In 1729 Jonathan Swift anonymously published a short work titled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public. The essay began innocuously by discussing the problem of numerous starving beggars and homeless children in Ireland. But then it proposed a radical solution: Ireland's large, impoverished population could be turned to its advantage by feeding the unwanted babies of the poor to the rich. Swift noted, "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."

Swift did not actually intend to promote class-based cannibalism. His point was to use satire in order to dramatize how the rich exploit and dehumanize the poor. However, many readers failed to recognize this.

Swift's short work is one of the most celebrated examples of satire in the English language. It has subsequently lent its name to a genre of satirical hoaxing that uses the same method. The satirist pretends to advocate an idea that people find shocking or disgusting. But the true goal of the satire (at least, according to the satirist) is to raise awareness of a social problem.

In 1747 the London General Advertiser printed the text of a speech said to have been given by a woman, Polly Baker, at her trial. She had just given birth to her fifth child, was unmarried, and had been charged with having sexual intercourse out of wedlock.

Polly Baker readily admitted her guilt but argued that the law itself was unreasonable. Why was she being punished, she asked, while the men who committed the crime with her were let off scot free? According to the article, Polly's argument so moved the judges that one of them asked her hand in marriage the next day.

The text of Polly Baker's speech subsequently circulated widely throughout Europe and America, and it was widely believed to be real. However, thirty years later Benjamin Franklin admitted he had written it. It is not clear how he managed to insert the article into the General Advertiser. However, almost all scholars accept that he wrote it. His intention appears to have been to draw attention to the unfairness of the law which punished mothers, but not fathers, for having children out of wedlock. Franklin himself had fathered a son out of wedlock. The hoax was also Franklin’s first criticism of the penal system, a subject which he devoted much attention to in later decades. More→

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.

Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures was first published in January, 1836. In it, Monk exposed various scandalous events that, according to her, had occurred at the Hotel Dieu convent in Montreal. She claimed convent nuns were having sexual relations with priests from the neighboring seminary who supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. All babies born of these illicit encounters, Monk claimed, were baptized before being strangled and dumped in a lime pit in the basement of the convent. Maria Monk said she had lived in the convent for a total of seven years before becoming pregnant by a priest. Unable to bear the thought of having her child killed and dumped in the basement, she finally fled.

The publication of Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures caused an enormous public outcry that fed on the widespread anti-Catholic sentiment of the era. Leading protestants in New York and Montreal demanded an investigation of the convent, to which demand the Bishop of Montreal eventually acquiesced. It turned up no evidence to support Maria Monk's claims, but American Protestants refused to accept these results, claiming the investigation was biased because it had supposedly been conducted by Jesuits disguised as Protestants.

A New York City newspaper editor, Col. William Leete Stone, asked the Bishop for permission to investigate with a team of protestants. The bishop granted his request, and in October 1836 Stone led a team around the convent. With Maria Monk's book in hand, he compared her description of the convent's interior with the convent itself. He found very little correspondence between the two. However he was not allowed to see the nun's rooms or the basement area and had to return to New York City, his investigation unfinished.

Col. Stone later obtained permission to see the entire convent and, on the basis of this fuller investigation, concluded there was no evidence Maria Monk "had ever been within the walls of the cloister."

With her claims discredited, Maria Monk fell from public view. A rumor emerged that she had actually been a prostitute in Montreal, and that the years she claimed to have spent in a convent were spent in the Magdalen Asylum for Wayward Girls. She was later arrested for picking the pocket of a man who had paid her for sex. She died in prison on Welfare Island, New York City, in 1849. Her Awful Disclosures, despite having been shown to be false, remained in print until well into the twentieth century.

A news report that appeared in the Territorial Enterprise on October 28, 1863, detailed how advice to invest in San Francisco utilities had resulted in tragedy for one man. According to the story, this man, after losing all his money when his investment went bad, went insane and slaughtered his entire family except for his two young girls who miraculously survived. He then rode into town carrying the “reeking scalp” of his wife and collapsed dead in front of a saloon. The story caused a sensation and was widely reprinted. Readers were simultaneously horrified and captivated by the gruesome news. Almost no one thought that it might be false. But it was. It was the invention of a young reporter named Mark Twain. More→

Shortly before Christmas, 1863, a 72-page pamphlet appeared for sale on newsstands in New York City. It was titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The pamphlet opened with an explanation of its title. 'Miscegenation' was a word the author of the pamphlet had coined, and he explained that he had invented it by combining two latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). The pamphlet went on to expound a social philosophy which, by modern standards, sounds enlightened, but which by the racist standards of 1863 was highly inflammatory. He wanted to promote the practice of miscegenation. In other words, he wanted to encourage white and black people to have children with each other. The pamphlet ended by suggesting that Lincoln should add a miscegenation plank to the Republican party platform.

It was eventually revealed that the Miscegenation pamphlet was written by a couple of Democratic newspapermen as a way to insert the inflammatory issue of miscegenation into the presidential election. They had hoped to spread the idea that Republicans encourage miscegenation, and by doing so turn white, working-class voters against the Republican party. The hoax didn't work. Republicans won the election anyway. But the hoax did bring a new word, miscegenation, into the English language. More→

On November 9, 1874 the New York Herald published a front-page article claiming that the animals had escaped from their cages in the Central Park Zoo and were rampaging through the city. A lion had been seen inside a church. A rhinoceros had fallen into a sewer. The police and national guard were heroically battling the beasts, but already forty-nine people were dead and two hundred injured. It was "a bloody and fearful carnival," the article despaired. And the animals were still on the loose!

