Six Historical Hoaxes That Worked, and One That Did Not

The useful thing about hoaxes, as a class of historical document, is that they tell you what a given era was willing to believe. A successful hoax is a document of collective gullibility. It shows the shape of the credulity it exploited. The Victorians' eagerness to believe in fairy photographs tells you something the Victorians could not have told you about themselves. So does the respectability of the Times's serialization of the Hitler Diaries in 1983.

What follows are six hoaxes I have spent time with, in one archive or another, over the last several years. Each one fooled serious people for serious lengths of time. The final entry is a hoax that failed, almost immediately, and what it tells us about why the successes succeeded.

1. The Donation of Constantine (c. 750 AD)

The Donation of Constantine is an ecclesiastical document purportedly written by the Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century, in which he grants the Pope spiritual authority over the entire Western Roman Empire. It was cited repeatedly by medieval popes from the ninth century onward as the legal foundation of papal temporal power. It was, in fact, a forgery, probably composed in the papal chancery sometime in the eighth century, seven hundred years after Constantine's death.

The forgery was not definitively exposed until 1440, when the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla produced a detailed linguistic analysis showing that the document used terms and concepts that did not exist in Constantine's time. Valla's demolition was so total that the document could not be defended, even by its beneficiaries. It is, as far as I know, the longest-running successful forgery in Western history. It shaped European politics for six centuries.

2. The Cardiff Giant (1869)

In October 1869, workers digging a well on the farm of William Newell near Cardiff, New York, unearthed what appeared to be a ten-foot-tall petrified man. Newell charged twenty-five cents admission to view it. Thousands came. The Giant was declared by at least one Yale professor to be a genuine petrified human, and by others to be an ancient statue of considerable archaeological value.

It was, in fact, a gypsum sculpture, commissioned by Newell's cousin George Hull, carved in Chicago, shipped to upstate New York, and buried in advance. Hull's motivation was an argument he had had with a Methodist minister over whether the Book of Genesis should be read as literal fact. The Giant was meant to be a parody of biblical literalism. The public refused to get the joke. P. T. Barnum, prevented from buying the original, made his own copy and exhibited it alongside claims that his was the real one and Newell's was a fake. The true situation, in which both giants were fakes, did not impede ticket sales for either.

3. The Great Moon Hoax (1835)

In August 1835, the New York Sun published a series of six articles describing the discovery of life on the moon, made through a new, enormous telescope at the Cape of Good Hope. The articles described forests, lakes, winged humanoid creatures, and large mammals resembling bison. The reports were attributed to Sir John Herschel, a real and prominent astronomer, who was at the time actually at the Cape of Good Hope and could not easily be reached for comment.

Circulation of the Sun reportedly rose from a few thousand to over nineteen thousand during the series. Other newspapers reprinted the reports. The Yale Literary Society dispatched a delegation to Manhattan to verify the telescope's specifications. The hoax was not formally exposed for several weeks, and was probably written by a Sun reporter named Richard Adams Locke as a satire of a specific school of speculative astronomy. Herschel, on receiving the clippings in South Africa, was reportedly amused. He became considerably less amused when strangers began writing to him for decades afterward asking for updates on the lunar flora.

4. The Piltdown Man (1912)

In December 1912, the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery, in a gravel pit in East Sussex, of fragments of a hominid skull combining the cranium of a modern human with the jaw of an ape. This was, he and his collaborators argued, the long-sought "missing link" in human evolution. The British scientific establishment, and particularly the British scientific establishment's nationalism (the major hominid finds up to that point had all been in Germany or France), embraced the find. Piltdown Man entered textbooks, encyclopedias, and museum displays.

He remained there for forty-one years. In 1953, a team using improved dating techniques showed conclusively that the cranium was a medieval human skull and the jaw was the recently-filed jaw of an orangutan, stained with chemicals to match. The fraud was, technically, not difficult to detect. It had simply not been seriously examined, because examining it would have required questioning a conclusion that most of British paleoanthropology had a stake in believing. The identity of the forger is still debated; Dawson is the leading candidate, though the case is not closed.

