5 Hoaxes That Had People Fooled

From finding the missing link to mermaids

By Micah JamesPublished 7 months ago • 4 min read

Photo by Hartono Creative Studio on Unsplash

Missing Link. Charles Darwin was the first person to propose evolution, even publishing a book on his findings entitled On the Origins of Species. Ever since, people have been trying to find the missing link. And it was found in 1912 by amateur geologist and archeologist Charles Dawson. The skull was given the name Piltdown Man. While many people did buy into it, there were still skeptics. Those who didn’t believe it said it looked exactly what it was: a human skull with an ape jaw. There was a ceremony in December 1912 hosted by the Geological Society of London, where Dawson could present his findings. Then, in 1917, believers felt a little vindication. Another skull was found, given the title Piltdown II. As more and more early human skulls were found in China and Africa, the legitimacy of the Piltdown skulls came under scrutiny. These new skulls had an apelike skull and humanlike jaw, the exact opposite of the Piltdown ones. Finally, in 1953, the Piltdown Man was run through some tests, which exposed the skull as a fraud. The nonbelievers were on the right track! It was revealed that it was a combination of human (skull), orangutan (jaw), and chimp (teeth). To top it all off, the fluorine dating shows the skull to be no more than 100,000 years old. While that it old, it’s still not old enough to be a missing link. There is still no answer to who the perpetrator of the hoax is, though it’s suspected it was Charles Dawson himself.
Indecent Animals. A man by the name of Clifford Prout Jr. was fed up with animals just walking around in the nude. So much so that in the 1950s and 60s, he started a group called SINA: the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Clifford believed that animals deserved some modesty just as much as humans. According to Prout, allowing animals to wander around with their genitals out contributed to moral decay. The public took SINA so seriously that Clifford Prout received a $40,000 donation to continue his efforts. But in 1964, the truth finally came out. Clifford Prout Jr. wasn’t a real man, and SINA wasn’t a real group. The person behind this was actually career hoaxer Alan Abel, who would later impersonate Howard Hughes and offered a “euthinasia cruise” for those who were ready to go.
Hoax Unintended. This one is a little bit up for debate when it comes to calling it a hoax, as it could fall under the mass hysteria umbrella as well. And that is the radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel War of the Worlds. There were a few things that led to this hysteria/hoax. Prior to the radio show, there was a disclaimer that would have helped avoid the whole trouble. However, there were many people who were listening to another station and didn’t tune in until 8:12, thus missing the disclaimer. There was another thing that lent to the believability of the broadcast. The alien invasion started with a weather report and a concert. This was followed by “reports” of explosions on Mars, a meteorite touching ground in New Jersey, and finally with aliens actually invading. With the reporters starting to become more frantic, the one million people who tuned in also started to panic. People were arming themselves and crowding highways. When CBS got wind of the hysteria, Wells himself had to get onto the radio and remind everyone that it was all fiction.
The Cardiff Giant. Giants have been a big part of mythology all over the world, and on October 10, 1869, two men seemingly found evidence of their existence. Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols dug up a 10-foot petrified man while digging a well on a New York farm for owner William Newell. As word spread, Newell decided to put up a tent and charged a quarter for a peek at the giant (and eventually charged $0.50 as more and more people came). Some claimed that this body was an ancestor of the Onondaga people while others claimed that this was evidence of the Biblical giants. And many still believed its authenticity despite professionals saying that this giant was a fake. William Newell eventually sold this “mummy” to two businessmen, who took the body on tour. PT Barnum offered these men $50,000 for the giant for his own collection. When they declined, Barnum created a knockoff for his New York museum. Eventually, a man named George Hull came forward and admitted that this was a get-rich-quick scheme. He commissioned a German stone cutter to create this man and asked his cousin William Newell to bury the body. Even after the hoax was revealed, the Cardiff Giant still made its rounds before making its way to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown in 1947, where he still lives today.
Feejee/Fiji Mermaid. Nowadays, it’s more widely known that PT Barnum wasn’t super honest about all of his attractions and performers. So it was hard to choose just one, but one of his more famous “real” discoveries was something he dubbed the “Feejee Mermaid.” He claimed that these were the remains of a real mermaid found in the Bay of Bengal. Eventually, staff from the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology got their hands on a specimen called the Java Mermaid. While it’s not known if this is the Feejee Mermaid, at the very least it is very similar to the one Barnum had. The museum wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery. After all, if Barnum was telling the truth, then this would have been a brand new discovery. It was found that this wasn’t really a mermaid. In fact, it was just a souvenir handcrafted by Southeast Asian fishermen and sold to tourists as a mermaid. These creatures are a mix of paper-mache and fish bones and fins.