In the mid-twelfth century, at a time when European rulers felt threatened by the growing power of Muslim nations on their borders, a letter suddenly appeared from Prester John, who described himself as a Christian king of great wealth living in the far east. The letter was addressed to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus.

Prester John claimed to be a descendant of one of the Three Magi. He wrote that his kingdom stretched from India to the land where the sun rises, and that it was inhabited by fantastic creatures such as seven-horned bulls, birds so large they could lift and kill an armored man, and horned men with three eyes in the back of their heads. He even claimed there was a fountain of perpetual youth in his kingdom.

The letter circulated throughout all the European courts. In 1177, Pope Alexander III instructed his personal envoy to travel east, search for Prester John, and deliver a reply to his letter. It was hoped Prester John would come to the aid of the Christian nations in Europe, but no response ever came. Nevertheless, European explorers continued to search for the mythical king for centuries.

The true author of the letter remains unknown. Whoever it was, he was familiar with old legends, which he borrowed heavily from — legends such as the tales of Alexander the Great’s adventures in the East. Linguistic evidence suggests the letter originated in Italy. The author probably intended to offer hope to the Christian armies fighting the crusades, and in this respect he succeeded, even though the hope was a false one.

Marco Polo's Description of the World, written around 1298, described his travels in China. In later centuries the book became one of the principal European sources of information about China. But some historians, principally Frances Wood in Did Marco Polo Go to China?, argue that Marco Polo may never have set foot in China. Instead, he may have traveled no further than his family’s trading posts on the Black Sea, where he was able to compile information from Persian and Arabic guidebooks about China. Evidence for this theory rests largely on curious omissions in Marco Polo's work. For instance, he never mentions the Great Wall of China nor the Chinese use of chopsticks. However, this theory remains highly controversial. More→

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which first appeared in print around 1371, purported to document the travels of an English knight throughout Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and Turkey. The book was very popular, and was regarded as being factual by medieval scholars, but modern readers can easily spot that the majority of it is fiction. For instance, it describes islands whose inhabitants have the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs, a tribe whose only source of nourishment is the smell of apples, people the size of pygmies whose mouths are so small that they have to suck all their food through reeds, and a race of one-eyed giants who eat only raw fish and raw meat. More→

For centuries European map-makers believed that an island called Hi-Brazil was located in the Atlantic, even though no such island had ever been found. More→

During the early eighteenth-century a white-skinned, blond-haired man showed up in northern Europe claiming to be from the island of Formosa (Taiwan). He attracted the attention of curious scholars and members of high society with his tales of the bizarre practices of Formosa, such as the supposed annual sacrifice of 20,000 young boys to appease the gods. Luckily for him, no one in Europe knew what a Taiwanese person should look like. He was able to keep up his masquerade for four years before finally being exposed.
More→

A book titled Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal, during fifteen years captivity on that Island was published in England in 1729. In it, Robert Drury described how, almost forty years earlier, he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar, survived the slaughter of his shipmates by hostile islanders, and then spent the next fifteen years living as a slave, fighting in local wars, taking a wife, and eventually escaping on a slave ship back to England.

The story was accepted as true during the eighteenth century. In fact, it served as one of Europe’s main sources of information about the faraway island of Madagascar. But during the nineteenth century scholars started to question almost everything about it. In particular, there were suspicions that the book was actually a fictional account written by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinsin Crusoe, and that Robert Drury didn't even exist.

However, the controversy has come full circle, because modern scholars suspect the work may not be a hoax after all. In 1996, Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at Sheffield University, published evidence suggesting not only that Drury had lived, but that his description of early 18th century Madagascar was highly accurate... far too accurate to have been invented by Defoe.

Therefore, while it's impossible to say for sure, Robert Drury's Journal may be a case of a factual narrative mistaken for a hoax.

In 1766, when the Dolphin returned to London after circumnavigating the globe, a rumor began to circulate alleging that the crew of the ship had discovered a race of nine-foot-tall giants living in Patagonia, South America. The rumor of South American giants had a long history, dating as far back as the 1520s. According to this rumor, the name Patagonia actually meant "land of the big feet". But in reality, there were no South American giants, and Patagonia didn't mean "land of the big feet". When the captain of the Dolphin published his official account of the voyage in 1773, he revealed that his crew had indeed encountered a tribe of Patagonians, but that the tallest among them had measured only 6 feet 6 inches. In other words, the Patagonians were tall, but they weren't giants. More→

In 1812 a Boston printer published a journal, said to have been written by the French trader Charles Le Raye, describing his capture in 1801 by a band of Teton Sioux and subsequent travels through the Upper Missouri and Yellowstone regions. If the account is true, Le Raye would have been the first European to travel through that region and write about it, preceding the Lewis and Clark expedition by three years. But scholars now believe the journal was a hoax. They cite its gross geographical inaccuracies, inaccurate portrayal of Indian life, and the lack of any other evidence suggesting that Le Raye existed.

