Category:
Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators

My Old Flame

A song that goes rapidly off the rails around the one-minute mark, with some Halloween relevance.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Oct 25, 2020 - Comments (4)
Category: Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Horror, Music, 1940s, Parody

Colonel Barker



Wikipedia says:
Victor Barker, born Lillias Irma Valerie Barker (1895–1960), who also went by the pseudonyms John Hill and Geoffrey Norton, was a transgender man who is notable for having married a woman. He was an officer of the National Fascisti, a bankrupt and a convicted criminal.


Good article here.

A contemporary report from 1933:



Source.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jun 24, 2020 - Comments (1)
Category: Crime, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Gender-bending, Twentieth Century

The postman who pretended to be paraplegic

Ian Moor had qualified to compete in the 1979 National Paraplegic Championships, in events such as table tennis and wheelchair discus. But when a picture of him ran in the Yorkshire Evening Press, people recognized him as their postman, who was fully capable of walking.

His deception revealed, Moor was kicked out of the Paraplegic Championships. But he never faced any criminal charges because he hadn't benefitted financially from his deception in any way.

The Guardian - Aug 23, 1979



Los Angeles Times - Aug 23, 1979

Posted By: Alex - Fri May 22, 2020 - Comments (2)
Category: Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Sports, 1970s, Differently Abled, Handicapped, Challenged, and Otherwise Atypical

The Painter Joachim Raphaël Boronali

NOTW and Weird Universe have covered innumerable art world hoaxes and farces. Paintings hung upside down, installations destroyed by janitors, large prize money for unmade beds, and so forth. Here is one of the first such japes. A painting done by a donkey with a brush tied to its tail, and exhibited at a famous Paris salon as the work of a new painter named Joachim Raphaël Boronali.



Read the whole story here.

Posted By: Paul - Thu May 14, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Animals, Art, Avant Garde, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Twentieth Century

Happy April Fool’s Day 2019

Jokes were more gruesome in 1909.



Source.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Apr 01, 2019 - Comments (4)
Category: Customs, Death, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Holidays, Humor, 1900s

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence



An honest mistaken memory, or a deliberate hoax to cash in on the early glamour of the American Revolution? You decide!

The Wikipedia page.

History Channel account.


The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a text published in 1819 with the claim that it was the first declaration of independence made in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution. It was supposedly signed on May 20, 1775, in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a committee of citizens of Mecklenburg County, who declared independence from Great Britain after hearing of the battle of Lexington. If the story is true, the Mecklenburg Declaration preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by more than a year. The authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration has been disputed since it was published, forty-four years after it was reputedly written. There is no verifiable evidence to confirm the original document's existence and no reference to it has been found in extant newspapers from 1775.[citation needed]

Professional historians have maintained that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is an inaccurate rendering of an authentic document known as the Mecklenburg Resolves. The Mecklenburg Resolves were a set of radical resolutions passed on May 31, 1775, that fell short of an actual declaration of independence. Although published in newspapers in 1775, the text of the Mecklenburg Resolves was lost after the American Revolution and not rediscovered until 1838. Historians believe that the Mecklenburg Declaration was written in 1800 in an attempt to recreate the Mecklenburg Resolves from memory. According to this theory, the author of the Mecklenburg Declaration mistakenly believed that the Resolves had been a declaration of independence, and so he recreated the Resolves with language borrowed from the United States Declaration of Independence. Defenders of the Mecklenburg Declaration have argued that both the Mecklenburg Declaration and the Mecklenburg Resolves are authentic.


Posted By: Paul - Sat Jan 12, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Antiques, Anachronisms and Throwbacks, Confusion, Misunderstanding, and Incomprehension, Government, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Politics, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century

Joan Lowell and CRADLE OF THE DEEP



In 1929, Joan Lowell published an autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, published by Simon & Schuster, in which she claimed that her sea captain father took her aboard his ship, the Minnie A. Caine, at the age of three months when she was suffering from malnutrition. He nursed her back to health. She lived on the ship, with its all-male crew, until she was 17. She became skilled in the art of seamanship and once harpooned a whale by herself. Ultimately, the ship burned and sank off Australia, and Lowell swam three miles to safety, with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back. In fact, the book was a fabrication; Lowell had been on the ship, which remained safe in California, for only 15 months. The book was a sensational best seller until it was exposed as pure invention.[1] The book was later parodied by Corey Ford in his book Salt Water Taffy in which Lowell abandons the sinking ship (which had previously sunk several times before "very badly") and swims to safety with her manuscript.


Her Wikipedia page.

An article on the hoax.


Read the book here.

Posted By: Paul - Sun Jun 18, 2017 - Comments (2)
Category: Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Movies, Oceans and Maritime Pursuits, 1920s

Goblu and Beatosu, Ohio

The 1978-79 Michigan Highway map included some creative geography. If you looked at the part of the map that depicted neighboring Ohio, you found two new towns. There was Goblu, shown just east of Toledo near Bono, and Beatosu, shown to the west near Elmira. These names sounded a lot like the cries of University of Michigan football fans against rival Ohio State University.

They were included in the map at the order of Peter Fletcher, the highway commission chairman, who said he included the names to demonstrate his "loyalty to the Athens of the West, the University of Michigan." The fictitious towns were deleted from the next edition of the map. The map with the towns is now a collector's item. One is currently available for $32.55 on eBay.

More info: wikipedia





Lansing State Journal - Dec 23, 1977 (click to enlarge)

Posted By: Alex - Wed May 17, 2017 - Comments (4)
Category: Geography and Maps, Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, 1970s

Don’t Cry For Me, Roentgen-tina!



Once upon a time Juan Peron's Argentina, tricked by a quasi-scientific hoaxer, claimed they had perfected fusion power. You can see the legacy of their project in the picture above.

Read the full story here.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Aug 12, 2016 - Comments (2)
Category: Hoaxes and Imposters and Imitators, Technology, 1940s, 1950s, South America

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Who We Are
Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes.

Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.

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