Medieval naturalists had a great appreciation of hoaxes, and they spent a lot of time collecting and studying them. However, they didn't call them hoaxes. Instead, they called them Lusus Naturae, or Jokes of Nature. The term Lusus Naturae described any creature or specimen that defied classification. One famous example was the Scythian Lamb, or Vegetable Lamb. This bizarre creature, which medieval naturalists were sure existed, although they couldn't locate a specimen, was part plant and part animal. It consisted of a lamb from whose belly grew a thick stem that was firmly rooted in the ground. Thus rendered immobile, the creature survived by eating the grass which grew around it. Medieval naturalists labelled the creature a Lusus Naturae because it defied classification, being neither plant nor animal. More→

Michel de Notredame (1503-1566), better known as Nostradamus, rose to prominence as an astrologer in sixteenth-century France. He was supported by the patronage of Queen Catherine de Médici, for whom he wrote numerous verses implying the downfall of her rival, Elizabeth I of England. Obviously, these predictions did not come true. His most popular work was The Prophecies, first published in 1555, which has remained in print to this day.

Nostradamus himself cannot properly be regarded as a hoaxer since astrology in his time was a highly respected practice. He believed in the legitimacy of his art. The real deception lies in the uses to which his work has been put since his death.

Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in an ancient form of French worded so ambiguously that it could be interpreted to mean almost anything a reader desired. As a result, his followers have been able to credit him with predicting a wide range of calamities including the great London fire of 1666, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the events of September 11, 2001. However, Nostradamus's supposed predictions are only ever noted after the fact. There has never been an instance in which a verse by Nostradamus has been used to accurately predict an event before it occurred.

The work of Nostradamus has also been a theme in a large number of outright hoaxes—instances in which verses were falsely attributed to him. For instance, during World War II the Nazis spread propaganda claiming that Nostradamus had prophesied the success of Hitler. The Allied countries retaliated by spreading propaganda claiming Nostradamus had foreseen Germany's defeat. After 9/11 interest in Nostradamus surged thanks to some verses of his, circulated by email, in which he seemed to predict the tragedy. However, the verses had not actually been written by him. They were the work of an anonymous hoaxer.

Martin Guerre, a French peasant, married Bertrande de Rols in 1538. She bore him one son. But in 1548, after a falling out with his father, Martin disappeared. Eight years passed without any sight of him. Because of Catholic law, Bertrande could not remarry. But in 1556 Martin suddenly returned. Or did he?

The man who claimed to be Martin Guerre was similar in appearance and knew many details of Guerre's life. Bertrande accepted him as her husband, and lived with him for three years, bearing him two children. But when the new Martin sued his uncle for part of the inheritance of his father, the uncle became suspicious and accused him of being an impostor. Specifically, the uncle claimed that the new Martin was actually Arnaud du Tilh, a man from a nearby town.

The case went through a series of trials and appeals. The court seemed to be favoring the authenticity of the new Martin, until suddenly the original Martin Guerre showed up. He had been serving in the Spanish army, where he had lost a leg.

The fake Martin Guerre was executed. The real one eventually reconciled with his wife, who bore him another child.

A film based on the story of Martin Guerre was released in 1982.

Carlo Sigonio was a highly respected Italian scholar who specialized in the history of Rome. Around 1583 he claimed that he had discovered a new complete work by the great Roman orator Cicero. It was titled De Consolatione or the Consolation. In it Cicero grieved for his daughter's death. Only small fragments of this work had ever been found before.

The discovery of this manuscript caused great excitement. But when other scholars read it, the general consensus was that it had to be a fake. It contained numerous anachronistic phrases and Italian mannerisms that Cicero would never have used.

Sigonio stubbornly defended the work, but today it is still regarded as being a forgery. Sigonio might have written the book himself, perhaps to display his mastery of Ciceronian scholarship.

