Famous Hoaxes

“Of all of the ‘real’ monsters that stir Western imagination, there are few so romantic as the Loch Ness Monster” (Loxton, 2013, p. 118). According to Loxton, the tradition of lake monster and sea serpent hoaxes long predates the modern Nessie legend (2013, p. 125). Many people believed and some even claimed to have seen a plesiosaur living in a Scottish lake, named Loch Ness.

The most popular image of the Loch Ness Monster was allegedly taken by a doctor named Robert Kenneth Wilson (Loxton, 2013). This image is known today as the “Surgeon’s Photograph” (Loxton, 2013). What reasons might a doctor have to forge a photograph? Since it came from a doctor, it must be true. Unfortunately, the photograph was indeed a hoax. This hoax tricked people into believing in the Loch Ness Monster for more than forty years and some probably still do.

In 1975, the Sunday Telegraph revealed that the photograph was a Wetherell family hoax (Loxton, 2013). Marmaduke Wetherell said they used a small model monster built around a toy submarine, took various pictures, handed the film to Maurice Chambers who passed it to Wilson, who submitted to the newspaper (Loxton, 2013). However, as Loxton (2013) points out “Nessie swims on, swift and elusive, in the imagination of millions” (p. 174).

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 can be considered one of the most imaginative newspaper hoax of all time (Vida, 2012). This hoax is “a remarkable blend of early science fiction, and a well-conceived practical joke, tricked hundreds of thousands of readers in and outside of the United States” (Vida, 2012, p. 431) into believing that there was life on the moon. The person responsible for this hoax was Richard Adams Locke, who let his imagination run wild as he reported that the moon had a lunar forest area full of strange looking animals (Vida, 2012).

These animals included bison-like creatures with a fleshy appendage over their eyes and a blue goat with a single horn (Vida, 2012) as well as “a strange amphibious creature, of a spherical form, which rolled with a great velocity across the pebbly beach” (Locke, 1975, p. 27).

Various tricks were used to deceive. For example, the article was supposedly written by the renowned astronomer, Sir John Herschel, and the source was the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had been closed two years earlier (Vida, 2012). This demonstrates that hoaxsters will try to deceive people by making the author and the source look credible.

The Trojan Horse may be one of the earliest and most popular hoaxes. The Trojan Horse hoax is a classic deceptive trick used as a military advantage (Eaton & Hoose, 2016).

In this story, three thousand years ago, the Greek soldier Ulysses snuck 30 of his soldiers into a large wooden sculpture of a horse and sneakily gained entrance to the city of Troy by tricking the Trojans. The Greeks got on their ships and acted as if they had left, but before leaving they left behind a liar named Sinon. Sinon told the Trojans that the horse was an offering to the goddess Minerva, which the Greeks had left on purpose due to a prophecy that if the horse would get damaged the Greeks would win the war. The Trojans foolishly believed Sinon and broke the walls of the city to not damage the horse offering. When the Greek soldiers were inside, they attacked and won the Trojan War.

Eaton and Hoose (2016) agree that the Trojan Horse hoax has all the details of a classic hoax, which aimed to trick by taking advantage of the desire and beliefs of the Trojans. Sinon’s story aligned with the beliefs of that time, that an angry goddess needed to be appeased (Eaton & Hoose, 2016). Sinon’s story also “allowed the Trojans to believe what they truly wanted to believe: the war was over” (Eaton & Hoose, 2016, p. 4).

Today the term Trojan Horse is used in everyday language as “someone or something intended to defeat or subvert from within, usually by deceptive means” (Merriam-Webster, 2020). The Trojan Horse hoax has also inspired the use of the term in computer science as “a seemingly useful computer program that contains concealed instructions which when activated perform an illicit or malicious action, such as destroying data files” (Merriam‑Webster, 2020).

Visit the history .com website to learn more about famous hoaxes throughout history.