In October 2009, the Heene family duped the entire United States when they claimed their six-year-old son had floated away in a hot-air balloon. Now known as the “balloon boy hoax,” the ruse continued to shock and anger Americans long after the boy, Falcon, was found safe and sound. The Heenes may be the most dishonest people to be covered by the media in recent memory, but their scam was actually just one in a long line thereof that have occurred throughout history. These four famous hoaxes, all recorded in ListVerse.com’s The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists, take deception to another level.
The Cardiff Giant (1869)
This is one of the most famous hoaxes in history. Two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York, unearthed a ten-foot-tall “petrified man” on October 16, 1869. Upon finding the giant, one of the men said, “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!”
Little did he know, the giant was a fake. New York tobacconist George Hull, an atheist, decided to create it after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Turk over a passage in the Bible from Genesis 6:4: “There were giants on the earth in those days …” Hull hired men to carve out a ten-foot-long, 4.5-inch-wide block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on the pretense that it was intended for a monument of Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a stonecutter to carve it into a man’s shape, all the while swearing him to secrecy. Hull used stains and acids to weather the giant and beat the figure with steel knitting needles embedded in a board, to simulate pores. He buried the giant for a year before hiring Emmons and Nichols to dig that well.
Buzz around the giant caught the attention of circus showman P.T. Barnum, who offered Hull $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When Hull turned him down, Barnum hired a man to discreetly make a plaster replica of the giant’s head and put the ersatz giant on display in New York, claiming that his was the real thing and that the Cardiff Giant was a fake. On February 2, 1870, both giants were revealed as frauds in court. Luckily for Barnum, the judged ruled that he couldn’t be sued for calling the fake a fake.
Piltdown Man (1912)
In 1912, an amateur archeologist named Charles Dawson began collecting fragments of a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, in East Sussex. At the time, many experts thought the fragments were the fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human and dubbed the specimen Eoanthropus dawsoni.
Immediately after the Piltdown findings, however, scientists expressed their skepticism. They increasingly regarded Piltdown Man as an aberration in hominid evolution inconsistent with the fossil record found elsewhere.
Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud in 1953 and revealed to be the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a modern adult male. Though the identity of the forger remains unproven, suspects have included Dawson himself, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who took part in the discovery of Peking Man, a similar collection in China), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The hoax is one of the most famous in history. Forty years elapsed between the discovery of the “fossil” and its exposure as a fake.
