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Benjamin Franklin
Type: Famous Hoaxer. Summary: Throughout his life Benjamin Franklin perpetrated many hoaxes. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was born the son of a candle and soap maker, but by his own efforts and intellect he rose to become arguably the most admired man of the eighteenth century. Throughout his…
Black Like Me
Type: Impostor. Summary: In 1959, a white man posed as a black man in the American Deep South for six weeks. The result was the bestselling book “Black Like Me.” Posted by: Elliot Feldman Black Like MeIn 1959, John Howard Griffin was a white native Texan novelist and journalist with…
Captain Crunch
Type: Hacker. Summary: In the early seventies, a group of hackers called “phone phreaks” emerged, earning notoriety by creating high-tech ways to beat the costs of long distance calls. “Cap’n Crunch” was the most notorious of them all. Posted by: Elliot Feldman blue box John Draper is one of Silicon…
Captain Midnight
Type: Hacker. Summary: In 1986 a tech-savvy hacker interrupted a cable channel broadcast with his own transmission. Posted by: Elliot Feldman On April 27, 1986, late night HBO subscribers watching the movie “The Falcon and the Snowman” were surprised by a sudden interruption of service. A color bar test pattern…
Cassie Chadwick
Type: Con Artist. Summary: A woman financed a lavish lifestyle by claiming to be the daughter of Andrew Carnegie. Cassie Chadwick claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. She said that Carnegie was paying her huge sums of money in order to keep their relationship a secret. Based…
Doris Lessing as Jane Somers
Type: Literary hoax (of the spurious submission type) Summary: Doris Lessing used a pseudonym to submit copies of a new work by herself to the publishers of her previous works. In 1983 the novel The Diary of a Good Neighbor was published in Great Britain and United States. It told…
Elmer de Hory
Type: Forgery Summary: Elmyr de Hory fooled the art world for thirty years with his expert forgeries of works by Picasso, Renoir, and other masters. To this day, many of his forgeries remain undetected and are in museums and collections throughout the world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1955, Harvard…
Ern Malley
Type: Literary hoax. Summary: Two Australian poets deliberately wrote nonsense verse, and fooled an editor into believing it was the work of a brilliant young writer. Max Harris was a glamorous young Australian poet who was making a reputation for himself as something of a rebel as editor of Angry…
Gorgeous Guy
Type: Online Hoax. Summary: A man was accused of using numerous fake aliases in order to create a buzz about himself online. Dan Baca, aka ‘Gorgeous Guy’ Dan Baca, a 29-year-old network engineer, was going about his life, minding his own business, when suddenly people began staring at him. He…
Hitler Diaries
Type: Forgery. Summary: A fake set of diaries, supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, became one of the most costly forgeries in history. Gerd Heidemann (right) and Wolf Hess (left), son of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess, pose with a volume of the Hitler diaries. April, 1983. Table of Contents The Beginning:…
Hugh Troy
Hugh Troy posing in front of one of his murals. New York City, Rockefeller Center, 1940. By trade Hugh Troy (1906-1964) was an illustrator. By nature he was a practical joker. A true master of the art. Numerous different pranks and practical jokes are attributed to him. However, it’s not…
Hugo N. Frye
Type: College Prank. Summary: Republican leaders were tricked into praising the example of the “sturdy patriot” Hugo N. Frye, unaware that there was no such person. In 1930 letters were mailed to Republican leaders throughout the United States inviting them to a May 26 party at Cornell University in honor…
J.S.G. Boggs
Type: Art. Summary: Boggs draws money that’s almost convincing enough to pass for the real thing. J.S.G. Boggs is a contemporary artist whose work deals with the tension between money’s aesthetic value and its economic function. He draws currency: Dollars, euros, or whatever the currency is where he happens to…
Jack Kelley
Type: Rogue Reporter. Summary: In 2004, it was uncovered that Jack Kelley, one of USA Today’s most respected reporters, a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, had been fabricating major news stories at least since 1991. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 2004 it was uncovered that Jack Kelley, one of USA Today’s…
Janet Cardiff - Walking Tours
Type: Art that blurs fiction and reality. Summary: Canadian installation artist Janet Cardiff has created a new art genre: alternative big city historical walking tours. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian multimedia artist. She is best known for creating a new…
John Harvey Kellogg
