HOAXES OF THE AGES

BELIEVE OR NOT, YOUR CHOICE.

Primitive daze
1. But could he shoot hoops? The Bible says giants once walked the Earth, and in 1869, workmen said they dug one up–a 10-foot-tall, 3,000-pound stone body buried on a farm near Cardiff, N.Y. The farmer and his brother-in-law, cigar maker George Hull, made a fortune, charging 50 cents to see the Cardiff Giant. A Yale paleontologist called the gypsum giant a “decided humbug of recent origin,” pointing out fresh tool marks and smooth surfaces. And, of course, flesh doesn’t fossilize. Hull soon fessed up to planting the statue. But people kept paying to see the goliath–and still do at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. “Part of the appeal is wondering if you would be fooled by it,” says Gilbert Vincent, museum president.

2. Sketchy skull. “Darwin Theory Is Proved True” read a 1912 New York Times headline after amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson unearthed skull fragments in Piltdown, England. Combining a thrust-out jaw and a large braincase, the fragments were thought to prove that men and apes had a common ancestor–the missing link. Subsequent fossil finds pointed to a different evolutionary pattern. Still some scientists believed in Piltdown until 1953, when new dating methods showed that critical fragments were from different periods and had been chemically aged to match up. Dawson is the most likely suspect in the longest-running known hoax in paleontology.

3. Stone Agers in T-shirts. In August 1972, National Geographic devoted a cover story to “Stone Age Cavemen of Mindanao”–a tiny band in the Philippine rain forest, apparently isolated for centuries. The Tasaday reportedly wore only orchid leaves, used primitive tools, and subsisted on forest foragings. The Marcos regime later cut off access; when Marcos fell in 1986, a curious Swiss anthropologist hiked into the mountains and found the Tasaday wearing T-shirts and jeans, living in huts, and growing crops. Many anthropologists quickly labeled the affair a hoax, pinning the blame on the eccentric head of the Philippine agency for minority protection. “Claims that they were Stone Age survivors in orchid-leaf clothing are absurd,” says Gerald Berreman of the University of California-Berkeley, who has studied the controversy. National Geographic argues that changes could have been caused by acculturation. “I don’t think anyone really knows the answer because of that time lag,” says spokeswoman Barbara Moffet.

4. Holy rocks. How did Hebrew-inscribed rocks wind up in a prehistoric mound in Ohio? And do the Newark Holy Stones, found in 1860, prove that nonnative peoples visited the Americas before Columbus? Hebrew spelling errors swiftly exposed the rocks as fakes, though some still believe they’re real. Bradley Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society thinks the culprit was a Newark Episcopal minister who hoped the stones would prove that Adam and Eve were mother and father to all races–a good argument against slavery. Years later, a prankster planted two more stones–but the Hebrew letters just spelled his name.

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Military mix-ups
5. Operation Mincemeat. Mix one dead body, a sprinkling of misinformation, and a large pinch of British intelligence. Toss results in salt water and you get “Operation Mincemeat.” Led by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a team of British officers procured the body of a pneumonia victim and planted false documents suggesting the Allied invasion of Italy would come from Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Dressed in a Royal Marines uniform and chained to a briefcase full of fake personal papers, the corpse was released from a submarine off the Spanish coast. Fishermen picked it up; German agents in Spain forwarded the plans to their commanders, who left Sicily’s southern coast nearly defense-less–allowing the Allies to land almost unopposed on July 10, 1943.
6. Dressed to shoot. As an 18th-century woman, Deborah Sampson couldn’t travel alone and couldn’t stand the husband-to-be Mom had picked out for her. What she could do, it turned out, was fool the Army of the American Revolution into thinking she was a man, satisfying her need for adventure. Sampson bound her breasts, deepened her voice, took the name Robert Shurtlieff, and joined the Army in May 1782. Through several battles with the British and a couple of injuries, Sampson kept up her charade. Wounded in the thigh, she dug the bullet out herself to avoid a doctor’s scruti­ ny. It wasn’t until April 1783 that a physician treating her for fever discovered her secret; she was honorably discharged in October 1783. Two years later, she married Benjamin Gan­ nett, a farmer. They had three children.

