17 Of History's Greatest Hoaxes and Deceptions

1.

In the 1700s, a woman named Mary Toft in England tricked doctors into thinking she could give birth to rabbits. Sometime later she admitted that she shoved rabbits into her vagina before 'birthing' them.

2.

In 1906, a German shoemaker, Wilhelm Voigt, impersonated a military officer and tricked a group of soldiers into helping him rob a small town. The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II thought it was so funny that he personally pardoned Voigt.

3.

In 2004, a German hacker named Axel Gembe stole the source code for Half Life 2. Gabe Newell, the managing director of the company then tricked him into thinking Valve wanted to hire him as an "in-house security auditor." He was given plane tickets to the USA and was to be arrested on arrival by the FBI. German government became aware of his plan and he was arrested in Germany and put on trial there.

4.

Between 1932 and 1972, the US government tricked approximately 600 black citizens from Alabama into believing that they were receiving free healthcare. They were actually test subjects to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis.

5.

The "Cottingley Fairies" were captured in a series of photographs by two young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917. The images were an instant sensation, even fooling Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. It wasn't until 1983 that the two girl finally admitted that they faked the photos using cardboard cutouts.

6.

In 1968, a car driven by Japanese bank employees was pulled over by a motorcycle cop claiming that the car had been rigged with a bomb. The cop got under the car to "defuse" the device. When the car started to smoke, everybody ran. Then the "cop" just drove the car away. This 300 million Yen robbery still remains unsolved.

7.

The "Spaghetti Tree" hoax was an April Fools prank played by BBC in 1957 when they aired a short TV segment about the harvesting of spaghetti trees in Switzerland. At the time, not everybody knew how pasta was made, so a spaghetti orchard seemed very plausible. About 8 million people watched the broadcast, which CNN later called "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."

8.

Someone tricked a Nigerian scammer into hand writing an entire Harry Potter novel, the whole 293 pages and scanned with a scan width of 1200 pixel. They told them that they are too busy with writing down printed books by hand to help the scammer, and offered to pay him $100 per page if he was willing to work for them.

9.

The reverse scam on the Nigerian scammer was topped by someone else tricking a different group of Nigerian email scammers into recreating Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch.

10.

In the 2004 Harvard-Yale game, Yale students tricked thousands of Harvard fans into holding up cards that together spelled out "WE SUCK."

11.

In 1725, professor Johann Beringer was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at University of Wurzburg in what is now Germany. Also, he was apparently an insufferable coworker, which is why two of his colleagues decided to plant fake fossils in places Beringer was known to dig. Thousands of stones planted over a series of months bearing images of plants, animals, Hebrew symbols, religious iconography, etc... When Beringer was about to publish a book on his findings, his colleagues finally admitted the prank, but by then it was too late. He figured they were just jealous, and published the book anyway. In the end, it would ruin all three of their careers.

12.

From 1946-1953, Quaker Oates and MIT conducted an experiment on unsuspecting, mentally retarded children. They tricked them into eating radioactive cereal by telling them they were in a "science club." The victims recently received a $1.85 million settlement.

13.

In 1998, a Japanese comedian was tricked into a real-life "Truman show" when he accepted a job which (unbeknownst to him) would lock him into an apartment, naked and cut off from everything and film him, without knowledge.

14.

The inventor of the Brazen Bull, Perillos of Athens, was tricked into being the first victim of his sadistic execution device.

15.

A man protested against the 1956 Olympic torch relay by carrying a fake flame, consisting of a pair of underpants set on fire in a plum pudding can, attached to a silver painted chair leg. He tricked onlookers and even handed it to the Mayor of Sydney, Pat Hills before escaping without being noticed. The prankster, Barry Larkin, and the other 8 students performed the prank in protest of the torch relay which had been invented by the Nazis.

16.

Even after his men cheated and stole from a Jamaican tribe, Christopher Columbus tricked native Jamaicans into providing provisions by correctly predicting a lunar eclipse.

17.

"The Piltdown Man" hoax was a skull that purported to be proof of evolution's "missing link" between apes and humans, and was celebrated as one of the most important cultural discoveries in history. For 40 years, Piltdown Man was regarded as fact, until it was exposed as a forgery in 1953. With this prank, Charles Dawson single-handedly set the evolution debate back an entire generation.

18.

In 1985, a California man claiming to be a doctor successfully tricked a girl into bed (and out of $1000) by claiming that he could give her a vaccine for a 'fatal disease that she had contracted' by having sex with her.

19.

The "Berners Street Hoax." In London 1810, for the sake of a bet, Theodore Hook sent out thousands of letters requesting services at the address of 54 Berners Street in London. All day long, starting at 5 in the morning, the unsuspecting residents had to send away chimney sweeps, wedding cakes, over a dozen piano deliveries, fishmongers, shoemakers, priests, doctors, lawyers, dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York and Albany, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Lord Mayor of the City of London... Berners Street eventually became so congested that every available police officer was sent to try to disperse the crowd. Meanwhile, Hook spent the day across the street with his friend watching the chaos unfold.