In 1593 reports began to spread of a young boy in Silesia, seven-year-old Christoph Müller, who had grown a golden tooth. Jakob Horst, a professor of medicine at Julius University in Helmstedt, decided to investigate. He found the boy did indeed have a gold tooth set firmly in his jaw. Tests with a touchstone (a small tablet of dark stone on which soft metals such as gold leave a visible trace) confirmed the gold was real, though not as high quality, Horst noted, as Hungarian gold. More→

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Mother Shipton was a sixteenth-century Yorkshire seer who supposedly made a number of startlingly accurate predictions. However, it is uncertain whether she actually existed, and many of the predictions attributed to her are outright hoaxes.

The first extant reference to her is found in a booklet, The Propheceyes of Mother Shipton, published in 1641, eighty years after she was said to have died. This work claimed she had accurately predicted the deaths of a number of her contemporaries such as Cardinal Wolsey. However, there are no written references to her, or her predictions, during her own lifetime.

Other works about Mother Shipton subsequently appeared, and with each work new prophecies were credited to her. However, all the prophecies were backdated prophecies (i.e. prophecies which described events that had already occurred).

Mother Shipton's most famous prophecy was that, "The world to an end shall come / In eighteen hundred and eighty-one."

These lines circulated widely throughout England as 1881 approached and caused great popular concern. However, this prophecy was actually the work of a Brighton bookseller, Charles Hindley, who in 1862 had published what he claimed to be a reprint of a 1684 biography of Mother Shipton. To make the biography seem more relevant to nineteenth-century audiences, Hindley had inserted some new verses of his own creation into the book. Some of the other verses Hindley wrote made it seem as if Mother Shipton had accurately predicted the invention of technologies such as the railway, telegraph, submarines, and hot-air balloons. More→

The Cerne Abbas Giant is a chalk figure of an enormous naked man wielding a club carved into the side of a hill in Dorchester, England. The giant is one of a number of presumably ancient hill figures that dot the English countryside, such as the Long Man of Wilmington and the White Horse of Uffington. But the Cerne Abbas giant is uniquely distinctive because of the enormous erect phallus that he sports. The giant occupies a treasured place in British culture. He's widely believed to have been carved thousands of years ago. Folklore suggests he's an ancient fertility god, possessing the power to make childless women pregnant. Postcards of him are the only images of a naked man accepted by the British post office. But in recent years historians have suggested that the Giant may date only to the seventeenth-century, since the first written reference to it only dates to 1694. Furthermore, its creation may have been a prank. More→

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was a Jesuit Scholar and professor of Mathematics at the Roman College in Italy. He was one of the central figures of Baroque scientific culture, and probably the greatest expert on ancient and universal languages, archaeology, astronomy, magnetism, and Chinese and Egyptian culture in Europe at that time. However, he was also reported to be the target of a number of pranks and hoaxes. More→

The Ghostly Drummer of Tedworth was a case of suspected poltergeist activity. In the early 1660s John Mompesson of Wiltshire began to hear strange noises in his home. There was the sound of a drum beating, as well as scratching and panting noises. Objects seemed to move of their own accord in the house, and sometimes a strange sulphureous smell lingered in the air.

Mompesson believed that a man he had helped send to jail, a drummer named William Drury, had, through some form of witchcraft, caused a malevolent spirit to invade his home. The case attracted interest throughout England, and many people came to witness the spirit for themselves. However, when the King sent two representatives to investigate the haunting, they found no evidence of supernatural activity.

Skeptics, of which there were many, dismissed the entire thing as a hoax. They suggested that Mompesson himself may have been behind it, either to profit from those who came to see the spirit, or to decrease the value of the house (which was rented). Another possible culprit was Mompesson's servants, who seemed quite pleased at the travails of their master, and who often taunted him by pointing out that he could never fire them because no one else would agree to work for him under such conditions. More→

Jean Hardouin (1646-1729) was not himself a forger, but he was the author of an unusual theory about forgery. As librarian of the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he came to the conclusion that virtually all classical texts, and most ancient works of art, coins and inscriptions, had been forged by a group of thirteenth-century monks led by a mysterious figure whom he called Severus Archontius. The goal of this group was supposedly to "establish Atheism amongst men, by paganising all the facts of Christianity". The name Severus Archontius was probably a veiled reference to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.

