In 1970, scientists researching the link between diet and heart disease visited the small town of Vilcabamba, located high in the Ecuadorian Andes. The scientists included Dr. Alexander Leaf of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Harold Elrick of the University of California at San Diego, and a group from the University of Quito.

The scientists found that the residents of Vilcabamba, who were principally of European descent, had very low cholesterol levels and very few of them ever suffered from heart disease. But more remarkable was the longevity of the Vilcabambans. Many of the town residents claimed to be over 100 years old. A few of them stated their age as being over 140 years old. These ages appeared to be confirmed by birth and baptismal records. More >>>

May 21, 1977: Anthony 'Doc' Shiels claimed that he took this picture while camping beside Urquhart Castle. Its startling clarity (it's probably the clearest picture of Nessie ever taken) has made it popular with the public. But it's hard to find any expert willing to take it seriously, simply because the creature depicted in it looks so obviously fake. (And it's odd that there are no ripples in the water around the neck.) Skeptics refer to Shiels's monster as "The Loch Ness Muppet." The fact that Shiels was a showman, "wizard," and psychic entertainer who was developing a side business as a professional monster hunter didn't help his credibility. Shiels himself commented that while he definitely took photos of lake monsters, he didn't believe in them.

Cherie Darvell was a member of a film crew searching for Bigfoot in the woods outside Eureka, California. Unfortunately for her, she found Bigfoot and he abducted her. Or so she claimed. Humboldt County organized a search party to find her, but without success. (Total cost for the search: $11,613. Humboldt County tried to sue Shasta County to make them pay a portion of the cost, but a judge struck down their suit, ruling that the search for Bigfoot had been an "exercise in futility.") A few days later, Darvell walked into a nearby resort, looking none the worse for wear, despite her experience as a Bride of Bigfoot. When reporters tried to ask her questions about her ordeal, her only response was to scream. Her fellow filmmakers, Ed Bush and Terry Gaston, later released a movie showing her being carried away by Bigfoot. It crossed the minds of a few people that the "abduction" had been simply an elaborate publicity stunt.

Caltech is known for producing world-class scientists and engineers. But a few of its students have also demonstrated a flair for the law, as a highly controversial 1975 prank that turned on the legalistic reading of a sweepstakes entry form proved.

The sweepstakes in question was held by McDonald's. It ran from March 3rd to March 23rd, 1975, at 187 participating McDonald's restaurants in Southern California. The prizes included a year of groceries, a Datsun Z, McDonald's gift certificates, and cash. But one part of the contest rules caught the attention of three Caltech students who lived in Page House — Steve Klein, Dave Novikoff, and Barry Megdal. The part they noticed was the phrase "Enter as often as you wish." What if, the Caltech students wondered, a person entered the sweepstakes one million times? More >>>

Sir Peter Scott of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau participated in the 1972 expedition that produced the flipper photo. Feeling that the photo provided proof that some kind of large creature existed in the loch, he decided to give the animal a scientific name: Nessiteras Rhombopteryx (which meant "the Ness wonder with a diamond fin"). But London newspapers soon pointed out that if you juggled around the letters in this name, you got the phrase "monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Was this evidence that the flipper photo had been a deliberate hoax? Scott denied it. Dr. Rines came to his rescue by pointing out that if you juggled the letters around a bit more, you could spell "Yes, both pix are monsters. R."

In 1975 Chuck Ross was selling cable TV door-to-door, and dreaming of becoming a writer. However, he felt the odds were stacked against him since the publishing industry seemed incapable of recognizing talent. To prove his theory, he typed up twenty-one pages of a highly acclaimed book and sent it unsolicited to four publishers (Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Doubleday, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), claiming it was his own work. The work he chose for this experiment was Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski. It had won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969 and by 1975 had sold over 400,000 copies. All four publishers rejected the work, including Random House, who was its original publisher. More >>>

In the early 1970s, a group of hackers called "phone phreaks" emerged, earning notoriety by creating high-tech ways to beat the costs of long distance calls. John Draper, more famously known as "Cap'n Crunch," was the most notorious of them all. His only link to the sugary cereal was a plastic toy whistle that was once a prize giveaway in each cereal box. In the late sixties, he had discovered that the Cap'n Crunch toy whistle's tone perfectly matched A.T.&T.'s 2600-hertz long distance trunk telephone signal. This enabled him to make free long distance phone calls around the world. More >>>

August 7, 1972: An expedition to find Nessie led by Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Science struck gold when its underwater camera took a picture of what appeared to be the flipper of a large aquatic animal resembling a plesiosaur. However, the relatively clear image of a flipper shown to the public was not quite what the camera had initially recorded. The initial image was far less distinct. (It basically looked like a shot of a bunch of bubbles or sediment in the water.) This initial picture was then computer enhanced by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, and apparently the computer-enhanced image was further artistically enhanced by the Academy of Applied Science team (i.e. it was retouched), thereby producing the final flipper photo. Modern image-enhancement software has not been able to conjure anything resembling a flipper from the original image.

