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The Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of All Time

2009-10-22 · Hank · watch on YouTube · History & curiosities · curiosity idea

Hank argues the Balloon Boy hoax is nothing new, since news media and people have always been easy to fool, lists his ten favourite hoaxes from fairy photographs to The War of the Worlds, and concludes we should accept that and trust people anyway.

What is said

00:00:00 — Balloon Boy is nothing new: news media have never been hard to fool; the top 10 hoaxes

  • ★★★ Hank says Balloon Boy is nothing new: it's fun to call it a symptom of reality TV and the 24-hour news cycle, but the world has always been this way. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Hank says news media isn't and never has been hard to fool, people like to mess with people, and hoaxes are nothing new. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Hoaxes 10-9: Mars as big as the moon; fairy photographs

  • ★ Hank recalls a hoax from around 1995 that Mars would look as big as the moon in that night's sky. (hedged) — 00:00:29
    • number check: like 1995 — doubtful
  • ★★ Hank says that around 1917 some girls photographed themselves with fairy cutouts, and people, new to photographs, believed in fairies. (hedged) — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — Hoaxes 8-6: alien autopsy, Poe's transatlantic balloon, the Fiji Mermaid

  • ★★ Hank says that in 1995 hoaxers showed the media footage of an alien being cut open by doctors, faked in their garage. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says Edgar Allan Poe convinced a newspaper reporter that a man had flown across the Atlantic in a balloon in three days, apparently just to prove he could. (hedged) — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says the Fiji Mermaid, shown for years to millions of paying spectators, proved to be a baby ape's body sewn onto a fish and wrapped in papier-mache. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Hoaxes 5-3: the Mechanical Turk, perpetual motion devices, Hitler's diaries

  • ★★ Hank says that in 1770 an inventor unveiled the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing 'robot' that beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, with a man hidden inside. — 00:01:56
  • ★ Hank calls every perpetual motion device ever a hoax: people have always claimed to create energy from nothing and taken investments in it. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Hank says that in 1983 a German magazine paid six million dollars for a supposed 60-volume set of Hitler's diaries, forged on modern paper; the forger got 32 months in prison. — 00:01:56
    • number check: 32 months — doubtful

00:02:43 — Hoaxes 2-1: the moon series in the New York Sun; The War of the Worlds broadcast

  • ★★ Hank says that in 1835 the New York Sun ran a six-part series, by astronomer John Herschel, about people and beasts on the moon; people believed it for six weeks and the Sun's subscriptions rose for good. (hedged) — 00:02:43
  • ★★★ Hank calls The War of the Worlds broadcast, which he credits to H. G. Wells, possibly the greatest hoax and probably accidental; listeners believed Martians attacked, and an Ecuadorian rebroadcast killed 20 people. (hedged) — 00:03:12
    • number check: 20 — doubtful

00:03:41 — Ecuador deaths; we're not hard to fool, so accept it and trust people anyway

  • ★★★ Hank concludes that we're not that hard to fool, and that we should probably just accept that and trust people anyway. (hedged) — 00:03:41

Humor (significant)

  • Hoaxers showed an actual image of an actual alien being actually cut open by actual doctors... — 00:00:58 > «All of those actuals are actually fakes.»
  • The Fiji Mermaid turned out to be a baby ape sewn onto a fish and wrapped in papier-mache. — 00:01:27 > «One, that's pretty gross and pretty sick. Two, an excellent hoax.»
  • Poe convinced a reporter a man had crossed the Atlantic by balloon in three days, and everyone said 'That's awesome! That's so cool!' — 00:01:27 > «Not even that hard to believe!»
  • In 1770, a mechanical robot that could play chess! — 00:01:56 > «Of course, it turned out that there was a dude inside of the mechanical robot.»

Threads in this video

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