The Greatest Hoaxes Ever Pulled Quiz: Can You Spot the Fake?
The Greatest Hoaxes Ever Pulled Quiz
Spaghetti trees, fairies in the garden, giants in the mud and bat-winged people on the Moon. Millions believed them. Would you have? Put your instincts to the test, then read the real stories behind history’s most famous fakes.
A hoax is a lie dressed up as truth, built on purpose to fool people. The best ones don’t just trick a few gullible onlookers. They fool scientists, journalists, famous authors and entire countries, sometimes for decades. Some were harmless jokes. Others were schemes for money, fame or revenge.
What makes hoaxes fascinating is that they reveal how people decide what to believe. A respected voice on television, a photograph, a scientific-sounding report or a story that confirms what we already hoped was true can be enough to switch off our doubts.
Below, you’ll find ten “clippings” from the history of deception. Answer each one and watch the Gullibility Gauge swing toward Fooled or Skeptic. Every answer comes with a correction, newspaper style, explaining what really happened.
After the quiz, the full stories are laid out in our Hoax Hall of Fame, along with the ingredients that make a hoax work, the clues that eventually exposed them and a simple method for spotting fakes today.
Front-Page Detective
Ten clippings from history’s greatest hoaxes. Get it right to stamp it DEBUNKED. Get it wrong and you’ve been FOOLED.
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Clippings debunked0 / 10
What counts as a hoax?
Section A · DefinitionsNot every false story is a hoax. The key ingredient is intent: a hoaxer knows the claim is untrue and presents it as real anyway. That separates hoaxes from three close cousins that often get lumped in with them.
The line can blur. April Fools’ pranks are hoaxes with a built-in reveal, while some stories, like the Great Moon Hoax, were later defended by their authors as satire that readers took too literally.
The Hoax Hall of Fame
Section B · Ten fakes, in the order they fooled usThe Mechanical Turk
Vienna, AustriaInventor Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a life-size figure seated at a cabinet that appeared to play chess by itself. It toured Europe and America for decades and reportedly faced opponents including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The secret: a skilled chess player hidden inside, following the game through magnets under the board and moving the arm with levers.
The Great Moon Hoax
The Sun, New YorkOver six installments in August 1835, the newspaper reported that famed astronomer Sir John Herschel had spotted lunar forests, unicorn-like goats, upright beavers and winged “man-bats” through a giant telescope in South Africa. Herschel had nothing to do with it. Editor Richard Adams Locke later acknowledged writing the series.
The Cardiff Giant
Cardiff, New YorkWorkers digging a well on William “Stub” Newell’s farm struck what looked like a petrified 10-foot man. It was a gypsum statue commissioned by tobacconist George Hull, carved in Chicago, artificially aged and buried a year earlier. Crowds paid to see it, and showman P.T. Barnum displayed his own plaster copy, which reportedly drew bigger crowds than the original fake.
Piltdown Man
Piltdown, Sussex, EnglandAmateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced skull and jaw fragments said to belong to a “missing link” between apes and humans. For about 40 years it sat in textbooks. In reality, the pieces combined human bones with an orangutan jaw, stained to look ancient and with teeth filed down.
The Cottingley Fairies
Cottingley, West Yorkshire, EnglandTwo young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, produced photographs that appeared to show them playing with tiny winged fairies beside a stream. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, championed the images and published them in The Strand Magazine in 1920.
The Surgeon’s Photograph
Loch Ness, ScotlandThe most famous image of the Loch Ness Monster was credited to a respectable London surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson. It actually showed a small toy submarine fitted with a sculpted head and neck. The plot was reportedly organized by Marmaduke Wetherell, who wanted revenge after newspapers mocked him for an earlier fake “monster footprint” claim.
The Spaghetti Harvest
BBC Panorama, United KingdomOn April 1, the respected current affairs program aired a short report, narrated by Richard Dimbleby, showing a Swiss family picking spaghetti from trees. Pasta was still unfamiliar to many British viewers, and hundreds called the BBC afterward, some asking how to grow their own. The BBC reportedly suggested planting a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce.
The Hitler Diaries
Stern magazine, West GermanyGerman magazine Stern paid millions of marks for some 60 notebooks claimed to be Adolf Hitler’s private diaries, sourced through journalist Gerd Heidemann. They were forged by Konrad Kujau, a dealer in fake Nazi memorabilia, and falsely painted Hitler as unaware of crimes his regime committed. Historians call it one of the great journalistic scandals of the century.
