In New York City in late August 1835, the penny daily The Sun ran a six-part series claiming that the astronomer Sir John Herschel, observing from the Cape of Good Hope, had discovered forests, oceans, herds of bison and beavers, and an intelligent race of winged “man-bats” living on the Moon. The reports were a complete fabrication. They were almost certainly written by a Sun reporter named Richard Adams Locke, falsely attributed to Herschel and to a fictitious “Dr. Andrew Grant,” and dressed up as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science — a real publication that had ceased to exist two years earlier. None of it was true, and within weeks New York knew it.
The series ran from Tuesday, August 25 to Monday, August 31, 1835, roughly 17,000 words across six installments, and it was an immediate sensation. The Sun boasted a circulation of 19,360 copies on August 28 and declared itself “the greatest of any daily paper in the world.” The hoax was exposed almost as fast as it spread: James Gordon Bennett’s rival New York Herald pointed out on August 31 that the cited journal had been defunct since 1833 and named Locke as the likely author. The Sun never printed a formal retraction.
What makes the case unusual among great deceptions is how little it cost anyone. Herschel, who knew nothing of it until later, was first amused and then irritated at having to field questions, but bore the imposture “with good grace.” Locke kept his job, eventually attached “Author of the Moon Hoax” to his byline, and confessed the whole thing as satire in an 1840 letter to the weekly New World. The paper paid no fine and faced no court. The Great Moon Hoax has survived as a founding episode of “fake news” precisely because it demonstrated, early and cleanly, that a sensational fabrication could sell papers, evaporate under scrutiny, and leave its perpetrators richer and unpunished.
The lasting interest of the story is less in the man-bats than in the mechanism. The hoax worked not because its readers were uniquely foolish but because it borrowed the costume of legitimate science at a moment when real astronomy was producing genuinely astonishing news and when a cheap, fast, profit-driven press had every incentive to print what sold.
On the evening of 1 April 1957, the BBC current-affairs flagship Panorama broadcast a three-minute film, narrated by the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, showing a family in the Swiss canton of Ticino plucking strands of spaghetti from the branches of trees and laying them in baskets to dry. It was an April Fools’ Day fabrication conceived by a BBC cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, and produced on a budget of roughly £100. Spaghetti does not grow on trees. The “harvest” was dried pasta draped over branches at a hotel in Castagnola, with additional footage staged at a pasta factory in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Within a day the BBC was acknowledging the segment as a joke.
The film reached an audience estimated at eight million in a country where, in 1957, pasta was an unfamiliar delicacy rather than a pantry staple, and where Panorama and Dimbleby carried immense institutional authority. The segment explained the bumper crop as the product of a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” and noted that growers bred their plants for uniform strand length. Hundreds of viewers telephoned the BBC the following day — some indignant, but many sincerely asking how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. The corporation reportedly advised them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
Unlike most entries in this file, the Spaghetti-Tree Hoax injured no one and was never meant to last beyond the joke. It is remembered not as a fraud but as a benchmark: the moment a respected news institution proved that authoritative narration and moving pictures could persuade a mass audience of something botanically impossible. Decades later CNN called it “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”
The lasting interest of the case lies in why the joke worked at all. It exploited a precise gap between the audience’s trust in the medium and its knowledge of the subject. Britons knew Dimbleby and they knew Panorama; what most of them did not know was how spaghetti was actually made. Into that gap a plausible-sounding film could pour almost any nonsense, provided it was delivered in the sober register of the early-evening news.
In its issue dated 1 April 1985, Sports Illustrated published “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” a long feature by the writer George Plimpton describing a mysterious New York Mets pitching prospect who could throw a fastball 168 miles per hour with pinpoint control. The pitcher did not exist. Hayden Siddhartha “Sidd” Finch was an invention — an April Fools’ Day hoax commissioned by managing editor Mark Mulvoy after he noticed the issue would be dated 1 April, and written by Plimpton with the full apparatus of Sports Illustrated‘s reporting: photographs, named teammates, and a detailed, sober narrative voice.
The story was elaborate. Finch was said to have been raised in an English orphanage, orphaned again when his adoptive archaeologist father died in a Nepalese plane crash, schooled briefly at Harvard, and trained in the mountains of Tibet, where he had learned through yoga to harness “siddhi” — perfect mastery of mind and body — into a delivery faster than any human arm had produced. He pitched, it was reported, while wearing a single heavy hiking boot, and was torn between baseball and the French horn. A junior-high art teacher from Oak Park, Illinois, named Joe Berton, posed for the photographs, usually with his face turned away. The whole confection rested on a single embedded confession: the article’s subhead read, “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball.” The first letters of those words spell “Happy April Fools’ Day — a(h) fib.”
