In 1782 a shocking letter was printed in the Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle. It alleged that Indian warriors were sending hundreds of American scalps as war trophies to British royalty and Members of Parliament. The scalps included those of women, as well as young girls and boys.

Soon the letter had crossed the Atlantic and began to circulate throughout Europe, where it shocked European public opinion. But in fact, the British had not received scalps from any Indians. The Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle was a fake newspaper which Benjamin Franklin had printed and distributed to his friends.

Franklin intended his hoax to aid the American war effort by turning European opinion against the British.

In 1827 a Massachusetts printer named Luther Roby published The Journal Kept by Mr. John Howe while He Was Employed as a British Spy. It told the story of John Howe, a man said to have been a British spy during the Revolutionary war before switching sides to become an American soldier, then a settler, a frontier trader, an Indian preacher, and finally a smuggler.

Howe was long accepted as an actual historical figure. As late as 1976, the historian Robert Gross referred to Howe in The Minutemen and Their World as a "quick-thinking English civilian-spy." The 1983 biographical dictionary American Writers Before 1800 contained an entry about Howe. But the writer of the 1983 biographical entry, Daniel Williams, realized, upon investigation, that Howe was fictitious and exposed the hoax, 165 years after it had been perpetrated.

Williams concluded that Roby (or someone he hired to do the writing) had created the character of Howe based on a real figure, Ensign Henry DeBerniere, who had spied for General Gage. Roby essentially Americanized the character of DeBerniere, making him craftier and more representative of the American ideal of the self-made man. Roby's motive was probably financial. He recognized that readers would be more interested in the adventures of a supposedly real Revolutionary war hero than a fictional one.

In November 1874 an unusual article appeared in the introductory volume of The American Medical Weekly, a Louisville medical journal. It was written by Dr. LeGrand G. Capers and was titled, "Attention Gynaecologists!—Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon, C.S.A." In the article Dr. Capers recounted an unusual case of artificial insemination he had witnessed on a Civil War battlefield in Mississippi, in which a bullet had passed through a soldier's testicles, and then traveled on before hitting a woman and impregnating her. The event was said to have occurred on May 12, 1863 at around 3 p.m. at the "battle of R." (battle of Raymond), where "Gen. G's brigade" (Brigadier General John Gregg) of the Confederate forces fought Grant's army led by "Gen. L." (Major General John A. Logan). More→

William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, had a reputation for never letting truth get in the way of a good story. According to one famous tale, when hostilities broke out between the Spanish and the Cubans, Hearst sent the illustrator Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw pictures of the conflict. Finding that not much was happening, Remington cabled Hearst in January 1897: "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."

Supposedly Hearst cabled back: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

It is doubtful Hearst ever sent such a telegram. The first report of it appeared in a 1901 book, On the Great Highway, by journalist James Creelman. Creelman was in Europe at the time the telegram was supposedly sent, so he either heard the story second-hand or invented it himself. Since he was known for exaggeration, the latter is likely. Hearst himself denied having sent such a telegram.

On October 16, 1906, an out-of-work German shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt donned a second-hand military captain's uniform he had bought in a store, walked out into the street, and assumed control of a company of soldiers marching past. He led them to the town hall of Köpenick, a small suburb of Berlin, arrested the mayor and the treasurer on charges of embezzlement, and took possession of 4,000 marks from the town treasury. He then disappeared with the money. The incident became famous as a symbol of the blind obedience of German soldiers to authority — even fake authority.

The police tracked him down nine days later, and he was sentenced to four years in jail. But he proved to be such a likable character (and popular hero) that the Kaiser pardoned Voigt after he had served less than two years. Voigt subsequently pursued a career in show business, where he entertained audiences by re-enacting his stunt on the stage.

On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy's most powerful battleship. Although the Commander-in-Chief of the Dreadnought had only received a last-minute warning of the Prince's arrival, he had the sailors standing at attention when the Prince arrived. The Abyssinian party acknowledged the greeting with bows as they shuffled onto the ship, dressed in their long, flowing robes, and for the next forty minutes the Commander gave them a guided tour of the vessel. The Abyssinians paused at each new marvel while murmuring the appreciative phrase "Bunga, Bunga!" in their native tongue. Finally the royal visitors departed as "God Save the King!" played in the background. More→

On August 22 and 23, 1914 the British Expeditionary Force near Mons was struggling to retreat from the German Army. They were almost surrounded and badly outnumbered. But just when all hope seemed to have been lost, a shimmering angelic apparation appeared in the fog and smoke that hung over the battle field. The British troops staggered towards the figure and discovered that it had shown them an escape route. This remarkable story quickly spread throughout Britain and was widely taken as evidence of divine support for their troops. But in time skeptics began to insist that the entire story was a hoax. The writer Arthur Machen claimed that a fictional story he had published in September, 1914, involving angelic bowmen firing arrows at the Germans, had been mistaken by readers as a true account, thereby leading to the Angel of Mons tale. Stranger still, in 1930 a German officer claimed that the German army had used Zeiss lenses to project an image of an angel into the clouds above the battlefield. It was a psychological warfare trick, he explained, designed to make the British believe that angelic powers were supporting the German forces.
Links: Fortean Times — Wikipedia — The Angel of Mons, by David Clarke.

