This Day in History: The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, was "discovered" on this day in 1869. The Cardiff Giant was a 10-foot tall, 3000 pound “petrified giant” that was discovered on the farm of William Newell in Cardiff, New York, just south of Syracuse by some men hired to dig a well on the farm. Newell covered the giant with a tent and charged people 50 cents to view it. The giant drew national attention...and critics. Archaeological scholars pronounced the giant a fake, and some geologists noticed that there was no good reason to try to dig a well in the exact spot the giant had been found.
P. T. Barnum offered $50,000 for the giant, but when he was refused he paid someone to build another Cardiff Giant for him, essentially making a fake of a fake.
The Cardiff Giant is considered one of the greatest hoaxes of all time...though there were many others. One of them was the Taughannock Giant, a petrified giant "discovered" in Ithaca, New York, in 1879, a copycat hoax inspired by the Cardiff Giant.
1835 had the Great Moon Hoax, which refers to a series of articles published in the The Sun (New York). The articles described animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids ("Vespertilio-homo") who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle".
In 1995 many of us watched the Alien Autopsy with rapt attention. This is a hoax that many still believe in.
In 1912, Piltdown Man (an evolutionary missing link between man and apes) was "discovered" by Charles Dawson. It took over 4 decades for this to be declared a hoax for there was such a willingness to believe in it. It was even used as evidence for evolution in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
An anti-Catholic screed entitled Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was published in 1836. In the book it was claimed that nuns of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph of the Montreal convent of the Hôtel-Dieu, whom she called "the Black Nuns", were forced to have sex with the priests. The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If the sexual union produced a baby, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Uncooperative nuns mysteriously disappeared.
In 1917, five photographs appeared of the Cottingley Fairies that fooled even Sherlock Holmes' author Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Hitler Diaries sold for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks (£2.33 million or US$3.7 million) in 1983. The Diaries were a series of 60 volumes of journals supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983.
In 1726, Mary Toft convinced doctors that she had given birth to rabbits. This caused quite a sensation at the time and the matter was even brought to the surgeon of the Royal Household of King George I.
There was also the Disappearing blonde gene hoax. This was apparently a scientific study that claimed that natural blonds would become extinct by 2202, and this was repeated in the mainstream media.
Edgar Goodspeed in his book Strange New Gospels writes about Christian forgeries and hoaxes, including the Archko Volume or Archko Library that claims to be a series of reports from Jewish and pagan sources contemporary with Jesus that relate to the biblical texts describing his life. The author was convicted by an ecclesiastical court of falsehood and plagiarism and the Volume is regarded as fraudulent by all religious scholars.
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