Type: Questionable Medicine. Summary: John Harvey Kellogg was a brilliant surgeon, the creator of corn flakes cereal, and health faddist who bordered on quackery. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Brothers John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan invented the breakfast cereal industry. Will Keith Kellogg was the business…
Joice Heth
Type: Show-business hoax. Summary: An elderly black woman claimed to be the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. A pamphlet advertising the exhibition of Joice HethJoice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161 year old…
Jonathan Swift
Type: Satirist. Summary: Jonathan Swift penned some of the most famous satires (and satirical hoaxes) of the eighteenth century. Jonathan SwiftThe relationship between satire and hoaxing is complex. Satire is defined as the use of wit to expose stupidity or vice, whereas a hoax is a sensational act of deception.…
Joseph Mulhattan
Type: Media Hoaxer. Summary: During the late nineteenth century, Mulhattan was widely known for his love of hoaxing newspapers. Joseph MulhattanDuring the 1870s and 1880s Joseph Mulhattan was perhaps the most famous hoaxer in America. He was a traveling salesman, not a reporter, but he was notorious for repeatedly succeeding…
Kaycee Nicole Swenson
Type: Online Impostor. Summary: A woman attracted many friends online by pretending to be a young girl dying of cancer. Kaycee Nicole was a nineteen-year-old girl from Kansas dying of cancer. Or so believed the thousands of people who visited her website on which she kept a diary of her…
Lafayette Mulligan
Type: Prank. Summary: A man calling himself Lafayette Mulligan presented the Prince of Wales with the key to the City of Boston. However, the Mayor of Boston had no idea who Lafayette Mulligan was. James Curley, former Mayor of Boston. In the Fall of 1924 the Prince of Wales visited…
Letter of Prester John
The year was 1144. Christian crusaders were getting beaten up by Muslim armies in Edessa. European rulers were wondering how they could ever recover from these losses. But just then, in this moment of defeat for the Europeans, there came a glimmer of hope. The Europeans heard a rumor about…
Marcel Duchamp
Type: Art Prankster. Summary: Throughout his career, French artist Marcel Duchamp was known for playing outrageous pranks on the art world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) always held the snobbishness of art collectors and gallery owners in disdain. While he was a revolutionary artist with at least one…
Native of Formosa
Type: Impostor. Summary: During the early eighteenth-century a white-skinned, blond-haired man showed up in northern Europe claiming to be from Taiwan. Luckily for him, no one knew what a Taiwanese person should look like. George Psalmanazar, The Native of FormosaThose who travelled on European roads at the start of the…
Paris Hilton Hoaxes
Type: Heiress-themed Hoaxes. Summary: Paris Hilton has played a starring role in numerous hoaxes. Paris Hilton. Mugshot taken June, 2007 when she was booked into a Los Angeles jail. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton is not known for perpetrating hoaxes. However, much like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and Adolf Hitler,…
Paul Is Dead
Type: Part rumor, part hoax. Summary: In 1969 the possibility that Paul McCartney had died years ago in a car crash and been replaced by a double became one of the most hotly debated questions around the world. HOAX HAIKUSo many fake clues The three, the hand, the flowers Paul…
Paul Krassner and The Realist
Type: Hoaxer. Summary: In the sixties, Paul Krassner was one of the original Yippies. His magazine “The Realist” was known for perpetuating political hoaxes. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, Paul Krassner began publishing his magazine “The Realist.” It was deep leftist political…
Pope Joan
Type: Legend. (Possible case of gender concealment.) Summary: According to legend, a woman disguised as a man briefly served as Pope sometime in the ninth century. HOAX HAIKUMy girlfriend thinks she’s always right — infallible — just because she’s Pope. (by AB) Oh what a surprise! Pope is different to…
Princess Caraboo
Type: Impostor Summary: A nineteenth-century British maid pretended to be a princess from the exotic land of Javasu. Princess Caraboo, by Edward BirdOn Thursday April 3, 1817, a strange woman appeared in Almondsbury, a small town near Bristol in Gloucestershire, England. She was five foot two, extremely attractive, and wore…
Rudolph Fentz
The widely circulated story of Rudolph Fentz is told as follows: In June 1950 a man suddenly appeared in the center of New York City’s Times Square, as if from out of the blue. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes and sported the kind of mutton-chop sideburns that had gone out…
Silence Dogood