Many readers missed it. Mets fans deluged the magazine with requests for more information; the magazine reported that two major-league general managers telephoned the commissioner’s office, a Florida newspaper dispatched a reporter to find Finch at the Mets’ spring camp in St. Petersburg, and the television networks scrambled. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner reportedly fumed that the stunt was “bad for baseball.” Sports Illustrated let the joke ripen for two weeks, ran a mock “retirement” notice on 8 April, and admitted the hoax outright in the issue dated 15 April 1985.
The case is studied less for the absurdity of a 168-mph fastball — well beyond the roughly 100-mph ceiling of real pitchers — than for the precision of its engineering. It married the unimpeachable credibility of a national magazine and a celebrated author to a fantasy its audience desperately wanted to be true, and it printed its own confession in plain sight, trusting that belief would override reading.
On 28 September 1980, The Washington Post published “Jimmy’s World” on its front page — a roughly 2,100-word feature by reporter Janet Cooke describing an eight-year-old heroin addict in Southeast Washington, complete with a scene of the boy being injected by his mother’s boyfriend. The story was a fabrication. There was no Jimmy, no family, and no interview with a heroin-using child; Cooke invented the boy and his world. The article won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing on 13 April 1981, and within roughly two days the prize was returned and Cooke had resigned — the only time a Pulitzer has ever been surrendered.
The deception did not unravel because anyone caught the invented boy. It unravelled because of the prize itself. When Cooke won, the Associated Press circulated a biography drawn from her own claims, and editors at The Toledo Blade, where she had previously worked, spotted discrepancies: she had claimed a magna cum laude degree from Vassar and a master’s from the University of Toledo, when in fact she had attended Vassar for a single year and held a bachelor’s from Toledo. The resume lies prompted Post editors to test her other claims — executive editor Ben Bradlee found she could not speak the languages she professed — and the scrutiny collapsed into an eleven-hour interrogation. At 1:45 a.m., a deputy editor recorded her confession: “There is no Jimmy and no family. It was a fabrication.”
What makes the case a permanent reference point in journalism is not the lie itself but how an institution famous for verification — the paper of Watergate — published, defended, and submitted for the highest prize a story that no one had confirmed. “Jimmy” had been protected from scrutiny by the very practices meant to protect sources. Cooke told editors she had promised confidentiality and that revealing the boy’s identity could endanger her or him; when the mayor and police searched the city for the child and found nothing, the failure was read by some as a sign of the inner city’s hidden horrors rather than of fabrication. The anonymity that shielded a vulnerable source also shielded a fictional one.
The lasting interest lies in the mechanism of institutional credulity. A talented writer told her editors exactly the story they were primed to want — vivid, prize-worthy, confirming a known crisis — and the newsroom’s checks bent around her instead of around the claim. The ombudsman’s subsequent autopsy became a landmark of self-examination, and the scandal reshaped how American newsrooms handle anonymous sources and how they vet the people they hire.
In New York City on April 1, 1998, the novelist William Boyd, the singer David Bowie, the critic John Richardson and the writer Gore Vidal launched a handsomely produced biography of an American abstract expressionist named Nat Tate — a painter who had never existed. The book, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960, was written by Boyd as a deliberate hoax and published by 21 Publishing, an imprint Bowie co-directed. At a party in Jeff Koons’s Manhattan studio, Bowie read aloud from the fictional life while guests from the upper reaches of the art world mingled, and several of them, prompted, recalled having seen Tate’s work or mourned his early death. None of it was real. The painter, his paintings, his suicide and his circle were inventions.
The fabrication was built to be plausible and to be flattering to anyone who pretended to recognize it. Boyd gave Tate a complete and poignant biography: born in 1928, a melancholic abstractionist who studied under Hans Hofmann, befriended Braque and Picasso, then destroyed roughly 99 percent of his own output and leapt to his death from the Staten Island Ferry in 1960 — a tidy explanation for why no one had heard of him. The name itself was a quiet joke, stitched from two London museums, the National Gallery and the Tate. The book carried grainy “period” photographs, reproductions of “his” paintings, and admiring quotations from real, eminent figures — Vidal and Richardson among them — who were in on the joke and lent their authority to a void.
