Throughout history, there have been some hilarious, controversial, and confusing hoaxes that have been created. Hoaxes are different from urban legends, rumors, pseudoscience, or even jokes since a hoax is a deliberate and intentional attempt to create something that is false but present it as the truth. We will look at ten of the most interesting hoaxes that fooled a lot of people.
3. The Cardiff Giant
The Cardiff Giant is a story that began in the late 1860's. A man named George Hull from Cardiff, New York, had an argument with some fundamentalist Methodists about a Bible verse (Genesis 6:4, specifically) where it states that there were giants who once lived on earth. He decided to pull a hoax on them. He had a chunk of gypsum carved out in Iowa, and shipped to Chicago where it was carved into a ten-foot tall statue (which he said was supposed to be in honor of Abraham Lincoln). The statue was aged with various stains and acids, and it was also beaten with needles that had been embedded into a board which would simulate pores from weathering. Hull transported the statue to his cousin's farm in November of 1868. At that time, he'd already spent $2600 on the hoax (which would be approximately $42,000 in 2010).
In 1869, Hull's cousin (whose property the statue was buried in) decided to build a well. They just so happened to dig for the well where the statue was buried. The men thought it was a petrified Indian, so they set up a tent and began charging people to enter the tent and see the giant. It gained attention, and as it did so, geologists and archeologists denounced the giant as fake, but many fundmantalist religious people defended it at authentic (which ties back to the argument between Hull and the Methodists).
Hull ended up selling his part of the hoax for $23,000 to a group of men (headed by David Hannum) who took the giant to Syracuse, NY to exhibit it. P.T. Barnum gained interest in the giant and offered the men $50,000 for the giant so he could display it in his show. The men refused the sale, so Barnum (one who didn't take no for an answer) had a mold made secretly from the giant and a plaster replica was made. Barnum displayed his copy in New York City and proclaimed that the Cardiff Giant was the fake. Hannum sued Barnum for calling his a fake. The judge ordered that he had to bring his giant to prove that it was real. Unable to find a way out of the situation, Hannum admitted that his was a fake, which meant that Barnum's was a copy of a fake. The revelation of the truth happened on February 2, 1870. The judge ruled that Barnum cannot be sued since the giant really was a fake.
Both the original fake and the copy of the fake are still on display, one at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, NY, and the other at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, MI. But which one is Hull's/Hannum's and which one is Barnum's? You be the judge!
Bet you didn't know that!
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