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The World’s Greatest Hoaxes The World’s Greatest Hoaxes Benjamin Radford The 2009 story of the "Balloon Boy" — the 6- year-old whose family claimed he had climbed aboard a homemade balloon, triggering a nationwide police search — has been officially declared a hoax. It seems that this stunt was done for publicity, though the motives for creating a hoax are as varied as the hoaxers themselves. Some do it for fun or profit; others to make a social statement; still others pull hoaxes for no clear reason. History is filled with great hoaxes — "great" meaning important or influential, not necessarily smart or beneficial. Here are some of the most remarkable and curious hoaxes of all time: nearby field. Her story was dismissed as a bizarre delusion until six months later a doctor was called to her bedside. According to his published report, the woman gave birth to five bunnies! While news of the strange birth spread throughout England and Europe, Toft gave birth to a few more rabbits, astounding many learned men of the day. Eventually skeptical investigators exposed her, and she confessed to having her husband secretly hide bunnies in her bedsheets, whereupon she would further secrete them in what was euphemistically called the "dumb oracle." Laughing at the ivory tower Raelians When well-respected physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article titled "Transgressing the In 2004, a religious sect called the Raelians Boundaries: Toward a Transformative claimed that a group of their scientists had Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to "Social created the world's first human clone, a seven- Text," a leading journal of cultural studies, the pound baby girl named Eve. The ultimate goal, piece was accepted without question. The according to leader Rael (who claims to have article, in 1996, was in fact filled with academic descended from extraterrestrials), was to jargon and nonsensical, pseudointellectual achieve immortality. The announcement was gibberish, a parody of post-modernism and met with widespread public condemnation and philosophical relativism. "I intentionally wrote skepticism among scientists, while President the article so that any competent physicist or George W. Bush called for a ban on human mathematician (or undergraduate physics or cloning. The claim was eventually exposed as a Crazy for crop circles math major) would realize it was a spoof," publicity stunt when the group failed to produce Sokal said. The journal's editors didn't, and evidence of the experiments — or the cloned Though many people believe that crop circles Sokal's hoax exposed an Ivory Tower emperor child. have been reported for centuries, in fact they without clothes. only date back about thirty years. The mysterious circles first appeared in the British Continued on Page 9 countryside, and their origin remained a mystery until September 1991, when two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, confessed that they had created crop circles for decades as a prank to make people think UFOs had landed. They never claimed to have made all the circles- - in fact many were copycat hoaxes done by others-- but their hoax was responsible for launching the crop circle phenomena. For ALL Your Publishing Needs Mary Toft's bunny births Printing. Digital eBook Formats, Hand Held =?;0A@ 8<2:B38<6 8&=3 8&03 G <3?=83 &?4@@ In 1726 England, a young woman named Mary (4:40@4@ -41@8A4@ ) %G)4?C824@ 0<3 #B27 Toft told a neighbor that she had been sexually More! assaulted by a huge rabbit while weeding a www.rel-mar.com