Type: False Identity. Summary: Sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin pretended to be a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. View the Discussion Page for this topic. In 1722 a series of letters appeared in the New-England Courant written by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. The letters poked fun at various aspects of…
The Third Eye
Type: Phony Tibetan monk. Summary: The son of a British plumber claimed to be a lama from a wealthy Tibetan family. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa The Third Eye, published in 1956 and authored by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, purported to be Rampa’s autobiographical tale of his study and mastery of Tibetan Buddhism.…
Thomas Chatterton
Type: Literary forgery. Summary: A young man in eighteenth-century England claimed to have found poetry by a fifteenth-century priest. The Death of Chatterton, Oil Painting by Henry Wallis, 1856As a young boy growing up in Bristol, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) spent a great deal of time with his uncle, the sexton…
Tichborne Claimant
In 1854 a wealthy young aristocrat named Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne disappeared at sea and was presumed dead. His distraught mother, refusing to believe he was actually dead, placed ads in newspapers around the world, seeking information about his whereabouts. In 1866 she received a response from an Australian man…
Vrain Lucas
Type: Forgery. Summary: The counterfeits of a successful forger strained credulity. Few accounts of forgery are as strange as the case of Vrain Lucas. Lucas’s career as a forger began in 1851 when he met the esteemed French mathematician Michel Chasles. Lucas showed the mathematician a few letters he claimed…
Whatever Happened to Buckwheat
Type: Hoax. Summary: Man falsely claims to be the actor who played Buckwheat in the Our Gang film series. Buckwheat, as soon on Our GangMany child stars achieve success and stability as adults, but occasionally they go from stardom to the opposite extreme of anonymity and failure, as if dragged…
William Henry Ireland - Shakespeare Forgeries
Type: Literary Forgery. Summary: During the 1790s, a young man claimed to have found a new play written by Shakespeare. A letter supposedly written by Shakespeare (forged by Ireland) expressing gratitude towards the Earl of Southampton. (click for larger version)As literacy rates rose during the eighteenth century, a kind of…
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There are 9 subcategories for this categoryArticles in category "People":
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Benjamin Franklin
Type: Famous Hoaxer. Summary: Throughout his life Benjamin Franklin perpetrated many hoaxes. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was born the son of a candle and soap maker, but by his own efforts and intellect he rose to become arguably the most admired man of the eighteenth century. Throughout his…
Black Like Me
Type: Impostor. Summary: In 1959, a white man posed as a black man in the American Deep South for six weeks. The result was the bestselling book “Black Like Me.” Posted by: Elliot Feldman Black Like MeIn 1959, John Howard Griffin was a white native Texan novelist and journalist with…
Captain Crunch
Type: Hacker. Summary: In the early seventies, a group of hackers called “phone phreaks” emerged, earning notoriety by creating high-tech ways to beat the costs of long distance calls. “Cap’n Crunch” was the most notorious of them all. Posted by: Elliot Feldman blue box John Draper is one of Silicon…
Captain Midnight
Type: Hacker. Summary: In 1986 a tech-savvy hacker interrupted a cable channel broadcast with his own transmission. Posted by: Elliot Feldman On April 27, 1986, late night HBO subscribers watching the movie “The Falcon and the Snowman” were surprised by a sudden interruption of service. A color bar test pattern…
Cassie Chadwick
Type: Con Artist. Summary: A woman financed a lavish lifestyle by claiming to be the daughter of Andrew Carnegie. Cassie Chadwick claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. She said that Carnegie was paying her huge sums of money in order to keep their relationship a secret. Based…
Doris Lessing as Jane Somers
Type: Literary hoax (of the spurious submission type) Summary: Doris Lessing used a pseudonym to submit copies of a new work by herself to the publishers of her previous works. In 1983 the novel The Diary of a Good Neighbor was published in Great Britain and United States. It told…
Elmer de Hory
Type: Forgery Summary: Elmyr de Hory fooled the art world for thirty years with his expert forgeries of works by Picasso, Renoir, and other masters. To this day, many of his forgeries remain undetected and are in museums and collections throughout the world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1955, Harvard…
Ern Malley
