Great Hoaxes in History — and the Real Stories Behind Them

Researching one or two high-level hoaxes is a great way to highlight the effectiveness of “fake news” — and makes for a fun investigative unit study.

Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast — in which he spun the fictional tale of a happening-right-now alien invasion — probably didn’t freak out as many people as legend likes to suggest, but there have other hoaxes that successfully fooled people for years, sometimes centuries. Researching one or two of them is a great way to highlight the effectiveness of “fake news” — and makes for a fun investigative unit study.

Drake’s Plate

An inscribed brass marker left by Sir Francis Drake and the crew of the Golden Hind is one of those finds that must have seemed absolutely too good to be true when it was discovered in North Carolina in 1936. University of California, Berkeley, history professor — and major Drake buff — Herbert Bolton authenticated the plate himself — but when researchers in 1977 analyzed the artifact, they discovered it was a fake. The pranksters owned up: They’d created the plate as a joke on Bolton and didn’t know how to backpedal when he bought it for the Berkeley library collection.

Get the Real Story: You Wouldn't Want to Explore With Sir Francis Drake!: A Pirate You'd Rather Not Know by David Stewart

Archaeoraptor

Remember the Archaeoraptor liaoningensis? For a shining moment in 1999, it seemed like the link between present-day birds and dinosaurs had been discovered when a fossil found in China turned out to have the arms of a primitive bird and a dinosaur tail. National Geographic magazine published a feature on the fossil, which was immediately snapped up by a U.S. dinosaur museum. So plenty of people were embarrassed when the fossil was discovered to have been glued together by an enterprising Chinese farmer who did some fossil hunting in his spare time.

Get the Real Story: “The great dinosaur fossil hoax” (Cosmos)

The Bathtub’s Birthday

We talk a lot about how people share news on social media without ever fact-checking, but this isn’t a new problem: In 1917, journalist H.L. Mencken wanted to call people’s attention to that very gullibility. He published an article called “A Neglected Anniversary,” celebrating the not-at-all-correct anniversary of the modern bathtub with a lot of made-up “facts.” The joke was on Mencken, though — newspapers continued to reprint the story for years, and people believed the tale of the tub even after Mencken owned up to his trick. 

Get the Real Story: Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water-Closet by Lawrence Wright

The Masked Marauders

Musical supergroups were all the rage in the late 1960s, and it’s hard to imagine a weirder and more must-hear collaboration than the Masked Marauders, a group that allegedly featured the vocal talents of Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and (Nobel Prize-winner) Bob Dylan. Greil Marcus invented the band for a Rolling Stone article, thinking that its over-the-top claims to fame (an extended jam between bass guitar and piano with Paul McCartney playing both parts, 18-minute cover songs) would clue people in on the joke. Of course it didn’t— the self-titled debut album (recorded as a spoof ) sold 100,000 copies.

Get the Real Story: “Masked Marauders ‘Supergroup’ Exposed” (Rolling Stone)

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This article originally appeared in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.

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