Famous Hoaxes

The Bible, an argument, and someone’s business sense in 1869 made possible one of the world’s famous hoaxes, those stunts that try to make real the unreal.

There was a ten-foot tall stone man discovered by workers who dug a well behind the barn of a farmer in Cardiff, New York. Word on the Cardiff Giant soon spread, and thousands went to the farm to see it. In time the viewers were charged 50 cents each, and still they kept coming.

A ‘petrified man’ versus ‘ancient statue’ match ensued. The former harked to the Bible, the latter favored the theory that a Jesuit missionary carved it in the 1600s.

Then a group of businessmen bought the Cardiff Giant for over 37 thousand dollars and moved it to Syracuse for a more prominent display. There it was analyzed by a paleontologist from Yale, who declared it a “clumsy fake” because its chisel marks were too clear for it to have been buried a long time.

Businessman and atheist George Hull confessed. He created the giant statue after arguing with a Methodist minister on whether the Bible should be taken literally. He didn’t think so, but the minister insisted that even the line “There were giants on the earth in those days…” (Genesis 6:4) should be taken literally.

So Hull made the stone giant to poke at Biblical literalists. It cost him over two thousand dollars, in conspiracy with the stonecutters who carved out the giant and the farmer who owned the place in which it was found. It didn’t hurt that his hoax also earned him profits.

The truth didn’t stop the public’s interest. The stone man was even called ‘Old Hoaxey.’ P.T. Barnum of Barnum Circus fame offered to rent it for three days at sixty thousand dollars. He was refused, so he had an artist build a plaster replica. It drew bigger crowds than the original fake, prompting the new owners to file a lawsuit, which fizzled when the judge decided to hear the case only if they could prove which one is original.

Across the Atlantic, in England in 1912, an artifact that proved to be ‘the missing link’ between man and ape rocked not the public but a more select group― the scientific community. The Piltdown Man, named such because it was excavated from a pit in Piltdown, England, had a human skull and the jawbone of an ape.

It was said to have lived half a million years earlier, during the Pleistocene period. For the next three decades, the scientific community accepted it as an authentic artifact and entered it in textbooks as Eonthropus Dawson, named after its discoverer, Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur paleontologist.

It proved to be unlike anything else as more skeletons of early man were found. By 1953, a team of researchers from the British Museum took a series of tests on the artifact. The skull was 50 thousand years old but the jawbone was just decades old. They also found out that the jawbone was chemically treated to make it appear ancient.

Since Dawson had died by then, speculations on who perpetrated the hoax remained unproved. Most suspected Dawson but some cast doubts on two heavyweights― the existentialist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who as a young priest helped in the excavation, and Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived near Piltdown and was reputed to hold a strong interest in paleontology.

Leave it to eccentric Englishmen to perpetrate hoaxes. In 1821, there was famous naturalist Charles Waterton. He arrived from Guiana with crates of specimens of South American wildlife. A customs inspector charged him with the highest import tax possible even if his cargo had more scientific than commercial value.

Waterton returned to Guiana three years later and came back with a remarkable specimen labeled Nondescript, a creature with a human head and face covered by thick fur that he claimed he had killed in Guiana’s jungles, as he described in his popular book.

Other skeptical naturalists argued that Nondescript’s face was molded out of the behind of a howler monkey. No other person can claim sightings of the creature, so Waterton’s specimen was the best case for its existence. There was just one catch: Nondescript had an uncanny resemblance to the customs inspector who taxed Waterton heavily back in 1821. It is said that he literally ‘made a monkey’ out of the tax collector.