Type: Literary hoax. Summary: Two Australian poets deliberately wrote nonsense verse, and fooled an editor into believing it was the work of a brilliant young writer. Max Harris was a glamorous young Australian poet who was making a reputation for himself as something of a rebel as editor of Angry…
Gorgeous Guy
Type: Online Hoax. Summary: A man was accused of using numerous fake aliases in order to create a buzz about himself online. Dan Baca, aka ‘Gorgeous Guy’ Dan Baca, a 29-year-old network engineer, was going about his life, minding his own business, when suddenly people began staring at him. He…
Hitler Diaries
Type: Forgery. Summary: A fake set of diaries, supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, became one of the most costly forgeries in history. Gerd Heidemann (right) and Wolf Hess (left), son of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess, pose with a volume of the Hitler diaries. April, 1983. Table of Contents The Beginning:…
Hugh Troy
Hugh Troy posing in front of one of his murals. New York City, Rockefeller Center, 1940. By trade Hugh Troy (1906-1964) was an illustrator. By nature he was a practical joker. A true master of the art. Numerous different pranks and practical jokes are attributed to him. However, it’s not…
Hugo N. Frye
Type: College Prank. Summary: Republican leaders were tricked into praising the example of the “sturdy patriot” Hugo N. Frye, unaware that there was no such person. In 1930 letters were mailed to Republican leaders throughout the United States inviting them to a May 26 party at Cornell University in honor…
J.S.G. Boggs
Type: Art. Summary: Boggs draws money that’s almost convincing enough to pass for the real thing. J.S.G. Boggs is a contemporary artist whose work deals with the tension between money’s aesthetic value and its economic function. He draws currency: Dollars, euros, or whatever the currency is where he happens to…
Jack Kelley
Type: Rogue Reporter. Summary: In 2004, it was uncovered that Jack Kelley, one of USA Today’s most respected reporters, a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, had been fabricating major news stories at least since 1991. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 2004 it was uncovered that Jack Kelley, one of USA Today’s…
Janet Cardiff - Walking Tours
Type: Art that blurs fiction and reality. Summary: Canadian installation artist Janet Cardiff has created a new art genre: alternative big city historical walking tours. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian multimedia artist. She is best known for creating a new…
John Harvey Kellogg
Type: Questionable Medicine. Summary: John Harvey Kellogg was a brilliant surgeon, the creator of corn flakes cereal, and health faddist who bordered on quackery. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Brothers John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan invented the breakfast cereal industry. Will Keith Kellogg was the business…
Joice Heth
Type: Show-business hoax. Summary: An elderly black woman claimed to be the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. A pamphlet advertising the exhibition of Joice HethJoice Heth was an elderly black woman whom a young P.T. Barnum put on display in 1835, advertising that she was the 161 year old…
Jonathan Swift
Type: Satirist. Summary: Jonathan Swift penned some of the most famous satires (and satirical hoaxes) of the eighteenth century. Jonathan SwiftThe relationship between satire and hoaxing is complex. Satire is defined as the use of wit to expose stupidity or vice, whereas a hoax is a sensational act of deception.…
Joseph Mulhattan
Type: Media Hoaxer. Summary: During the late nineteenth century, Mulhattan was widely known for his love of hoaxing newspapers. Joseph MulhattanDuring the 1870s and 1880s Joseph Mulhattan was perhaps the most famous hoaxer in America. He was a traveling salesman, not a reporter, but he was notorious for repeatedly succeeding…
Kaycee Nicole Swenson
Type: Online Impostor. Summary: A woman attracted many friends online by pretending to be a young girl dying of cancer. Kaycee Nicole was a nineteen-year-old girl from Kansas dying of cancer. Or so believed the thousands of people who visited her website on which she kept a diary of her…
Lafayette Mulligan
Type: Prank. Summary: A man calling himself Lafayette Mulligan presented the Prince of Wales with the key to the City of Boston. However, the Mayor of Boston had no idea who Lafayette Mulligan was. James Curley, former Mayor of Boston. In the Fall of 1924 the Prince of Wales visited…
Letter of Prester John
The year was 1144. Christian crusaders were getting beaten up by Muslim armies in Edessa. European rulers were wondering how they could ever recover from these losses. But just then, in this moment of defeat for the Europeans, there came a glimmer of hope. The Europeans heard a rumor about…
Marcel Duchamp
Type: Art Prankster. Summary: Throughout his career, French artist Marcel Duchamp was known for playing outrageous pranks on the art world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) always held the snobbishness of art collectors and gallery owners in disdain. While he was a revolutionary artist with at least one…
