April Fooling

 

You've seen the photo: a grainy, black-and-white, 1934 image of a serpentine head rising out of the deep, dark waters of Loch Ness. It's Nessie, the mysterious monster who may--or may not--patrol Scotland's most famous lake. The problem: this particular Nessie is a hoax, a cleverly molded piece of plastic putty mounted on a toy submarine. In 1993, 90-year-old Christian Spurling finally admitted that he and a friend had played a prank.

And the famous photo of Bigfoot? Hoax. It's a frame from a movie shot by rancher Roger Patterson near Eureka, California, in 1967. Patterson genuinely believed that he had captured the creature on film. But what he shot was literally a lady in a Bigfoot suit, the wife of one Ray Wallace. When Wallace died in 2002, his family owned up. Seems Wallace thought that arranging all sorts of Bigfoot sightings made a pretty good April Fools' joke.

 

Today's Knowledge
Knowledge That Isn't

We interrupt our regularly scheduled knowledge to wrap your brain in protective plastic. When alien worshippers claim they've cloned a human, do you believe? When scientists say that maybe, just maybe, they can make unlimited energy in a glass of water, do you wonder when they'll hook you up?

Sometimes "knowledge" just isn't. Every now and then, cunning hoaxers steal the newspaper (or worse, the encyclopedia) and slip in a bogus page. So, this April Fools' Day, here's a syringe full of skeptic serum for us all.
Active ingredient: three science hoaxes that actually suckered the world.

 

Biblical Goliath Visits New York --
The Cardiff Giant

Cigar-maker George Hull read the Bible for business ideas, not salvation. And Genesis 6:4 ("There were giants in the earth in those days") totally tickled his entrepreneurial imagination. So, in 1868, Hull hired Chicago stonecutters to create a 10-foot-tall "petrified goliath"--a giant from the biblical past--out of Iowa gypsum. He then shipped the giant to his brother-in-law, Stub Newell, a farmer in Cardiff, New York, who buried the big stone guy on his property.

The next fall, Newell hired workmen to dig a well for him on the spot, where they "discovered" the giant. Thousands paid 50 cents a head to glimpse this newfound biblical "fossil." Five local businessmen paid even more, acquiring majority rights to the giant for $30,000 and shipping him to nearby Syracuse. Later, when competing showman P.T. Barnum (who knew a good deal, and a sucker, when he saw one) couldn't buy it for $60,000, he made one for himself, and the two competing giants practically minted money in New York City.

By then, the cat was out of the bag. Virtually every scientist who examined the giant declared it a fraud. Hull even admitted his trick. Yet people still came in droves. In fact, people pay $9 even today to see the Cardiff giant on display in Cooperstown, New York.

 

"Missing Link" Found in England --
Piltdown Man

In 1912, amateur geologist Charles Dawson revealed to the world fossil skull fragments he found in the Piltdown quarry of Sussex, England. Local scientists and intellectuals, including neighbor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, heralded the fossil find as a breakthrough in the study of human evolution, a "missing link" blending ape and human features. A few scientists wondered about the fossils' placement, but for the most part, science embraced old Piltdown Man. He even got a scientific name: Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson's dawn man.

Over the next decades, however, fossil discoveries of Australopithecus and Homo erectus pushed Piltdown Man further and further out of the scientific spotlight. Increasingly, it dawned on scientists that the old boy just didn't fit. By 1953, the Piltdown meltdown was complete. Accurate fossil dating techniques and more studied inspection of the fossils revealed their true origins: they were frauds.

The "discovery" was actually a combination of doctored human and orangutan skull fragments, none of which was more than 600 years old. Who was responsible for this monkey business? We may never know. Dawson died in 1916, and a case can be made against a number of scientists that handled the bogus bones early on.

 

Cavemen Still Alive --
The Tasaday Tribe

In 1971, most anthropologists thought they knew even the world's most remote cultures--until the cultural minister of the Philippines announced the discovery of a Stone Age tribe untouched by the modern world. These people, the Tasaday, lived in caves and had no knowledge of agriculture, domesticated animals, metal, or any but the most rudimentary tools. They became an international sensation. CBS aired a documentary on the tribe, and National Geographic featured them in several articles.

Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the Philippines descended into martial law. It was not until 1986, after the overthrow of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, that anthropologists could return. When they did, they found the caves deserted, and the Tasaday gone. It did not take long for them to figure out why. Local villagers admitted that they were paid to live in the caves and pretend to be the primitive people.

The mastermind behind the scheme was the cultural minister, Manuel Elizalde, who planned to use money for the Tasaday's protection for himself. He fled the country in 1986 with more than $30 million donated to protect the bogus tribe. After fleeing to Costa Rica, he squandered the money on all sorts of modern conveniences, and died penniless in 1997.

From: KnowledgeNews