The exposure came within about a week and from the inside. David Lister, arts correspondent of The Independent, had been at the launch and noticed how readily fashionable guests claimed acquaintance with an artist no reference work contained. He reported that the art world had been hoaxed, that Tate was Boyd’s invention, and that some of the biggest names present had been caught praising or remembering a man who never lived. The point of the prank, Boyd and his collaborators acknowledged, had been to test whether art-world authority would rather feign knowledge than admit a gap — and it had.
What makes Nat Tate a clean case of credulity is that it weaponized social vanity rather than forged evidence. The book lied, but its real engine was the listener who would not risk seeming ignorant by asking who Nat Tate was. The hoax measured the gap between what people knew and what they would claim to know in a room full of their peers, and found it wide.
On December 28, 1917, the New York Evening Mail ran an essay titled “A Neglected Anniversary” by the Baltimore journalist and critic H. L. Mencken, who fabricated an entire history of the bathtub in the United States and presented it, deadpan, as sober fact. The article was an invention from start to finish. Mencken later called it “a piece of spoofing to relieve the strain of war days,” written for his own amusement during the First World War. Nothing in it was true, and Mencken knew it when he wrote it.
The fiction was specific enough to be quotable. Mencken claimed the bathtub had been introduced to America on December 20, 1842, when a Cincinnati grain dealer named Adam Thompson installed the first one after encountering the device on business trips to England, where it had supposedly been invented in 1828 by one “Lord John Russell.” He invented a chorus of opposition — Cincinnati doctors warning that bathing was dangerous, a near-ban in Philadelphia, an actual prohibition in Boston — and a redemption arc in which Vice President Millard Fillmore took a bath in Thompson’s tub, then installed the first White House bathtub on becoming president in 1850, making the fixture respectable. None of these people, ordinances, or events existed as described. Lord John Russell was a real British prime minister with no connection to plumbing.
What distinguishes the case is not that readers believed the spoof but that the spoof kept being believed long after its author tried to kill it. The invented facts migrated into encyclopedias, medical literature, and standard reference works; they were quoted on the floor of Congress and crossed the Atlantic into European print. Mencken confessed in a front-page article, “Melancholy Reflections,” in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926, and confessed a second time that July. The retraction barely dented the legend. As late as the 21st century, the false bathtub chronology was still surfacing in newspapers and advertising as genuine American history.
The lasting interest of the affair is mechanical rather than comic. Mencken built a fake that was modest, plausible, and useless to dispute — a small civic story no one had reason to doubt and no easy way to check — and then watched it propagate through exactly the institutions that were supposed to filter error out. It is an early, clean demonstration of what later observers would call citogenesis: a fabrication acquires authority simply by being repeated in reputable places, until the repetitions become the evidence.
In 1964, the Swedish journalist Åke “Dacke” Axelsson of the Gothenburg tabloid Göteborgs-Tidningen staged a hoax to test whether art critics could tell genuine avant-garde painting from work made by an animal. Four abstract canvases were hung at the Gallerie Christinae in Gothenburg under the name of a previously unknown French modernist, “Pierre Brassau.” The paintings were not by any Frenchman. They had been made by Peter, a four-year-old common chimpanzee at the Borås Djurpark zoo, who had been handed brushes and oil paints by his teenaged keeper. The deception was deliberate, the artist invented, and the result, by Axelsson’s design, a public test of the critics’ eye.
The critics largely passed the test in the wrong direction. Several reviewers from Swedish papers treated Brassau as a serious new talent. Rolf Anderberg of the Göteborgs-Posten wrote that “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination,” and praised brushwork that twisted “with furious fastidiousness.” One reviewer was unconvinced and remarked that “only an ape could have done this” — a verdict that was, unknown to him, literally correct. A private collector, Bertil Eklöt, was sufficiently persuaded to buy one of the canvases for about ninety dollars.
When Axelsson revealed that Pierre Brassau was a chimpanzee named Peter, the exposure was instant and self-administered; there was never any mystery to unravel, because the hoaxer announced his own trick. The most-quoted critic did not retreat. Anderberg maintained that Peter’s work remained “still the best painting in the exhibition,” a response that preserved his judgment by detaching it from the question of who or what had made the art. The episode caused no financial harm and ruined no careers. Peter went on living at the zoo and was transferred to Chester Zoo in England in 1969.