However, a few parts of the journal are accurate. This indicates that its author had access to a source of information about the Upper Missouri region. This source might have been a journal by Lewis and Clark member Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor, although it was not previously known that Pryor kept a journal. More→

As the Wilkes Expedition, organized by the U.S. Navy, prepared to depart for South America and Antarctica during the late 1830s, polar travel received a great deal of attention in America. This was the context in which a serialized tale authored by Edgar Allan Poe appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in January and February, 1837. Titled "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," it presented the story of an explorer, Arthur Gordon Pym, who traveled to the polar latitudes where he suffered a mysterious demise.

The tale first appeared "under the garb of fiction," but when Poe republished it a year later as a novel, he added a preface claiming the work was factual. However, the story is so bizarre that it is certain most readers realized they were being presented with fiction.

The story was a dramatization of the beliefs of John Cleves Symmes, a man who promoted the theory that the earth was hollow and inhabited within. Symmes had long sought funding for a polar expedition (led by himself) so that he could prove his theory. Poe's fictional explorer, Pym, was on a similar quest.

Extracts from the Journal of a "Julius Rodman" appeared in a series of six installments in Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine between January and June 1840. The journal purported to detail a 1792 expedition led by Julius Rodman up the Missouri River toward the Far North. This 1792 expedition, if true, would have made Rodman the first European to cross the Rocky Mountains.

Julius Rodman's expedition was subsequently noted by a member of the U.S. Senate, Robert Greenhow, who wrote in a Senate document, "It is proper to notice here an account of an expedition across the American continent, made between 1791 and 1794, by a party of citizens of the United States, under the direction of Julius Rodman, whose journal has been recently discovered in Virginia, and is now in course of publication in a periodical magazine at Philadelphia."

Rodman was actually a fictitious character invented by Edgar Allan Poe. To create this ruse Poe penned the entire journal, relying heavily on sources such as Washington Irving's Astoria and Lewis and Clark's History of the Expedition to give his account a veneer of authenticity. Poe's motive for perpetrating this elaborate hoax is unclear.

The New York Sun included a broadside, or extra page, in the midday issue of its April 13, 1844 edition, announcing that the famous European balloonist Monck Mason had succeeded in flying across the Atlantic Ocean in 75 hours. This was major news, being the first time the Atlantic had ever been crossed in a balloon.

The balloon, named the Victoria, had supposedly taken off from England on a trip to Paris, but had been blown off course due to a propeller accident and ended up floating across the Atlantic and landing on Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.

The story was quickly revealed to be a hoax, authored by Edgar Allan Poe. Monck Mason, however, was a real person who had ballooned from London to Weilburg, Germany in 1836, a journey which he had described in 1837 in a book, Account of the Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg.

An illustration of the "Steering Balloon Victoria" accompanied Poe's article. Poe had obtained this image by redrawing it from the frontispiece of an anonymous 1843 pamphlet (the author of which was probably Monck Mason) titled Remarks on the Ellipsoidal Balloon, propelled by the Archimedean Screw, described as the New Aerial Machine.

On the day of the article's publication, Poe stood on the steps of the Sun's building in New York City telling crowds that his own story was a hoax. But apparently, amidst the general excitement, not many people paid attention to him. He later wrote an account in the Columbia Spy of the scene following the publication of the balloon news:

A London newspaper provoked trans-Atlantic controversy when it reported that a series of brutal killings had occurred on a Georgia train. More→

On April 28, 1874, the New York World ran an article announcing the discovery in Madagascar of a remarkable new species of plant: a man-eating tree. The article included a gruesome description of a woman fed to the plant by members of the Mkodos tribe. Numerous newspapers and magazines reprinted the article, but 14 years later the journal Current Literature revealed the story to be a work of fiction written by NY World reporter Edmund Spencer. 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.

On April 1, 1977, the British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades. More→