Hardouin was, at the time he first proposed his theory in 1693, a highly regarded scholar. Other learned men tried to take him seriously and argued the merits of his theory with him, but as he persisted in his views, he gradually came to be seen as a pariah in the scholarly community. One contemporary described him as "very confident, arrogant, and violently addicted to hypothesis and paradox." His critics referred to his theory dismissively as "Harduinismus".

Hardouin claimed he "detected the whole fraud" by spotting a series of clues embedded in classical works, clues that included instances of poor writing as well as apparent anachronisms. He believed the thirteenth-century forgers had not only forged the core classical texts, but also a range of later references to these texts, thereby creating a vast web of mutually reinforcing deception.

A nineteenth-century historian remarked that, "The legitimate inference from his theory is that he wished to establish Romanism on the ruins of universal learning, and to reduce mankind to an implicit submission to the Popedom: for, to the obvious question, which he states himself, 'If we must not believe the Fathers, whom can we believe?' he boldly replies: 'Not the Fathers, I say, but our Holy Mother the Church of Rome.'"

Viewed in a broader context, Hardouin's theory can be seen as an extreme expression of a growing awareness amongst seventeenth-century scholars of the number of errors, exaggerations, and inventions in the historical record.

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.
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Shortly before his death in 1702, butterfly collector William Charlton (1642-1702) sent a specimen to esteemed London entomologist James Petiver. Petiver thought it was quite remarkable. He wrote, "It exactly resembles our English Brimstone Butterfly (R. Rhamni), were it not for those black spots and apparent blue moons on the lower wings. This is the only one I have seen."

Carl Linnaeus had a chance to examine the rare butterfly in 1763 and declared it to be a new species that he named Papilio ecclipsis. He included it in the 12th edition (1767) of his Systema Naturae.

But thirty years later, in 1793, the Danish entomologist John Christian Fabricius examined it more closely and realized it was a fake. The black spots had been painted on the wings. The rare butterfly, the only one of its kind ever seen, was nothing more than a common Brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni).


When Dr. E.W. Gray, keeper of National Curiosities at the British Museum where the specimen was stored, heard of the deception, he is said to have become so enraged that he "indignantly stamped the specimen to pieces". The lepidopterist William Jones carefully created two replica specimens that are now preserved as "The Charlton Brimstones".

It is unclear whether this is an example of scientific fraud (i.e. Was Charlton hoping he would be credited with the discovery of a new species?), or if it was intended as a mere practical joke.

An almanac released by Isaac Bickerstaff in February 1708 predicted that a rival astrologer, John Partridge, would die on March 29 of that year. On March 31st Bickerstaff released a follow-up pamphlet announcing that his prediction had come true. Partridge was dead.

However, Partridge was actually still very much alive. He was woken on April 1st by a sexton outside his window announcing the news of his death. Isaac Bickerstaff was actually a pseudonym for Jonathan Swift, who would later become famous as the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s intention was to embarrass and discredit Partridge, apparently because he was annoyed by the astrologer’s attacks upon the church. More→

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of the pioneers of satirical hoaxing. For instance, his most famous work, Gulliver's Travels (1726), ostensibly told the true story of an Englishman's travels to a series of incredible lands, but it actually was more of a comment on English society. Likewise, in A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to their Parents or the Country (1729), he pretended to make a serious case for the benefits to be had by feeding poor children to the rich, although he clearly was making a dark comment on the inhumanity of the rich towards the poor.

The above examples are more in the vein of satire than actual hoaxes, since the deception was fairly obvious. But he also perpetrated out-and-out hoaxes, such as his Bickerstaff hoax of 1708 in which he poked fun at astrology. Posing as the astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, he managed to fool many people into believing he had accurately predicted the death of the famous astrologer, John Partridge, even though Partridge wasn't yet dead.