11 of the biggest lies ever told in human history (and who believed them)

When the right people hear a lie at the wrong time, it can turn into something way worse than anyone could’ve ever imagined, including the deaths of many people. 

A tale at court

England in 1678 was a dark place with plenty of fear about Catholics and plots to kill the king, Charles II. That’s what Titus Oates was counting on when he came forward with claims that Catholics were trying to do exactly that, so they could get his brother, James, on the throne.

The backlash was immediate. Regular people, politicians, they all believed the Catholics were trying to take control, and they started executing potential revolutionaries. The whole country believed the conspiracy that was, well, completely false.

Pages that traveled 

Znamia was a Russian newspaper that, in 1903, published what it claimed were notes from a secret Jewish meeting. The content? Claims that Jewish people were conspiring to take control of the world, you know, standard anti-Semitic conspiracy theory stuff. All lies.

It didn’t matter that the entire thing was fake or that it was copied from older writings that had absolutely nothing to do with Jewish people at all. People across the world believed it, even Henry Ford repeated the same claims in America, and the Nazis used it for propaganda. 

Bones in a gravel pit

The Piltdown Man was a fake. We know that now, yes, but in 1912, people genuinely believed Charles Dawson’s discovery was real, that he’d actually found an ancient human ancestor in Sussex, England, of all places. The discovery included skull pieces and a jawbone. 

Or should that be ‘alleged’ discovery? It was revealed later through tests that the whole thing was a fake because the skull and jaw weren’t even from the same species. The whole affair had put evolutionary scientists on the wrong track for ages.

Papers by the shore

Operation Mincemeat was a World War II secret operation that was nowhere near as delicious as it sounds. It started with British intelligence putting fake papers on a dead man’s body and letting it wash up on a Spanish coast. The man’s name? Major William Martin.

That was his fake name, at least, and what the Allied forces were running with since they planted fake papers on him, too, claiming they would invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily. German agents took the bait and believed them, so they sent forces to the wrong place.

Graves outside Smolensk

The Katyn lie was as cold as it was plain: just blame the Nazis for the murders of 22,000 Polish officers. German forces found mass graves near Smolensk in 1943, and the Soviets claimed it was the Nazis who’d killed them after taking the area. The Allies accepted the lie.

They were fighting with the USSR, so it was best to keep it all hush-hush. Then the truth came out because the killings were dated to 1940, a time when the Soviets had control of the area, not Germany. All those lives lost, and nobody took responsibility until way later.

The doubt machine

‘Smoking is harmless.’ That’s one of the biggest lies that the cigarette companies peddled for years, including a notice they published in over 400 American newspapers in 1954. Around 43 million people read the message that questioned the research claiming smoking caused cancer.

They made the whole thing seem so innocent, so safe, so believable. It doesn’t take a genius to know that was a lie, however, and many of these major companies were sued in 2006. They had deliberately lied to and endangered the American public, just to sell more cigarettes.

The case that fell apart

The lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction seemed so believable at the time. All those speeches, all those dossiers, they couldn’t be wrong, could they? American and British leaders said Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction.

He didn’t. Many of these leaders knowingly lied to the public about the weapons because they wanted support to invade Iraq. That’s not to say that Hussein was a good guy, but it was still a lie about the weapons.

Numbers with a shine

In 2001, Enron seemed like a company that was great for investing in, mostly because of the fancy reports and confident executives. CEO Jeffrey Skilling lied about how well the company was doing to get investors interested. It worked.

It took a few months for the truth to come out, and it sure was shocking. Hidden losses. Manipulated earnings. Public numbers that didn’t match reality. Everything they could’ve lied about they did lie about, defrauding investors of around $74 billion in total.

Confessions on cue

Between 1936 and 1938, a bunch of Bolshevik leaders confessed in court that they’d been involved in treason and sabotage. Their statements were pretty convenient for Stalin at the time, particularly since they included confessions to working with foreign enemies.

It was great ammunition for Stalin to target these people and start the Great Terror, which involved sending millions of people to camps. They were later killed. However, the whole thing was staged, and Stalin’s forces had tortured the leaders into making fake confessions. 

The tiny sample promise

Elizabeth Holmes is probably one of the most infamous CEOs in recent history. She claimed that she’d invented a machine that, with just a few drops of blood, could run clinical tests for all sorts of things. It was a medical miracle and seemed too good to be true. It was.

Investors and doctors believed her, yes, but the machines had major issues and were only able to run very few tests, nothing on the scale that Holmes claimed. She’d raised around $700 million through fraud and caused around $121 million loss to investors. 

Flames before the vote

The burning of the German government building, the Reichstag, was just what the newly-in-power Nazi Party needed. They claimed the 1933 fire was caused by Communists who wanted to take over the country. 

The Germans believed the claims because, well, they were already afraid of Communism spreading. The Nazis made mass arrests of suspected Communists, and it helped tighten control of the government. But most historians agree it probably wasn’t the Communists.

Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.