The Crop Circle Confession
Southern EnglandFor years, mysterious flattened patterns in fields sparked theories about aliens and strange weather. In 1991, two friends, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, told a British newspaper they had been making the circles since the late 1970s, using little more than wooden planks, rope and a simple sighting device.
The Sokal Affair
Social Text, United StatesPhysicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical article about the politics of quantum gravity to Social Text, an academic cultural studies journal, to test whether it would publish something that sounded right and flattered its editors’ views. It did. Weeks later, Sokal revealed the hoax in the magazine Lingua Franca, sparking a fierce debate about academic standards.
Honorable mention goes to the “Taco Liberty Bell.” On April 1, 1996, the fast-food chain ran full-page newspaper ads claiming it had bought Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. Outraged readers called in before the company admitted the joke, and the White House press secretary quipped that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, to become the Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
Anatomy of a great hoax
Section C · The recipe, ingredient by ingredientLook across centuries of deception and the same ingredients keep turning up. A hoax rarely needs all of them, but the most successful ones combine several.
How they got caught
Section D · The detectives behind the debunking- Lab scienceFluorine dating unmasked Piltdown Man, and paper analysis sank the Hitler Diaries. Materials often betray their true age.
- Expert eyesA paleontologist spotted fresh chisel marks on the Cardiff Giant that no genuine fossil would have.
- Source checkingRivals of the New York Sun noticed that the journal it cited for its Moon reports no longer existed.
- ConfessionsTime loosens tongues. The Cottingley cousins, the Loch Ness model maker and the crop circle pair all eventually admitted the truth.
Myth check
Section E · A “hoax” that may itself be exaggeratedDid The War of the Worlds cause a nationwide panic?
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre broadcast a radio drama about a Martian invasion, presented partly as fake news bulletins. It was a play, not a hoax, and listeners were told so at the start and during the broadcast.
The legend says millions fled in terror. Many media historians now argue the panic was greatly overstated, partly by newspapers eager to show that radio, their new competitor, couldn’t be trusted. Some listeners were genuinely frightened, but reports of mass hysteria grew in the retelling.
Don’t get fooled: spot a fake today
Section F · A four-step habitModern hoaxes travel at the speed of a share button. Digital literacy researcher Mike Caulfield popularized a simple four-step routine called SIFT that takes only a minute or two:
Also check the date. Many viral “news” stories are old ones recirculating, and plenty of hoaxes land on April 1.
Frequently asked questions
Section G · Readers askWhat is considered the greatest hoax of all time?
There’s no official ranking, but Piltdown Man is often named the most consequential because it misled scientists for about four decades. For sheer public reach, the 1957 BBC spaghetti harvest and the 1835 Great Moon Hoax are among the most famous.
What is the difference between a hoax and a prank?
A prank is a short-lived trick meant to be revealed, usually for laughs. A hoax aims for people to genuinely believe something false, sometimes for years. April Fools’ jokes sit in between: they are hoaxes designed to be uncovered.
Why do intelligent people fall for hoaxes?
Intelligence doesn’t protect against trusting a credible-seeming source or believing a story we want to be true. Experts can even be more vulnerable when a fake fits neatly into their existing theories, as Piltdown Man did.
Was the Loch Ness Monster proven to be a hoax?
The famous 1934 Surgeon’s Photograph was proven to be a hoax. That doesn’t settle every sighting, but no confirmed scientific evidence of a large unknown animal in Loch Ness has been found.
How can I check if a story online is a hoax?
Pause before sharing, look up who published it, search for coverage from reliable outlets or fact-checkers, and trace images and quotes back to their original source. Checking the date also helps.
Stop the presses: there’s more!
Today’s daily quiz has a brand-new topic waiting for you.
Sources
- Natural History Museum, London. Piltdown Man hoax findings: Charles Dawson the likely fraudster (2016).
- University of Leeds Library. Fooled by fairies.
- Museum of Hoaxes. The Great Moon Hoax (1835).
- Museum of Hoaxes. The Cardiff Giant (1869).
- Museum of Hoaxes. The Surgeon’s Photo.
- ABC News (Australia). How forged Hitler diaries became one of the greatest journalistic scandals of the 20th century (2023).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. Hitler Diaries.
- Sokal, A. (1996). “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies.” Lingua Franca.
- Caulfield, M. SIFT (The Four Moves), a method for evaluating online information.
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The Daily Deception is a playful design theme for this article. Every story above is true.