Whether it is for fame, fortune, or simply to mislead, some people will occasionally go to great lengths to deceive the world. Some are in fact quite amusing and meant to be little more than practical jokes. These are the 10 greatest scientific hoaxes in history.
1. Crop Circles
After these strange circles started popping up in wheat fields around the start of the 1970s, they led to all sorts of UFO and extra terrestrial theories. In 1991, however, the two pranksters came forward and revealed the truth.
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2. Tasaday Tribe
In 1970s, Prime Minister of the Philippines came forth to the world claiming that he had discovered a stone age tribe called the Tasaday on the island of Mindanao. When scientists tried to get a closer look, he declared the island to be an off-limits land reserve. About 15 years later several journalists visited the island only to find the Tasaday walking around in blue jeans and speaking a modern dialect. They explained that they had moved into caves under pressure from the minister. Elizalde was long gone as he had already fled the country with millions of dollars from an account set up to help protect the Tasaday people.
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3. The Great Moon Hoax
In 1835 several articles were published by the New York Sun claiming that Sir John Herschel had made some incredible discoveries in space using new telescopic methods. According to the article the surface of the moon was covered with lilac colored pyramids, herds of bison, and blue unicorns. The article was a hoax and even Herschel himself wasn’t aware of some of the claims being attributed to him.
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4. Jan Hendrik Schon
A German physicist, Schon briefly flirted with fame after a series of breakthroughs in semi-conductor research. After his rise to scientific stardom, however, others began noticing anomilies in his data. It was soon determined that he had faked almost all of his experiments making it one of the largest hoaxes in the world of physics for the last 50 years.
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5. The Sokal Affair
A hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal, he submitted a nonsensical research paper filled with jargon to the Social Text, a journal published by Duke. His goal was to prove that the many journals of the day were nothing more than “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense.”
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6. The Upas Tree
In 1783 an account was published in the London Magazine about a tree in Indonesia sopoisonous that it killed everything within 15 miles leaving the Earth bare and dotted with the skeletons of both man and beast. Although the Upas tree really exists and it really does contain a powerful toxin, this story was blown way out of proportion.
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7. The Secret of Immortality
In the 1700s Johann Cohausen wrote a paper on the prolongation of life claiming that it could be extended by taking an elixir produced in part from the breath of young women collected in bottles. He later came out clarifying that the work had in fact been a satire.
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8. Piltdown Man
Probably the most famous hoax in history, the Piltdown man, discovered in 1912, was supposed to be the fossilized remains of an early humanoid. It wasn’t until almost 50 years later that people discovered the elaborate hoax.
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9. Fiji Mermaid
A staple at the PT Barnum museum, this mermaid was actually believed to be real by many people until it was proved to be nothing more than than the head and torso of a monkey attached to the tail of a fish.
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10. Alien Autopsy
In the early 90′s a short film of a supposed alien autopsy was aired on Fox Network after which several other news outlets picked up the story as well. It wasn’t until over 15 years later that the producer came forward to admit that it was fake.
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