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The Berners Street Hoax (1810)In 1810 London was the largest, wealthiest city in the world, linked by trade with every continent, and fed by the manufacturing might of northern British cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. Almost anything could be obtained in its shops, and on Monday, November 26 of that year, all of this mercantile abundance focused for one day upon a single residential address: 54 Berners Street, the home of Mrs. Tottenham (in some sources spelled Tottingham)

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The Berners Street Hoax (1810)In 1810 London was the largest, wealthiest city in the world, linked by trade with every continent, and fed by the manufacturing might of northern British cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. Almost anything could be obtained in its shops, and on Monday, November 26 of that year, all of this mercantile abundance focused for one day upon a single residential address: 54 Berners Street, the home of Mrs. Tottenham (in some sources spelled Tottingham)

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Arna Dögg

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Hitler’s diaries

A german magazine said that one of their reporters uncovered diaries that Hitler supposedly wrote. That happened in 1984. Millions of copies of the diaries were published but then after a few weeks, it was discovered that those writings were fakes.

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Orson Welles’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds convinces millions of listeners that earth is under attack by aliens. Many flee their homes, pray in houses of worship, and, eventually, curse Welles’s name.

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Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.

The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”

Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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"Operation Fortitude North" was a military operation carried out by the allies during the second World War. This operation was all about preparation for the actual Normandy landings on D-Day. The operation focused on redirecting enemy troops away from Normandy, where the allies had already planned to strike and to Norway. The operation consisted of creating a whole new army, that only existed on paper, as well as using mannequins and inflatable tanks to make it look like the army was gathering for an attack on Norway. They also did this by creating an excessive amount of radio transmissions which made it look like there was a lot of communication going on. The British Media also aided by publishing false news about this army that would be attacking Norway. All the while double agents that had defected to the allies earlier in the war were now feeding the German high command fake reports and pictures of the fake soldiers. Just to make this threat seem real, British commandos started some small scale guerrilla warfare in Norway and as a result Norway ended up with 13 Military divisions leaving Normandy ill defended.

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On August 27, with Hurricane Harvey dropping more water on the Houston area than a single rain event has ever dropped in the US, some Scottish guy named Jason Michael posted a photoshopped tweet about a shark swimming over the flooded freeways of Houston. Garden variety internet horseshit, right?

Mostly yes, but it came with one extra, ugly wrinkle: Twitter is a useful tool for rapidly spreading information during emergencies, and the fake shark post was gumming up the works a bit. When someone brought this to the attention of Michael, he was dismissive. "So twitter is part of the emergency response now Adam? Hold on while I go and bang my head against a wall," Michael tweeted. As of this writing, Michael's original hoax had earned 87,494 retweets.

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In 1989, British police received frightened calls from people who said they’d seen a UFO flying through the sky. Officers were dispatched to a field outside London, where the craft had supposedly landed. When they arrived, the officers must have been shocked to find what looked like a flying saucer. As they approached it, a door opened, and a silver-clad figure emerged.

The police immediately fled (well, what would you do?) But, as you can probably guess based on the title of this article, the UFO wasn’t really from space.

The flying saucer was an almost unbelievably elaborate April Fools’ Day prank by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, whose love of April 1 is well-documented. (In 2011, he claimed that he bought Pluto to reinstate its status as a planet.)

The flying saucer was actually a hot air balloon shaped like a UFO that was supposed to land in London’s Hyde Park on April 1, but because of wind changes, had stopped in a field in Surrey the day before. Branson was on board, along with the silver-clad person who had startled the bobbies.

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On April 28, 1874, the New York World ran an article announcing the discovery in Madagascar of a remarkable new species of plant: a man-eating tree. The article included a gruesome description of a woman fed to the plant by members of the Mkodos tribe. Numerous newspapers and magazines reprinted the article, but 14 years later the journal Current Literature revealed the story to be a work of fiction written by NY World reporter Edmund Spencer.

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There have been tons of celebrity death hoaxes, but none of them spread like the wildfire that was the Jeff Goldblum death hoax. It was claimed that he fell off of a cliff in New Zealand while shooting a movie.

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The perpetual motion machine.
In 1813 a man by the name Charles Redheffer claimed to have created a machine that would remain constantly in motion, never stopping - a perpetual motion machine. A skeptical mechanical engineer named Robert Fulton challenged Redheffer, claiming that he could find the mechanism keeping the machine in motion. And he did exactly that. It turns out that the machine's source of unstoppable energy was an old man in an attic, turning the crank while munching on a piece of bread.

