Top 10 Shocking Hoaxes

Top 10 Shocking Hoaxes. With the parents of 6-year-old "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene facing criminal charges for concocting the story of his accidental flight in a bid for reality-show fame, a look at more of history's most outrageous deceptions.

1. A Balloon that Didn't Fly

It will surely be one of the strangest tales of 2009: as the world watched in horror, authorities in northern Colorado chased down a runaway helium balloon believed to have been carrying 6-year-old Falcon Heene up as high as 6,000 ft. The horror turned to relief when it was revealed that young Falcon hadn't taken flight but was instead hiding in his parents' attic — and then to outrage once suspicions were raised that the Heene family had concocted the tale of the flyaway child in a bid for reality-show fame. The Larimer County sheriff's office now says that the elaborate hoax — which sparked a major search and temporarily shut down Denver International Airport as some planes were rerouted — may have been part of a plan by the family to gain enough exposure to launch a reality TV show; the Heenes have produced several amateur YouTube videos and previously appeared on the ABC reality series Wife Swap. With Richard Heene and his wife Mayumi facing up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine, the reality could be that the Heenes have gained more fame than they bargained for.

2. B is for Beyond Belief

The 2008 U.S. election campaign played host to plenty of bizarre stories (Jeremiah Wright! Sarah Palin! Saturday Night Live returning to relevancy!) but none surely as surreal as the claim by 20-year-old Ashley Todd that she had been assaulted at knifepoint for being a John McCain supporter. Todd, who later admitted to a history of mental illness, told police on Oct. 22, 2008, that her assailant had carved a backward letter B into her right cheek, telling her, "You are going to be a Barack supporter."

Two days later, Todd confessed to concocting the entire story after police watched surveillance-camera material and conducted a polygraph test. Todd, who had a history of memory loss, said that she had administered the mark herself, although she couldn't remember doing so. Authorities were right to be skeptical. The backwards letter was reminiscent of an earlier incident, when talk-show host Morton Downey Jr. claimed to been assaulted by neo-Nazis in a San Francisco airport restroom; the swastika the attackers allegedly painted on his forehead was backwards and bore strong signs of having been self-inflicted with the help of a mirror. Both campaigns released statements about the "attack"; Todd, charged with filing a false police report, struck a deal in which she avoided prison but was required to undergo psychiatric counseling.

3. Please Release Me

Never has there been a crueler April 1 hoax than the story that appeared in the Romanian newspaper Opinia in 2000, reporting that the inmates of Baia Mare prison were finally going to be released. Approximately 60 people went there in anticipation of a highly emotional reunion with their incarcerated loved ones, only for nobody to emerge from jail. The subsequent outcry shamed Opinia into publishing an apology.

4. The Dam Busters.

File this one under the heading "It Looked Better on Paper." In 1999, presenters at KSJJ Radio in central Oregon announced on air that the Ochoco dam had burst, potentially causing dangerous flooding (is there any other kind?) to downstream areas. Making the hoax more credible was that, during the previous year, hundreds of homes in the region had been damaged for real when the Ochoco creek flooded, meaning that frantic homeowners were now ready to evacuate the area. When the DJs confessed that it was all a joke — they were apparently "having a little fun" — one imagines they didn't just lose lots of listeners but had to put up with a flood (ahem) of complaints for some time to come.

5. The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

In 1985, Sports Illustrated published one of the most legendary put-ons in the history of sports journalism: the implausible tale of rookie baseball pitcher Hayden (Sidd) Finch. Finch, a gangly phenom who pitched wearing a single hiking boot on his right foot, could hurl a ball at an unheard-of 168 m.p.h. — a magical skill he'd learned in a Tibetan monastery — and he was going to sign with the New York Mets. But upon closer inspection, the subhead of George Plimpton's piece read as follows: "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent lifestyle, Sidd's deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball." The first letter of each word spelled out "Happy April Fools' Day." Mind you, in light of their team's sorry history, many fans would have found the idea of the Mets signing such a superhuman prodigy too good to be true. And for the record, the seventh meaning of finch in Plimpton's Oxford English Dictionary

6. Hitler's Diaries

In 1983, German newsweekly Stern came out with an exclusive report on what seemed to be the most explosive diaries in history: the collected thoughts of Adolf Hitler. Procured by Stern staff reporter Gerd Heidemann, the documents had apparently been hidden away in East Germany by a mysterious Dr. Fischer after being recovered from an aircraft crash near Dresden in April 1945. The diaries passed three handwriting tests; the Times of London and Newsweek engaged historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gerhard Weinberg to examine the papers, with Trevor-Roper convinced of their authenticity.