Many readers panicked when they read the article. However, those who did so hadn't read to the end of the article, where it stated (in rather small print), "the entire story given above is a pure fabrication." More→

"Burned Alive!" a headline on the frontpage of the Chicago Times declared on February 13, 1875. The story that followed described a horrific scene of destruction and mass death in an unnamed Chicago theater that was engulfed in flames when a gas burner fell over. People were said to have been roasted alive as they rushed en masse towards the exit. Firemen had to carry out 157 charred bodies from the remains. The story was identified as fictitious both at its beginning and end, but you had to read closely to catch the disclaimers. More→

The French painter Paul Chabas completed "September Morn" in early 1912. The painting shows a young woman demurely bathing nude by the edge of Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie, France. When Chabas showed it that year at the Paris Salon, it won a gold medal of honor. Critics praised it. But when copies of the painting made their way to America, it provoked a bitter controversy there about nudity, art, and public morality. Thanks to this controversy, September Morn became one of the most famous and popular paintings of the twentieth century. It sold millions of copies and was reproduced on a wide variety of merchandise including umbrellas, suspenders, postcards, candy boxes, cane heads, and watch fobs. The painting is often cited as an example of "success by scandal." But in an ironic twist to the September Morn story, the publicist Harry Reichenbach later claimed to have started the controversy by complaining to moral censors about the indecency of the painting. He didn't actually feel the painting was indecent. He was cynically manipulating the self-righteous moralists in order to sell copies of the painting. It was an early example of a marketer staging a phony protest for the sake of publicity. More→

On June 21, 1940, Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government at a ceremony in Compiegne, France. He melodramatically insisted on receiving France's surrender in the same railroad car in which Germany had signed the 1918 armistice that had ended World War One.

After Hitler accepted France's surrender, he stepped backwards slightly, as if in shock. But this isn't what audiences in the Allied countries saw who watched the movie-reel of the ceremony. Instead they saw Hitler dance a bizarre little jig after signing the documents, as if he were childishly celebrating his victory by jumping up and down. The scene was played over and over in movie theaters.


Following the war, it was revealed that John Grierson, director of the Canadian information and propaganda departments, had manufactured the clip after noticing that Hitler raised his leg rather high up while stepping backwards. He realized that this moment could be looped repeatedly to create the appearance that Hitler was jumping with joy.

The film clip served the purpose of provoking popular outrage against Hitler.

A press release distributed to the media in Columbus, Ohio announced the formation of a new charity that would benefit the homeless by providing them with guns and ammunition. It was called the "Arm the Homeless Coalition." News of this charity was soon picked up by the national media and generated enormous controversy. But when an Ohio reporter tried to track down the Director of the Arm the Homeless Coalition, his investigation led him instead to a group of Ohio State University students who admitted the entire thing was a joke. More→

Jay Forman wrote an occasional "Vice" column for the online magazine Slate.com. In it he often described various bizarre activities he had engaged in or witnessed over the years. For instance, one column probed the synergies between guns and liquor. Another discussed his short career in the pornography trade. In his 8 June 2001 column, he described his participation in the extreme sport of monkey fishing.

Monkey fishing, in Forman's usage of the term, was not a slang expression for some untraditional method of fishing for fish. Forman meant exactly what he said. He went fishing for monkeys. More→

In July 2003, Las Vegas TV station KLAS-TV reported that a local company was selling “Bambi Hunts.” These were games in which men with paintball guns hunted naked women in the Nevada desert. Anyone could sign up to join in a "hunt", although it could cost as much as $10,000 per game. An international media frenzy ensued. Numerous critics denounced the hunts, pointing out that a paintball hitting a naked woman could seriously hurt her. Many questioned how such a thing could be legal.

Only after a week did it become widely apparent that there was no evidence the company had conducted any Bambi hunts. The company wasn’t currently accepting customers (it said there was too much negative publicity), and everyone who claimed to have participated in previous hunts was highly unreliable. Further research revealed that the company was only licensed to sell videos. If it had run commercial paintball games, it had done so illegally.

When the Las Vegas authorities threatened to bring charges against the company, its president, Michael Burdick, admitted that no real Bambi hunts had taken place. The story about the hunts had, he said, just been a “hook” to boost sales of a soft-porn video about a fictional Bambi Hunt. The hook worked. Though their stunt almost got them run out of Las Vegas, Burdick’s company sold thousands of copies of the video.

In March 2004, a photo circulated online showing an American soldier posing with two Iraqi boys. One of the boys was holding a sign that read, "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!" The Council on American-Islamic Relations saw the picture and complained to the Pentagon about it. The photo also received coverage in publications such as Islam Online. But it turned out that there were multiple versions of the photo in circulation. In another version the sign read "Lcpl Boudreaux saved my dad then he rescued my sister," and in yet another version the sign read "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then all your Base are Belong to us." Obviously the sign was being digitally manipulated, but which was the real version? Eventually the Marine Corps opened an investigation to answer this question. The results of this investigation were not publicly released. Lance Corporal Boudreaux himself insisted that the sign originally read 'Welcome Marines'.

The website MarryOurDaughter.com appeared online in September 2007. It claimed to be "an introduction service assisting those following the Biblical tradition of arranging marriages for their Daughters." In plainer language, it purported to be a service that would arrange marriages between underage girls and older husbands. More→