Native of Formosa
Type: Impostor. Summary: During the early eighteenth-century a white-skinned, blond-haired man showed up in northern Europe claiming to be from Taiwan. Luckily for him, no one knew what a Taiwanese person should look like. George Psalmanazar, The Native of FormosaThose who travelled on European roads at the start of the…
Paris Hilton Hoaxes
Type: Heiress-themed Hoaxes. Summary: Paris Hilton has played a starring role in numerous hoaxes. Paris Hilton. Mugshot taken June, 2007 when she was booked into a Los Angeles jail. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton is not known for perpetrating hoaxes. However, much like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and Adolf Hitler,…
Paul Is Dead
Type: Part rumor, part hoax. Summary: In 1969 the possibility that Paul McCartney had died years ago in a car crash and been replaced by a double became one of the most hotly debated questions around the world. HOAX HAIKUSo many fake clues The three, the hand, the flowers Paul…
Paul Krassner and The Realist
Type: Hoaxer. Summary: In the sixties, Paul Krassner was one of the original Yippies. His magazine “The Realist” was known for perpetuating political hoaxes. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, Paul Krassner began publishing his magazine “The Realist.” It was deep leftist political…
Pope Joan
Type: Legend. (Possible case of gender concealment.) Summary: According to legend, a woman disguised as a man briefly served as Pope sometime in the ninth century. HOAX HAIKUMy girlfriend thinks she’s always right — infallible — just because she’s Pope. (by AB) Oh what a surprise! Pope is different to…
Princess Caraboo
Type: Impostor Summary: A nineteenth-century British maid pretended to be a princess from the exotic land of Javasu. Princess Caraboo, by Edward BirdOn Thursday April 3, 1817, a strange woman appeared in Almondsbury, a small town near Bristol in Gloucestershire, England. She was five foot two, extremely attractive, and wore…
Rudolph Fentz
The widely circulated story of Rudolph Fentz is told as follows: In June 1950 a man suddenly appeared in the center of New York City’s Times Square, as if from out of the blue. He was wearing old-fashioned clothes and sported the kind of mutton-chop sideburns that had gone out…
Silence Dogood
Type: False Identity. Summary: Sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin pretended to be a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. View the Discussion Page for this topic. In 1722 a series of letters appeared in the New-England Courant written by a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. The letters poked fun at various aspects of…
The Third Eye
Type: Phony Tibetan monk. Summary: The son of a British plumber claimed to be a lama from a wealthy Tibetan family. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa The Third Eye, published in 1956 and authored by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, purported to be Rampa’s autobiographical tale of his study and mastery of Tibetan Buddhism.…
Thomas Chatterton
Type: Literary forgery. Summary: A young man in eighteenth-century England claimed to have found poetry by a fifteenth-century priest. The Death of Chatterton, Oil Painting by Henry Wallis, 1856As a young boy growing up in Bristol, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) spent a great deal of time with his uncle, the sexton…
Tichborne Claimant
In 1854 a wealthy young aristocrat named Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne disappeared at sea and was presumed dead. His distraught mother, refusing to believe he was actually dead, placed ads in newspapers around the world, seeking information about his whereabouts. In 1866 she received a response from an Australian man…
Vrain Lucas
Type: Forgery. Summary: The counterfeits of a successful forger strained credulity. Few accounts of forgery are as strange as the case of Vrain Lucas. Lucas’s career as a forger began in 1851 when he met the esteemed French mathematician Michel Chasles. Lucas showed the mathematician a few letters he claimed…
Whatever Happened to Buckwheat
Type: Hoax. Summary: Man falsely claims to be the actor who played Buckwheat in the Our Gang film series. Buckwheat, as soon on Our GangMany child stars achieve success and stability as adults, but occasionally they go from stardom to the opposite extreme of anonymity and failure, as if dragged…
William Henry Ireland - Shakespeare Forgeries
Type: Literary Forgery. Summary: During the 1790s, a young man claimed to have found a new play written by Shakespeare. A letter supposedly written by Shakespeare (forged by Ireland) expressing gratitude towards the Earl of Southampton. (click for larger version)As literacy rates rose during the eighteenth century, a kind of…