But Stern, which bought the documents for some $6 million, made a critical error: fearing the sensational story would leak, they refused to allow any German experts on World War II to examine the diaries. Within two weeks of publication, the West German Bundesarchiv had exposed the Hitler diaries as "grotesquely superficial fakes" made on modern paper using 1980s-era ink and riddled with historical inaccuracies. The fallout ruined Trevor-Roper's reputation and cost editors at Stern, the Sunday Times and Newsweek their jobs. As for the diaries themselves, they turned out to be the work of notorious Stuttgart forger Konrad Kujau. Both Heidemann and Kujau went to trial and were each sentenced to 42 months in prison for forgery and embezzlement.

7. War of the Worlds

Orson Welles' radio adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds is regularly cited as the best hoax of all time. And for good reason: performed by Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air as a Halloween special on Oct. 30, 1938 (and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network), the radio play — which took the form of a series of faux newscasts — caused many listeners to believe that an actual alien invasion was taking place. As a result of the broadcast, it has been variously alleged that residents fled the area, some smelling the poison gas or even seeing flashes of the fighting in the distance. It's even been reported that people went to the "scene" of the events in New Jersey to see if they could catch a glimpse of the action, including some astronomers from Princeton (who should have known better) looking for the "meteorite" that had fallen. According to Richard J. Hand, author of Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952 historians "calculate that some six million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were 'genuinely frightened.'"

8. The Last of the Romanovs

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia — to use her full title — was the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II and has been the subject of heated interest ever since her apparent murder at age 17, along with the rest of the royal family, during Russia's Bolshevik Revolution. Rumors had long circulated that the princess had actually escaped — indeed, the location of her burial remained unknown for decades, and when the grave was finally discovered and explored in 1991, her remains weren't there. To make matters even spicier, several women have falsely claimed to have been Anastasia, the most notorious among them being Anna Anderson. Anderson's battle to be legally recognized as the heir to the Romanov throne lasted an unheard-of 32 years, from 1938 to 1970; it was the longest-running case ever heard by the German courts (in the end, judges decided she hadn't provided sufficient proof). And she was just 1 of at least 10 women who claimed to be the missing princess.

9. Piltdown Man

When the first fragments of Eoanthropus Dawsoni — more famously known as Piltdown Man — were discovered in 1912 near East Sussex, England, scientists believed they had finally found definitive proof of mankind's evolution: the missing link between man and ape. Over the next 40 years, more than 500 scientific essays would be written on the fossils, but the discovery was proved to be a deliberate hoax in 1953. The parts of a skull and jawbone, collected from a gravel pit in the village of Piltdown, had many experts convinced they were the fossilized remains of an unknown form of early man. But Piltdown Man turned out to be more of a patchwork man, his remains an amalgamation of the lower jawbone from an orangutan with the skull of a fully developed human. Piltdown Man has since become a byword for fraudulent or shoddy research in academic circles; no culprit has been conclusively blamed for the hoax, but fingers have consistently pointed at the man who supposedly made the discovery, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson.

10. Napoleon Is Dead

Pubs are often unreliable sources of gossip and never more so than with this tall tale involving one of history's most famous short men. In 1814, a uniformed officer who gave his name as Colonel du Bourg arrived at the Ship Inn in Dover, England, bringing news that Napoleon Bonaparte had been killed. This meant that England's long war with the Bourbons was over. As the story rippled around the country, the value of government securities on the London Stock Exchange soared. But therein lay the root of the deception: the committee of the Stock Exchange discovered a recent sale of more than £1.1 million in government-based stocks, whose value had skyrocketed upon the news of Napoleon's death. Three people with a vested interest in the purchase (naval hero Lord Cochrane, his uncle Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone and Richard Butt, Lord Cochrane's financial adviser) were charged with the fraud. Napoleon himself, needless to say, was unscathed; it would be another seven years before he died in exile on the island of St. Helena, where he had been banished after his defeat at Waterloo. ( time.com )

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