5. The Cottingley Fairies (1917–1920)

In 1917, two English cousins, Elsie Wright (age sixteen) and Frances Griffiths (age nine), took a series of photographs in the garden behind the Wright family home in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, appearing to show the girls interacting with small winged fairies. The photographs came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then at the height of his enthusiasm for spiritualism, who examined them and declared them genuine. He published his analysis in The Strand Magazine in December 1920. The photographs made international news.

The fairies in the photographs were paper cutouts, copied and modified from an illustrated children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book, held in place with hatpins. The cousins kept the secret for sixty-five years. In 1983, Elsie (by then in her eighties) admitted the photographs were fakes, though she and Frances both maintained, to the end, that the fifth photograph in the series was genuine. Whether this final claim was itself a kind of joke is, as far as I know, unresolved.

6. The Hitler Diaries (1983)

In April 1983, the German magazine Stern announced that it had acquired sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler's personal diaries, covering the years 1932 to 1945. The magazine paid its source, Konrad Kujau, nearly ten million Deutschmarks. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a specialist in Nazi Germany, examined the volumes at Stern's request and initially vouched for their authenticity. The Times of London bought the English serialization rights.

The diaries were almost immediately exposed as forgeries. The paper contained a post-war whitening agent. The ink was modern. The handwriting, while superficially similar to Hitler's, was the handwriting of Konrad Kujau, who was already known to German police as a skilled forger of Nazi memorabilia. The contents of the diaries were paraphrases of a 1962 book of Nazi-era speeches, with errors from the source reproduced in the supposed originals. Trevor-Roper, who had had his doubts almost from the beginning, was humiliated. Kujau served three years in prison and, after release, made his living selling signed copies of his own forgeries as a kind of meta-celebrity. He died in 2000.

And one that did not: The Fujimura Stones (2000)

Shinichi Fujimura was, for most of the 1990s, Japan's most celebrated amateur archaeologist. He had personally excavated more than forty Paleolithic sites across northern Japan, pushing the known date of human occupation on the archipelago steadily back to approximately six hundred thousand years before the present. This was a remarkable record, and he was known in the field as "The Hand of God." Japanese textbooks were rewritten. National pride was invested.

In November 2000, the Mainichi Shimbun published a series of photographs, taken by an investigative reporter with a hidden camera, showing Fujimura planting stone tools at the Kamitakamori site the morning before a scheduled excavation. Fujimura confessed within the week. An investigation established that he had planted artifacts at something like forty-two sites over twenty years. Japanese archaeology had to throw out a substantial portion of its published paleolithic record. Museums closed exhibits. Textbooks were rewritten a second time.

The Fujimura hoax failed where Piltdown succeeded for four decades, and the reason is instructive. Fujimura was a single amateur working without a supporting institutional lie. Piltdown was a hoax that told the British establishment what it wanted to hear about itself, and was defended by the establishment for as long as it could be. The Donation of Constantine served the papacy, and the papacy defended it for six hundred years. The Moon Hoax told a newspaper-reading public that the universe was interesting and their newspapers would tell them about it. The Hitler Diaries told a media establishment that new history could be scooped by the diligent.

Hoaxes survive in direct proportion to how well they confirm an existing institutional belief. This is why they are useful. They diagram the belief. The Cottingley fairies lasted sixty-five years because the adults who looked at them very much wanted, in the aftermath of the First World War, for there to be fairies in an English garden. The photographs themselves were terrible. The need was enormous.

The failed hoax, by contrast, is a hoax that misread its audience. Fujimura planted his stones in a moment when Japanese archaeology was itself becoming more skeptical, more professionalized, and more internationally peer-reviewed. The institutional lie he needed to support him was no longer there.

The lesson, for the present, is not that we are cleverer than our ancestors. The lesson is that the hoaxes that will fool us are the ones we most want to believe. Which is, in our current moment, a list worth compiling.