Frank Searle, a former army captain, arrived in Loch Ness to search for the monster during the early 1970s and soon established a reputation as a definite character. He was like a colonial-style adventurer, assisted by a succession of attractive young "monster huntresses." He took an enormous number of photos of Nessie, many of which were published by the media, but all of which have been dismissed by experts as fakes. His early photos, such as the one to the right (taken in October 1972) have been identified as pictures of floating tree trunks. In later photos he progressed to cutting-and-pasting dinosaurs from postcards into his images. Searle left the loch in 1985 and died in 2005.

On the day before April Fool's Day, 1972, a team of British zoologists from the Flamingo Park Zoo found a mysterious carcass floating in Loch Ness. Initial reports claimed it weighed a ton and a half and was 15 ½ feet long. More >>>

In 1960, twenty-year-old Dan Rattiner started a small paper during his summer vacation in the Hamptons. He gave copies of it away for free, making money from the advertisements. It was the first free paper in the United States. Gradually Dan started more papers, each of them serving a different community in the Hamptons. He called all of them collectively Dan's Papers, and they soon became the most widely read papers in the Hamptons. Dan wrote most of the content himself, but from the start he approached the task with a sense of humor. Many of the stories were humorous hoaxes, which earned him the nickname the "Hoaxer of the Hamptons." More >>>

In June 1971 Robert Patterson, a 66-year-old newsman, filed a series of five reports for the San Francisco Examiner detailing his odyssey through mainland China. His journey was inspired by the popular interest in Chinese culture following President Nixon's official visit to that country. The series ran on the Examiner's front page.

Patterson discussed details such as his difficulty obtaining an entry visa, witnessing Chinese citizens doing calisthenics in the street every morning, and receiving acupuncture at a Chinese hospital for chronic hip pain.

However, his reports caused Paul Avery, a reporter at the rival San Francisco Chronicle, to become suspicious. Avery noted Patterson had not reported anything he "couldn't have picked up by doing some research or by watching the President's trip on TV."

Learning of Avery's suspicions, the Examiner started its own investigation. They discovered there was no record of Patterson having received a visa to enter China. When questioned about this, Patterson admitted he had been unable to receive a visa. He said he had entered China illegally, but he insisted he had gone. However, he couldn't come up with any evidence he had gotten further than Hong Kong: no hotel receipts, travel photos, or hospital record of his acupuncture treatment.

In August 1972 the Examiner published an apology to its readers, stating it had concluded that Patterson had invented his reports of "China from the inside." Patterson was fired.

Throughout history there have numerous cases of forgers faking diaries and biographies of people who are already dead. But, for obvious reasons, it is far less common for a forger to fake the biography of a person who is still alive. But this is exactly what happened when writer Clifford Irving forged the "autobiography" of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, while Hughes was still alive. In 1971 Irving told his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that Hughes had contacted him after reading and enjoying one of his earlier books. Hughes, he said, wanted to write an autobiography in order to set straight all the lies and rumors that were circulating about his life, and he wanted Irving to ghostwrite the work. Irving produced letters from Hughes (all forged) to prove the offer was real. McGraw-Hill completely fell for Irving’s story. They eventually gave him almost $1,000,000 in order to secure the rights to the work, and in return Irving handed them Hughes’s “autobiography” a few months later. More >>>

In 1971 a small group of extremely primitive, leaf-wearing, "Stone-Age" people was discovered living in a remote region of the Philippine rain forest. Called the Tasaday, after a nearby mountain, these people had apparently never had contact with the outside world.

The Tasaday immediately attracted a flurry of interest. Politicians, reporters, anthropologists, and celebrities all made the trip out into the rainforest to visit them. But in 1974 the Marcos government declared martial law, restricting access to the rainforest, and all contact with the Tasaday was temporarily lost.

In 1986, after the overthrow of Marcos, a Swiss journalist named Oswald Iten trekked out into the jungle to see them. To his surprise, he found the Tasaday dressed in western clothes living a simple, but definitely not Stone-Age, life. Some of the members of the tribe told him they weren't really a Stone-Age tribe, that the Marcos government had pressured them into posing as such. This revelation caused an international uproar, and the Tasaday were branded a hoax.

Today it is no longer clear to what extent the Tasaday actually were a hoax. Academics who have studied the tribe note that, while they may not have been as isolated as initially thought, they certainly were living a very primitive lifestyle, and linguistic evidence suggests they really were a distinct tribal group. The Tasaday who confessed later claimed they were bribed to do so by anti-Marcos factions hoping to discredit the former regime. More >>>