On 16 October 1869, on William C. “Stub” Newell’s farm at Cardiff, in the Onondaga Valley of central New York, two hired men digging a well struck a vast stone figure that looked like a petrified human ten feet tall. Word spread within hours, and a tent went up over the pit. It was a fraud from the first stroke. The figure was a block of gypsum, quarried in Iowa and carved in Chicago at the direction of George Hull, a Binghamton tobacconist and avowed skeptic, who had buried it on his cousin Newell’s land roughly eleven months earlier and waited for it to be “found.”
The deception barely outlived its own celebrity. Within weeks geologists pronounced the object impossible, and on 10 December 1869 — under two months after the discovery — Hull confessed the whole scheme to the press, having already pocketed the money. Yale’s pioneering paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh examined the giant and dismissed it as “of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug,” noting fresh tool marks and a polished surface that water-soluble gypsum could never have kept underground. The courts followed: in February 1870 the giant and a copied rival were both declared fakes.
Hull’s motive was not, at first, money. By his own account he conceived the hoax after a theological argument with a revivalist preacher who insisted, citing Genesis 6:4 — “there were giants in the earth in those days” — that scripture was literally true. Hull set out to manufacture exactly the relic such literalism predicted, then watch the credulous pay to believe it. He spent a reported 2,600 dollars building the giant and recouped a fortune; a syndicate led by the Syracuse banker David Hannum bought a three-quarter interest for a sum reported around 30,000 dollars, and the showman P.T. Barnum, refused the original, simply commissioned a plaster copy and exhibited it as the genuine article.
The Cardiff Giant endures less as a mystery than as a parable. It fooled no expert who was allowed to test it, yet it drew enormous crowds because it confirmed what many wished to be true and arrived wrapped in the authority of the soil. The phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute,” long misattributed to Barnum, is most plausibly traced to Hannum, exasperated that the public was paying to see Barnum’s fake of Hull’s fake. Today the original rests at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
On 31 March 1848, in a small rented farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, two sisters — eleven-year-old Kate Fox and her fourteen-year-old sister Margaret, called Maggie — began producing mysterious raps that seemed to answer questions, claiming an unseen presence was knocking back. There was no presence. Forty years later, on 21 October 1888, before a paying audience of some two thousand at the New York Academy of Music, Margaret Fox stood up and confessed: the raps had always been a trick, made by snapping the joints of her toes and ankles, a habit the girls had begun as a prank on their mother and never stopped. She demonstrated the sound on stage, her bare foot on a small wooden stool, while doctors on the platform confirmed the noise came from her toes.
Between those two dates the Fox sisters had founded modern Spiritualism, one of the largest religious movements of the nineteenth century. What began as two children fooling a credulous adult grew, under the management of their much older sister Leah, into a national sensation: public demonstrations, paid séances, and a doctrine that the living could converse with the dead through rapping mediums. The movement spread through the United States and Europe and, by the 1880s, was credited by its own adherents with millions of believers, swelled enormously by the grief of the American Civil War, which left countless families desperate to reach the sons they had lost.
The confession was as public as the hoax had been, and it was bought. The New York World reportedly paid Margaret around 1,500 dollars for the exclusive, and she denounced Spiritualism from the stage as a fraud she had helped create. Yet the recantation did not stick. Within roughly a year, impoverished and pressured, Margaret took her confession back, and many Spiritualists simply refused to believe she had ever told the truth. Both sisters died soon after in poverty and ill health — Kate in 1892, Margaret in 1893 — and the movement they had launched carried on without them.
The Fox case is a defining specimen hoax not because the trick was clever but because it was so trivial and yet scaled so far. Two girls cracking their toes produced a phenomenon that drew in judges, editors, scientists, and a future Sherlock Holmes author, and that hardened into a faith resilient enough to survive its own founder’s confession. The mechanism of the deception was a parlour prank; the mechanism of the credulity was grief, showmanship, and the human refusal to let the dead stay silent.
On 21 April 1934 the Daily Mail published a grainy image, taken on the shore of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, that it credited to a respectable London gynaecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson. It showed a slender neck and small head rising from rippling water, and it became the single most reproduced “evidence” for the Loch Ness Monster, printed for six decades as the photograph that proved something lived in the loch. It proved nothing. The object in the frame was a toy submarine bought from a Woolworths store, fitted with a head and neck modelled in plastic wood, and floated a few feet from the bank.
The picture was not an accident or a misidentification. It was a deliberate hoax, planned as an act of revenge against the very newspaper that printed it. In 1933 the Daily Mail had hired the big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell to find the monster; he returned with plaster casts of large footprints that the Natural History Museum quickly identified as impressions made by a dried hippopotamus foot, of the kind then sold as umbrella stands. Publicly ridiculed, Wetherell resolved to give the paper the monster it wanted. His stepson, the sculptor Christian Spurling, built the model; his son Ian Wetherell took the photograph; and Wilson, recruited through a mutual acquaintance, supplied the credibility — a surgeon’s word that the press would not think to doubt.
The deception held for sixty years. A 1975 Sunday Telegraph article had already cast doubt on the image, but it sank into obscurity, and the photograph kept its authority. The end came through the Loch Ness researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd, who tracked down the surviving conspirator. In an account given near the close of his life — Spurling died in November 1993, aged about ninety — he described in plain detail how the model was made, tested in a pond, and photographed. The exposure was reported in 1994, and the image that had defined a legend was retired as a fabrication.
What is striking is how small the fraud was. There was no elaborate apparatus, no chemistry, no forged document — only a child’s toy, a lump of modelling compound, and a name worth trusting. The photograph endured not because it was convincing under examination but because, for most of its life, almost no one examined it. It was wanted, it was credentialed, and it was printed; that was enough.
In the summer of 1917, in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley, two cousins — sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and nine-year-old Frances Griffiths — borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and returned with a photograph of Frances gazing at a group of dancing fairies. A second photograph followed, and in 1920 three more. The fairies were not real. They were drawings on stiff paper, copied and adapted by Elsie from illustrations in a popular children’s anthology, cut out, and propped upright in the grass and on branches with ordinary hatpins. The cousins maintained for more than sixty years that the images were genuine before finally, in 1982–83, admitting that the fairies had been faked.
The hoax would have remained a family curiosity but for the men who took it up. The photographs reached Edward Gardner, a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, and through him Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and by then a committed Spiritualist. Doyle, preparing an article on fairies, embraced the pictures as evidence, publishing them in The Strand Magazine at Christmas 1920 and expanding the case in his 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies. The man who had invented literature’s most pitiless rationalist staked his name on five photographs of cut-out fairies pinned in a Yorkshire garden.
The confession came late and in stages. From the early 1980s the researcher Joe Cooper interviewed the elderly cousins for the magazine The Unexplained, and in 1982 they acknowledged that the fairies were faked; in a 1983 letter to the photographic journalist Geoffrey Crawley, whose long forensic investigation had been published across 1982–83, Elsie confirmed that all five photographs were fabricated. The method was disarmingly simple — paper figures and hatpins — and it had been the simplicity, not any technical brilliance, that protected it. Experts had searched the negatives for signs of studio trickery and found none, because there was none to find.
One thread was never fully resolved. Elsie always said all five pictures were fakes; Frances insisted to the end of her life that the fifth, the “Fairies and their Sun-Bath,” showed something real, and both women maintained they had genuinely seen fairies even as they admitted that the photographs were staged. The case closed on the photographs as confessed fabrications while leaving, in the cousins’ own contradictory testimony, a small human ambiguity about what two children believed they had seen.
In the spring of 1996 the New York University physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately meaningless article in Social Text, a respected journal of cultural studies, and then immediately announced that it was a hoax. The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” argued — in dense, fashionable prose studded with real citations to leading theorists — that physical reality is a social and linguistic construct and that quantum gravity confirms postmodern epistemology. It was nonsense by design. Sokal, a working physicist, had written something he knew to be false and incoherent to test whether a journal would print it so long as it sounded impressive and flattered the editors’ assumptions.
It would. “Transgressing the Boundaries” appeared in Social Text‘s Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue, an issue assembled partly to rebut critics of postmodern science studies. On the same day, in the May 1996 issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, Sokal published “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” revealing that the article was a parody and quoting his own absurdities back at the field. The journal had not sent the piece to any physicist, and at the time Social Text did not practise formal peer review. The deception was not subtle and was never meant to last; the point was made the moment both pieces were in print.
The case is a hoax of a particular kind. Sokal forged no object and stole no money; what he counterfeited was scholarly authority itself, demonstrating that a credentialed-sounding argument could pass without anyone competent checking whether its physics meant anything. He stated his aim plainly: to see whether a leading journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The answer, in this instance, was yes.
The affair detonated into one of the defining intellectual controversies of the 1990s “science wars.” Social Text‘s editors, including Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, protested that they had been deceived in bad faith and that they had read the piece charitably as an earnest scientist’s reach toward their field. Sokal’s defenders countered that the very willingness to publish work they had not understood, in a field that claimed authority over science, was exactly the problem. He expanded the argument in a 1997 book with the physicist Jean Bricmont, published as Impostures intellectuelles and in English as Fashionable Nonsense, and returned to it in 2008 in Beyond the Hoax.