Chernobog's Blog

APRIL FOOLS' DAY: TOP 10 HOAXES 

 April Fools' Day is an annual custom on April 1st, consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. For many years, people have devised some of the most cunning and enduring hoaxes ever conceived. Although sometimes fooling millions of people in the process, they are often revealed for the hoaxes they are.

This April Fools' Day I would like to present some of my favorite Top 10 Hoaxes:

10. The Montauk Monster 

When an unknown creature washed up on the shore of Ditch Plains, a popular surfing beach on the Montauk peninsula in New York, a photo of the carcass appeared in a local paper and then ignited on the internet and dubbed the Montauk Monster. 

9. The Slender Man 

On June 10th, 2009, a Photoshop image appeared on an internet forum depicting a thin, unnaturally tall humanoid with a featureless head and face and wearing a black suit. Originating as a "Creepypasta" meme, this character spread all over the internet and developed an urban myth all it's own and finding its way into popular culture, entertainment and even movies, but unfortunately also the subject of an infamous stabbing incident in 2014. The character itself remains the perfect example of the power of memes.

8. The Jackalope 

When two brothers in the 1930's used their taxidermy skills to graft deer antlers onto a jackrabbit carcass and then sell the animal to a local hotel in Douglas, Wyoming, it began the story of the jackalope, named after the blended words of a jackrabbit and antelope, which has become a popular mythical animal in modern North American folklore.

7. Crop Circles 

When crop circles first began cropping up in the 1970's, many claimed that they were created by extraterrestrials, but in 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, of Southampton, England, confessed to having made more than 200 crop circles, with nothing more complex than ropes and boards.

6. Edward Mordrake, the Man with Two Faces 

One of the oldest hoaxes was that of a 19th-century English noble named Edward Mordake, who was supposedly born with a malevolent "second face" on the back of his head. The story goes that Mordrake begged doctors to remove his "demon head" because it whispered horrible things to him at night, but no doctor would do it and so he committed suicide at the age of 23. Althhough this story was published in Gould and Pyle’s "Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine" (1896) it was later proven to be the literary creation of poet and author Charles Lotin Hildreth.

5. The Minnesota Iceman 

When a zoologist and a biologist hear about the frozen corpse of a hairy man-like creature being exhibited in the Midwest in 1968, they begin an inquiry into the origin of an unknown hominid that involves the FBI, the Smithsonian, the Mafia, the Vietnam War, drug smuggling, Hollywood, and a secretive millionaire. The story of the Minnesota Iceman is one of the strangest stories ever told, and believe it or not, I had the pleasure of seeing it myself at the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas.

4. Alien Autopsy 

The infamous 1947 "Roswell Incident" undoubtedly began our modern fascination with UFOs and alien visitors, but when a grainy black-and-white film surface in 1995 that showed the postmortem dissection of an alleged alien body from the Roswell crash that were recovered by the government. Soon after the the footage was broadcast on FOX TV, many skeptics and UFO researchers deemed it a hoax, although many believed it to be true. However, recently the special effects artist who created the alien came forward and confessed it was in fact a hoax.

3. Patterson–Gimlin Bigfoot Film 

One of the most contested pieces of evidence on the existence of Bigfoot was a film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson (who died of cancer in 1972) and Bob Gimlin. The footage runs less than a minute long a shows a large ape-like humanoid figure walking in a creek bed along a logging-road in Northern California. Although Patterson has "maintained right to the end that the creature on the film was real," Gimlin denied being involved in any part of a hoax with Patterson and remained silent until about 2005. The film has since been subjected to many attempts to authenticate or debunk it. The creature known as Bigfoot has been embedded in our popular culture for over 50 years with appearances in a never-ending string of popular TV shows, movies and commercials.

2. "The War of the Worlds" 

On October 30th, 1938, actor Orson Welles (before Citizen Kane (1941) narrated an adaptation of the novel "The War of the Worlds" (1898) by H.G. Wells, performed live on CBS as part of the "Mercury Theatre" series. What began as a 1-hour radio drama, soon caused a virtual panic to those who mistook the broadcast for a real news report. I first saw the original "War of the Worlds" 1953 movie on TV with my dad when I was about 10-years-old, and was terrified of the long-fingered aliens until I saw the comedy "Spaced Invaders" (1990) around the same time and learned of the infamous radio program.

1. The Loch Ness Monster 

The most famous photograph of "Nessie" was supposedly taken by a respectable British surgeon, named Colonel Robert Wilson, in 1934, who claimed that he saw something in the water while driving past the lake in Scotland. He just so happened to have a camera and took some pictures. The credibility of this photo was debated for over 60 years, until it was ultimately proven to be a hoax. I have always held a great fascination for this monster since I was a kid, which was encouraged by my grandmother's Scottish pen pals.