By November 1918 it seemed that the four-year-long conflict between the Allied and Axis powers might finally be coming to an end. Word leaked to the president of the United Press, who was in Europe at the time, that an armistice had been signed on November 7. Excitedly he cabled the news to America, where it then appeared as front page news across the country and sparked nationwide celebrations. The only problem was that the armistice hadn’t actually been signed. Apparently a German agent had planted the false news in order to demonstrate that the public in the Allied countries would welcome peace rather than a continuation of the conflict. The agent had actually read the political and public mood correctly. He was just a few days early. The real armistice was signed on November 11.

In the early 1930s the French government informed the German reich that it had discharged all the prisoners of war taken during World War I. All soldiers still missing had to be presumed dead. But in May 1932 this statement appeared to be contradicted when a soldier, Oscar Daubmann, returned to Germany, claiming he had spent the last sixteen years in a French prisoner-of-war camp.

Daubmann told a dramatic tale of imprisonment and escape. He said he had been captured by the French in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme and was placed in a prison camp. After killing a guard during an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was sentenced to 20 years hard labor and transferred to Algeria. There he was tortured, starved, and kept in solitary confinement. Finally, years later, he was transferred to the prison tailor shop on account of good behavior, and from there was able to make a successful escape. He walked 3000 miles along the coast and was picked up by an Italian steamer that took him to Naples. He then returned to Germany. More→

A book called Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot was published in 1933. It contained numerous pages of spectacular aerial photographs of World War One dogfights supposedly taken by a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Since very few photos of aerial fighting had been taken by the military, the photographs caused a great sensation. Interest in them grew even greater when they were exhibited at galleries in New York and Philadelphia. It wasn't until 1984 that the photos were discovered to be fake.

In 1935 veterans of World War One lobbied Congress to pay them their war bonuses ten years early in order to ease the economic hardship they were experiencing during the Great Depression. Congress readily acquiesced and passed the Harrison Bonus Bill in January 1936.

This pre-payment was a source of inspiration for Lewis Gorin, a senior at Princeton University. It seemed logical to him that if present-day veterans could get their war bonuses early, why shouldn't future veterans also receive their money up-front — before they had fought in a war. After all, given the global political situation, it seemed inevitable to Gorin that all the young men in the country would soon have to go off to fight. Why shouldn't these future veterans be given their money now, while they could still enjoy it, instead of having to wait until after the conflict, when they might be dead? More→

On August 10, 1942 the U.S. Army's public-relations office issued a press release warning the public of "secret markers" that had been found on farm fields throughout the eastern United States. These markers were patterns formed by the arrangement of fertilizer sacks or the way a field had been tilled. From the ground they looked like nothing, but from the air they formed the shape of arrows, apparently created by Nazi sympathizers in order to guide enemy bombers toward military factories and airfields.

The Army simultaneously released three pictures showing these markers. But a few days later it was discovered that the "secret markers" were really just random patterns of no military significance, a fact the Army had known for months. More→

In 1943 the body of a British officer, Major William Martin, was discovered off the coast of Spain, near Huelva. British diplomats strongly requested that all documents found with the body be returned to them, and the Spanish government eventually complied. But upon examination, it was obvious the documents had been opened and read before their return. This was exactly what the British had hoped would happen, because Major Martin did not exist. He was part of a military hoax, codenamed Operation Mincemeat, designed to fool the Germans.

The British military had obtained a cadaver, chained a briefcase containing supposedly top-secret papers to its wrist, and dropped it in the sea off the coast of Spain. The plan was that the Germans, via the Spanish, would find the body and read the fake papers. The papers stated that the Allies' planned invasion of southern Europe would begin with an attack on Greece and Sardinia. In reality, the Allies planned to attack Sicily first. The hoax was successful. When the Allies launched their offensive on Sicily, most of the heavy German equipment had been moved to defend these other locations.

Ewen Montagu, the British officer who devised the operation, later wrote a book about it titled The Man Who Never Was. The book was subsequently made into a movie.

During World War II, the illustrator Hugh Troy was given a desk job stateside. He found it excruciatingly boring. So to amuse himself he began preparing Daily Flypaper Reports in the style of standard army regulations. These were counts, printed on official-looking paper, of all the flies trapped on flypaper in the mess hall during the last twenty-four hours. He analyzed the results according to wind direction, nearness to windows, nearness to the kitchen, length of the flypaper, etc. He then would mimeograph the report and slip it in among the other official forms submitted to headquarters each day.

After keeping this up for a month, he received a call from an officer in another comapny: "Lieutenant, Can you tell me the proper procedure for filing fly reports? We've been catching hell from the Pentagon for not sending them in."

In 1967 the war in Vietnam was escalating and race riots were breaking out in many major U.S. cities. Popular distrust of the federal government was growing. It was in this context that on October 16 a book appeared titled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It was published by Dial Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.

Leonard C. Lewin, a New York freelance writer, wrote the introduction to the book. He explained that the report had been compiled by 15 experts known as the Special Study Group (SSG) who had been brought together by the U.S. government. The SSG had first met in 1963 at a secret "underground nuclear hideout" called Iron Mountain. They had then held periodic meetings during the next two and a half years to discuss the problems that would confront the United States if it entered into a period of permanent peace. According to Lewin, one of the experts ("John Doe") who was identified as a professor of social science at a 'large Middle Western University,' had decided to release the report to the public.

The report, in language full of think-tank jargon, documented the conclusions of the Special Study Group concerning whether peace was possible, given the economic condition of the world. The SSG decided that peace "would almost certainly not be in the best interest of stable society." War, they argued, was simply too important a part of the world economy, and therefore it was necessary to continue a state of war indefinitely... More→