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The Feejee Mermaid, 1842.
The Feejee Mermaid was presented as a mummified body and looked like half a mammal and half a fish. It was originally popularized by P.T. Barnum but has been copied in other attractions. It was first shown around the United States. Then it was shown in many places but was soon found out to be a gaff, a work of an Indonesian craftsman.

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Soon after the tragic events of Sep. 11, 2001, a sensational photo began circulating widely via email, showing a tourist posing for a snapshot on top of the World Trade Center as a plane approached from behind. A caption explained that the
photo came from a camera found in the rubble of the building. Apparently the photo had been taken just seconds before disaster struck. The photo was quickly debunked, but it took several months to find out that the guy in the photo was really a Hungarian man who had visited the World Trade Center in 1997. He had inserted a plane into one of his old holiday photos as a joke, never realizing how far his joke would travel.

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In 1962, Swedish national television  broadcast a 5-minute special on how one could get color TV by placing a nylon stocking in front of the TV. A rather in-depth description on the physics behind the phenomenon was included. Thousands of people tried it.

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In 1965, a Copenhagen newspaper ran an April Fool hoax claiming that the Danish parliament was going to require all black dogs to be painted white, in order to increase road safety by making the dogs more visible at night.

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According to the New York Sun, it was a "new theory of cometary phenomena." Apparently, an astronomer named Sir John Herschel had not only discovered new planets orbiting other stars, he had "solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy."

The most exciting of these new astronomical discoveries: life on the moon.

It turns out that not only had Herschel not actually found life on the moon or cracked the entire field of mathematical astronomy, he wasn't even aware of these alleged discoveries, much less that they had been linked to him.

http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-scientific-hoaxes-history-2016-9?IR=T#life-on-the-moon-in-1835-3

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On April 1, 2008, the BBC reported about a colony of flying penguins in Antarctica. They even had a reporter walk among the alleged “flying penguins” and document their flight to the Amazon rainforest.

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It started as a rumour in London that Paul McCartney had died in a car accident in which his car crashed in 1966. To spare the public from grief, he was replaced by a look-alike. In September 1969,  American college students published articles claiming that clues to Paul McCartney's supposed death could be found among the lyrics and artwork of the Beatles' recordings. Clue-hunting proved infectious and, within a few weeks, had become an international phenomenon. Rumours declined after a contemporary interview with McCartney was published in Life magazine in November 1969. To this day, there are people still looking for clues and believe that the Paul we see today is not the real Paul.
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/0d/dd/77/0ddd7796d9a4907e8256729aa6096ab2.jpg

https://d25pcrmm4mxkj0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/09094418/el-exbeatle.jpg

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The balloon boy hoax occurred on o
October 15, 2009 in Fort Collins, Colorado, United States , when Richard and Mayumi Heene allowed a gas baloon filled with helium to float away into the atmosphere, and then claimed that their six-year-old son Falcon was inside it. At the time, it was reported by the mass media that the boy was apparently traveling at altitudes reaching 7,000 feet (2,100 m) above local terrain, in a homemade balloon colored and shaped to resemble a silver flying saucer-type of UFO. The event attracted worldwide attention. Falcon was nicknamed "Balloon Boy" by some in the media. After more than an hour-long flight that covered more than 50 miles (80 km) across three counties, the balloon landed about 12 miles (19 km) northeast of Denver International airport Authorities sent several National Guard helicopters and local police in pursuit. After the balloon landed and the boy was found not to be inside, authorities began a manhunt of the entire area, raising fears that he had fallen from the balloon; it was reported that an object had detached from the balloon and fallen to the ground. Later that afternoon the boy was reported to have been hiding in his home's attic the entire time.

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King Kugel: An April Fools' history lesson.
On April Fools' day in 1983,  professor James Boskin managed to convince a reporter from Associated Press that April Fools' day originated from Ancient Rome, when a jester named Kugel had been made king for a day. AP ran with the story and it wasn't discovered that Boskin had made it up for several weeks.

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In 1912,  East Sussex in England. Charles Dawson told the world that he discovered Darwin's mysterious missing link between apes and humans -  the Piltdown Man.  The culprit of the most famous paleoanthropological hoax was likely Martin A.C. Hinton a paleontologist who was trying to make his boss look like a fool.   It took about 30 years to prove that the Piltdown Man was nothing more than a modern human cranium and orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth.