No fancy tech, no artificial intelligence, some of history’s best-known fakers used their confidence and good timing alone to trick the world into believing them.
A name nobody could find
Janet Cooke’s story ‘Jimmy’s World’ shocked the entire nation, in fact, the whole world. It was on the front page of The Washington Post in 1980 and described an alleged eight-year-old heroin addict called Jimmy, a story that shocked and saddened many.Â
The story even won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Except, it wasn’t true, and although city officials tried to track down Jimmy, they never found him. Cooke’s story fell apart two days after she won the prize when the truth came out, and she returned the Pulitzer Prize, too.
The small shape on the water
Practically everyone’s heard of the Loch Ness Monster and seen Dr. Wilson’s photo of it. You know the one, it has the monster’s neck sticking out of the water far enough to make you think it’s real. It’s not.
The Daily Mail published the photo in 1934, but experts figured out exactly 60 years later that it was a fake. Wilson denied his involvement in it. Turns out, a man named Christian Spurling made a model, and Ian Wetherell took the photo.
A very formal visit
A telegram, costumes, and some confidence, that’s all it took to trick the Royal Navy into letting strangers onto their battleships. They welcomed a group of apparently Abyssinian royals onto HMS Dreadnought, giving them a free tour of the ship.Â
The royals spoke different languages, so they had to be real, right? No. They were a group of British pranksters, including Horace de Vere Cole, Virginia Stephen, Adrian Stephen, Anthony Buxton, Duncan Grant, and Guy Ridley. Cole told the Foreign Office the truth the next day.
Sounds after dark
Mysterious knocks are enough to scare anyone, especially when they’re happening at night, and that’s exactly what the Fox sisters said was happening to them. Aged 11 and 14, the two girls made a whole show out of what they heard in 1848. Their mother got in on it, too.
She’d ask questions and get raps as answers, kind of like ‘knock once for no, knock twice for yes,’ eventually attracting people across the world to come and visit. It wasn’t until later that Maggie, the older sister, revealed the truth. They made the whole thing up.
The guest with no passport
Princess Caraboo was the name of a mysterious stranger who appeared out of the blue in Gloucestershire, England, in 1817, wearing unusual clothes and speaking a language nobody could understand. At least, almost nobody could, except a Portuguese sailor.
He claimed he could translate what she was saying, and she said she was Princess Caraboo of Javasu, who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped. Or had she? A landlady recognized her a few months later as a cobbler’s daughter, named Mary Willcocks.
Wolves in the story
You’ve got to be pretty cold-hearted to fake a story about being in the Holocaust, but that’s what Misha Defonseca did. She told a fantastical tale about wandering across Europe during the war, living with wolves while trying to find her parents, who’d been taken by Nazis.
It was an incredible story, but that was all it was, a story. The book about her supposed life came out in 1997 and was translated into eighteen languages. In 2008, she admitted it was all made up. She wasn’t even Jewish and her real name was Monique De Wael.
The room in Godalming
Most of us today would immediately recognize Mary Toft’s story as fake, yet people in the eighteenth century really thought it was real. Toft was a woman in Surrey, England, who claimed she’d given birth to rabbits. Yes, really.Â
Doctors came, pamphlets were published, all saying it was real. Even King George I’s closest friends were paying attention, until Toft was taken to Lacy’s Bagnio in Leicester Fields. A porter was seen trying to smuggle a rabbit into her room. Toft then said she’d faked it all.
A map with a shadow
The southeast of England was practically a stage in 1944, but not for the reasons you might expect. It was thanks to something called Operation Fortitude South that involved a fake army planted there with fake craft, fake tanks, fake radio chatter, all of it.
The army was called the First U.S. Army Group, and it went as far as sending fake reports through double agents. It was that serious. The goal? To trick German forces into thinking the Allies would invade Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy, and it actually worked.
Something under glass
Mermaids. People have always been interested in them, and showmen like P. T. Barnum know that, so that’s why he promoted something called the Feejee Mermaid in 1842. To be fair, it did look like a mermaid, at least from far away. Up close, it was more like a nightmare.
Barnum tricked hundreds of people into thinking he’d found a real mermaid, mostly because he hired a fake expert called Dr. Griffin to drum up interest before he opened his museum. The ‘mermaid’ was actually a young monkey’s head glued to a fish’s body. Pretty gross.
Coupons in the mail
It’s thanks to Charles Ponzi that we got the term ‘Ponzi scheme,’ and it all started with his scam that tricked people across the country. He claimed that International Reply Coupons, postal slips you could exchange for return postage in another country, were a way to make money. How?
Buy them for cheap in other countries, redeem them for profit in America, simple as that, but maybe too simple. He used money from investors to pay himself and earlier investors, making around $200 million in modern money from the whole scheme.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