The case is remembered as a clean experiment in the sociology of taste. It did not prove that modern art is worthless, nor that critics are fools. It demonstrated something narrower and more durable: that when judgment depends on context — a gallery, a foreign name, the assumption of human intention — the context can carry the verdict, and a confident eye can read meaning into marks that were never meant to mean anything at all.
In November 1967, The Dial Press published Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, presented as a suppressed government study and accepted by a great many readers as exactly that. The book was a satire. It was written by the American author Leonard C. Lewin, at the suggestion of the editor Victor Navasky, and Lewin acknowledged sole authorship in The New York Times Book Review on March 19, 1972. There was no Special Study Group, no secret panel convened in a bunker, and no leaked report. The entire document was invented to provoke argument about war, peace, and the mentality of Cold War think tanks.
The framing was meticulous. Lewin wrote himself in only as the author of a foreword, presenting the body as the genuine work of an anonymous government panel — a fictitious “Special Study Group” said to have been quietly commissioned around 1963 and to have deliberated in an underground facility called Iron Mountain. Its deadpan conclusion was that permanent peace, though achievable, would be so destabilizing to the economy and the social order that it was not in fact desirable, and that war performs functions — economic, political, social — for which planners would need to engineer substitutes. The prose mimicked the affectless, systems-analysis voice of the era’s defense intellectuals so closely that the parody read as the real thing.
It worked. The book became a New York Times bestseller, was translated into some fifteen languages, and ran as a long excerpt in Esquire. To reinforce the illusion, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed it under the pseudonym “Herschel McLandress,” claiming to vouch for the report’s authenticity — a flourish that fed speculation he might be the author. Officials and journalists debated whether the leak was genuine; by some accounts President Johnson was furious. Lewin’s 1972 confession ended the central deception but not the story. Over the following decades the book was adopted as supposed proof of a globalist conspiracy by militia and far-right groups, who insisted Lewin’s admission was itself the cover-up, and the dispute spilled into a copyright suit against the Liberty Lobby.
The case is unusual among media hoaxes because its author wanted to be understood and could not fully succeed. Lewin meant the book as transparent satire of a real intellectual culture; the satire was so faithful that it became indistinguishable from its target, and a confession could not retrieve it from the believers it had recruited. It stands as a study in how parody, executed too well, stops functioning as parody.
On December 3, 2004 — the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster — a man calling himself Jude Finisterra appeared live on BBC World, introduced as a spokesman for the Dow Chemical Company, and announced that Dow had at last accepted full responsibility for Bhopal and would liquidate its Union Carbide subsidiary to fund a $12 billion plan to compensate the victims and clean the contaminated site. None of it was true. “Finisterra” was Andy Bichlbaum, a member of the activist duo the Yes Men, and Dow had authorized nothing. The broadcast was a deliberate hoax, and within roughly two hours Dow itself issued the denial that exposed it.
The deception was made possible by a clerical error at the BBC. The Yes Men maintained a parody website, dowethics.com, built to mimic Dow’s real site while highlighting the company’s refusal to act on Bhopal. A BBC researcher seeking a Dow spokesman for the anniversary found the parody site, took it for the real thing, and emailed an interview request to it on November 29, 2004. The Yes Men accepted. At about 9:00 a.m. GMT, the interview aired and was repeated, presenting a global audience with the false news that the disaster’s corporate successor was finally making amends. In the minutes that followed, Dow’s share price fell 4.24 percent on the Frankfurt exchange, briefly erasing some $2 billion in market value before recovering once the BBC issued corrections.
What set this hoax apart from a simple prank was its target and its candor. The Yes Men were not concealing wrongdoing; they were dramatizing it, using a tactic they call “identity correction” — impersonating a powerful institution to make it say, on the record, the thing critics believe it should say. The fiction of Dow doing right threw into relief the fact of Dow doing nothing. The 1984 disaster killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands; the 1989 legal settlement worked out to roughly $500 per victim, and Dow, which acquired Union Carbide in 2001, has consistently denied any further liability. The hoax conjured, for one broadcast, the justice that two decades had not delivered.
The case is studied less as a security failure than as a demonstration of how live broadcast credibility can be borrowed by anyone who looks official enough. The BBC apologized, calling the interview a deception and its content entirely inaccurate. Bichlbaum, asked about the cruelty of raising false hope among survivors, framed the calculus plainly: the world had weighed “two hours of false hopes versus 20 years of unrealized ones.” The stunt remediated nothing in Bhopal, but it forced Dow and Bhopal back onto front pages on the day the company most wished the anniversary would pass quietly.