The Greatest Hoaxes in History

A good hoax doesn’t just fool a few people. It fools institutions, experts, and sometimes an entire country, occasionally for decades before anyone catches on. Some of the ones below are almost funny in hindsight. One of them was weaponized to justify real atrocities. Here’s a look at the biggest hoaxes in history and how each of them eventually unraveled.

1. Piltdown Man (1912)

For over 40 years, Piltdown Man stood as one of the most important fossil finds in human evolutionary history, presented as a “missing link” between apes and humans after skull fragments were discovered in England. It wasn’t until 1953 that scientists using more advanced dating techniques revealed the fossil was a forgery, made by combining a human skull with an orangutan jaw, deliberately filed down and stained to look ancient. To this day, no one has been conclusively identified as the person behind the fraud.

2. The Cottingley Fairies (1917)

Two young cousins in England took a series of photographs appearing to show them alongside small winged fairies in their garden. The photos went on to fool a surprising number of people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote publicly in support of their authenticity. It wasn’t until decades later, in the 1980s, that the women admitted the fairies were paper cutouts, held up with hatpins.

3. The Great Moon Hoax (1835)

The New York Sun ran a series of articles claiming a famous astronomer had discovered life on the moon using a powerful new telescope, describing bizarre creatures including bat-winged humanoids. The story was entirely fabricated, but it dramatically boosted the paper’s circulation before being exposed as fiction. It’s often cited as one of the earliest examples of a media outlet knowingly running a fake story purely to sell papers.

4. The Cardiff Giant (1869)

A ten-foot stone figure was “discovered” buried on a farm in Cardiff, New York, and quickly promoted as either a petrified ancient man or an old biblical-era statue. In reality, it had been carved and deliberately buried a year earlier by a tobacconist looking to profit off public fascination with the discovery. Even after it was exposed as fake, showman P.T. Barnum reportedly built and displayed his own duplicate of the giant when he couldn’t buy the original.

5. The Feejee Mermaid (1842)

P.T. Barnum displayed what he claimed was a preserved mermaid, drawing large paying crowds eager to see it in person. The “mermaid” was actually the torso and head of a juvenile monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish, a common type of curiosity object crafted in parts of Asia and sold to Western collectors and showmen throughout the 19th century.

6. The Mechanical Turk (1770)

Built to resemble a turban-wearing automaton seated at a chessboard, the Turk toured Europe for decades, defeating skilled chess players, including, according to some accounts, Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It appeared to be an early marvel of mechanical engineering. In reality, a skilled human chess player was hidden inside the cabinet the entire time, operating the machine’s arm from within a cleverly concealed compartment.

7. The Loch Ness “Surgeon’s Photograph” (1934)

One of the most iconic images ever taken of the supposed Loch Ness Monster, showing a long neck rising from the water, was published under the credit of a respected surgeon, lending it instant credibility. Decades later, one of the men involved confessed on his deathbed that the photo showed a toy submarine fitted with a sculpted head, staged as a prank that spiraled into one of the most enduring cryptid legends in modern history.

8. The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast (1938)

Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ story presented a fictional Martian invasion in the format of live news bulletins. Newspapers at the time reported widespread panic among listeners who believed an actual invasion was underway, though modern historians have found the scale of that panic was likely exaggerated, partly by newspapers eager to discredit radio as a competing news source. Real or exaggerated, the broadcast became a lasting case study in how format and delivery can shape what audiences believe.

9. The Hitler Diaries (1983)

A German magazine paid a substantial sum for what were presented as newly discovered diaries written by Adolf Hitler, planning a major exclusive publication. Historians who examined the documents quickly found major inconsistencies, and forensic testing soon confirmed the diaries had been forged using postwar paper and ink, embarrassing the publication and several historians who had initially vouched for their authenticity.

10. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Early 1900s)

Unlike most entries on this list, this hoax wasn’t harmless. First circulated in Russia in the early 1900s, this fabricated document claimed to expose a secret Jewish plot for world domination. It was thoroughly debunked as a forgery, shown to have been plagiarized from earlier unrelated political satire, but that didn’t stop it from being widely circulated and used to fuel antisemitic persecution throughout the 20th century, including by Nazi propaganda. It stands as one of history’s starkest examples of how a debunked hoax can still cause real, lasting harm.

11. The Sokal Affair (1996)

Physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper, filled with scientific-sounding jargon but no real substance, to a cultural studies journal to test whether it would be published without rigorous scrutiny. The journal accepted and published it, and Sokal revealed the hoax shortly after, sparking a major debate within academia over peer review standards and the boundaries between scientific and philosophical writing.

12. Balloon Boy (2009)

A Colorado couple reported that their six-year-old son had accidentally floated away inside a homemade helium balloon, triggering a live televised chase involving the National Guard and Air Force. The boy was later found safely hidden at home, and investigators determined the entire event had been staged by the parents, reportedly in hopes of attracting a reality television deal. Both parents ultimately pleaded guilty to charges related to the hoax.

Final Thought

The best hoaxes work because they tell people something they already want to believe, whether it’s proof of missing evolutionary links, magical creatures in the garden, or a monster in a Scottish lake. Most of these stories are amusing in hindsight. A few are a reminder of how much damage a convincing lie can do once it escapes the person who told it.