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Crooked books
7. A gift that kept on giving. Bet you never got a present like this. According to a deed known as the Donation of Constantine, Emperor Constantine I of Rome gave Pope Sylvester I sovereignty over a significant portion of Western Europe, supposedly in gratitude for curing the emperor’s leprosy. But Constantine never had leprosy, and the document is an elaborate fraud. It was crafted between A.D. 750 and 800, a good 400 years after Constantine died. Yet the Donation became an essential part of Middle Ages real estate policy, as sources were rarely questioned at the time. The era was “the golden age of forgeries,” says Philip Benedict, a professor of history at Brown University. For hundreds of years, the Vatican used the document to buttress territorial claims in land struggles with the Holy Roman Empire. Despite a 1440 debunking by scholar Lorenzo Valla, who exposed anachronistic terms and other boo-boos, the Donation persisted until 1929. Under pressure from Benito Mussolini, the Vatican finally ceded the remainder of its “gift”–which had once encompassed not only Rome but a belt across central Italy from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic–back to Italy.
8. Hate lit. A czarist civil servant published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1905 to tell of the “widely conceived plan” of the Jews to rule the world by controlling the media and banks. In 1921, a London Times reporter exposed the book as a ripoff of an 1864 satiric novel. That didn’t dissuade Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler. A 1999 reissue is sold by Amazon.com. The Web site disclaims the work as “racist propaganda,” but one customer review praises it as “powerful stuff.”

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Alienated
9. Going in circles. They appeared like magic in the middle of the night–hundreds of huge geometrical patterns in the middle of English wheat fields. To some, the mysterious circles that first made headlines in 1980 were proof of alien visitors. Self-styled crop-circle experts claimed the precise shapes were the result of energy from spaceships that flattened the wheat as they hovered. “Cereologists” devoted books to the wheat- field wonders, and curious tourists flocked to see them–until Sep­ tember 1991, when two 60-something artists came forward to show how they had created the circles at night with lengths of rope and flat boards. The con that baffled the world for more than a decade had been cooked up over a pint in a local pub.

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Nix these pix
10. Fairy photos. There were fairies in the garden in pictures taken in 1917 by two girls, 10 and 16, in Cottingley, England. Experts determined the photos had not been tampered with. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw the images as proof little people were returning to the world and defended them in his book The Coming of the Fairies. For decades, the cousins insisted the photos were real, although skeptics pointed out how much the sprites looked like cutout illustrations from a 1915 children’s book, held up by wire. Not until the late ’70s did the surviving cousin admit that hatpins and storybook cutouts did the trick.
11. Kirlian curios. An aura of mystery or just electricity? Kirlian photographers promised to capture on film their subjects’ mystical auras, from which could be divined health and emotional well-being. Since its popularization by Russian engineers Semyon and Valentina Kirlian in 1939, New Agers and hopeful students of the paranormal have been snookered by the technique’s otherworldly coronas of light. Controlled experiments have shown that the Kirlian photos (captured by passing an electric current through the subject, whose “energies” are then recorded on special photographic plates) are the result of moisture and pressure, not spiritual vitality.

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Beastly tales
12. Bouncing baby bunnies. A month after suffering a miscarriage in 1726, Mary Toft sent for a doctor, complaining of abdominal pains. She gave birth to a dead, skinned baby rabbit, then several more in the days to follow. The doctor swore he could feel the crit­ ters “jumping” in the womb. Nathanael St. Andre, King George I’s physician, published a pamphlet verifying the story, and England was hooked. But when less gullible docs threatened to perform exploratory operations, Toft confessed. She perpetrated the hoax “to get so good a living that I should never want as long as I lived.” Charged as a “Notorious and Vile Cheat,” she was thrown in jail, where oglers mocked her. A popular purchase in early 1800s England was a book of writings about Toft, bound in rabbit skin.
13. Horse sense. He made Mr. Ed look downright average. Clever Hans couldn’t talk, but the German horse got global attention in 1904 for his ability to count, do math problems, read, spell, and solve problems of musical harmony–all by tapping his hoof in a code developed by owner Wilhelm von Osten. Each letter of the alphabet was assigned a number, and through this system, Clever Hans convinced the world that animals could reason and think just like humans. But scientists observed von Osten, who probably believed his horse could really count, giving unintentional signals with his posture that told Hans when to start and stop tapping. So it was the human all along–not the horse, of course.

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Subterfuge
14. Stealthy ship. The $200 million Glomar Explorer set sail in 1974 to find deep-sea minerals. But that was just a CIA cover story. The ship’s mission was to secretly salvage the wreck of a Soviet nuclear sub 3 miles under the ocean, 750 miles off Hawaii. Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes helped with the hoax: A Hughes subsidiary built the Explorer, based on designs pioneered by a Hughes vessel doing deep-sea exploration. Reporters revealed its mission in 1975, and the CIA admitted that the attempt had been a limited success; the sub broke in half while being raised off the ocean floor and several nuclear warheads were lost. Claims that the CIA had pressured journalists to keep quiet prompted a Rolling Stone reporter to file a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover intimidation tactics. The petition was foiled by the agency’s refusal to either confirm or deny the existence of such documents, the first time that the dvasion–now known as the “Glomar response”–was used.