10 Famous Hoaxes that Fooled the World

Q: What is the most famous hoax of all time?

There is no single definitive answer, but the Mechanical Turk is often considered one of the most famous hoaxes because it convinced audiences for 84 years that a machine could play chess autonomously. Other enduring examples include the Surgeon's Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, which fueled public debate for decades. Many famous hoaxes persist because they appeal to ideas people already want to believe.

Q: Why do people fall for hoaxes?

Psychology research suggests people are more likely to believe hoaxes because of factors such as goodwill, naivety, greed, deference to authority, and confirmation bias—the tendency to accept information that supports existing beliefs. Successful hoaxes often exploit expectations or hopes that audiences already hold.

Q: Was the War of the Worlds broadcast actually a hoax?

Not in the traditional sense. The CBS radio broadcast on October 30, 1938, identified itself as a dramatization of H.G. Wells' novel performed by Orson Welles. Some listeners who tuned in after the introduction mistakenly believed the fictional news bulletins were real. Historians generally agree that reports of widespread panic were themselves exaggerated by newspapers competing with the growing popularity of radio.

Q: What was the Piltdown Man hoax?

The Piltdown Man hoax began in 1912 when fossil fragments found near Piltdown, England, were presented as evidence of a 'missing link' between apes and humans. The remains were accepted by many scientists for decades until forensic testing in 1953 revealed they were a forgery made from a human skull and an orangutan jawbone that had been chemically treated to appear ancient. The identity of the person responsible has never been definitively established.

Written by Megan Hartley, Last Updated: July 8, 2026

The most famous hoaxes in history worked because they told people exactly what they wanted to believe. The Turk, an 18th-century chess robot, fooled emperors and grandmasters for 84 years by hiding a real player inside its cabinet. Studying why hoaxes like that succeed is really studying how the brain processes belief.

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What Actually Counts as a Hoax?

A hoax is a deliberate deception, built to make people accept something false as real. Some are malicious, such as scams designed to take money from unsuspecting victims. Others are fanciful, a joke with no larger goal than getting a laugh, like convincing half the internet that Justin Bieber shaved his head.

Either way, hoaxes are a genuine research interest in the field of psychology. What makes one hoax believable and another fall flat? Why do some people cling to a hoax even after it’s been debunked? How does a hoax spread through a population, and why does the reverse happen too, with people writing off real events as fake? Every hoax on this list is a small case study in one of those questions.

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We’ve all fallen for a hoax at some point. Here’s proof it’s been happening long before the internet existed.

Top 5 World’s Biggest Hoaxes

1. The Turk (1770)

The Turk was billed as a chess-playing automaton, and it beat almost everyone who sat down across from it. The machine consisted of a life-size figure in Ottoman robes seated behind a cabinet three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet high, with a chessboard mounted on top.

Its operators showed off the “empty” gears inside the cabinet before every match to prove nothing was hidden, then closed the doors and let the Turk go to work. It won more often than not, defeating challengers that included Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin during a tour of Europe in the 1780s.

The trick: one of those supposedly empty compartments wasn’t empty at all. A skilled chess player sat folded inside, tracking the board and working levers to move the Turk’s arm.

FACT: This single hoax fooled the public for almost 100 years.

2. The Cardiff Giant (1869)

Tobacconist and outspoken atheist George Hull got into an argument over the passage in Genesis 6:4, which claims that giants once walked the earth, and decided to settle it his own way. He hired a stonecutter to carve a 10-foot “petrified man” out of a block of gypsum, telling the mason it was for a monument to Abraham Lincoln, then shipped the block to Cardiff, New York, and had it buried on his cousin William Newell’s farm.

A year later, Newell hired men to dig a well at that exact spot. They struck the giant on October 16, 1869, and Newell started charging admission to see it. Word spread quickly enough that Hull eventually sold his stake in the find for $23,000, a sum worth several hundred thousand dollars today, adjusted for inflation.

FACT: Showman P.T. Barnum offered $50,000 to buy the giant outright.

3. The Surgeon’s Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster (1934)

The most famous photo ever taken of the Loch Ness Monster came from a respected British surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson, who claimed he was driving past the Loch when he spotted something moving in the water and grabbed his camera. The grainy image, showing what appeared to be a long neck rising from the surface, became the defining “proof” of Nessie for six decades.

FACT: For 60 years, people debated whether the photograph was real.

4. War of the Worlds (1938)

On October 30, 1938, a regularly scheduled radio drama was interrupted by news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Listeners who missed the introduction took it as real breaking news. Roads clogged, police and newspaper switchboards lit up, and some people reportedly fled their homes.

FACT: The broadcast opened by explaining it was an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” narrated by Orson Welles. Anyone who tuned in from the start knew exactly what they were listening to. What looked like the greatest hoax in broadcast history was really just a case of unfortunate timing.

5. Hitler’s Diaries (1983)

West German magazine Stern announced that reporter Gerd Heidemann had recovered what might be the most significant piece of Nazi memorabilia in existence: sixty-two volumes of Adolf Hitler’s private diaries. Stern paid 9.3 million German marks for them.

FACT: Within two weeks, West Germany’s Federal Archives revealed the diaries were forgeries, printed on paper and ink that didn’t exist during the war. Stern’s editors resigned within hours of the announcement.

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Top 5 Internet Hoaxes

1. The Helicopter Shark (2001)

Considered the first true internet-era hoax, this photo circulated by email with the claim that it was National Geographic’s “Photo of the Year”: a great white shark leaping toward a helicopter near the Golden Gate Bridge.

The truth: It’s a composite of two unrelated photos, a helicopter training exercise over San Francisco Bay and a great white shark breaching off South Africa.

2. Lonelygirl15 (2006)

A teenage girl named Bree began posting video diaries on YouTube under the username “lonelygirl15,” and the series built a devoted following as her onscreen parents supposedly went missing.

The truth: Bree was a scripted character played by an actress, and the whole series was revealed as fiction about four months after it started.

3. Charging an iPod With an Onion (2007)

The joke tech site Household Hacker posted a viral video demonstrating how to “charge” an iPod using nothing but an onion and a glass of Gatorade.

The truth: Mythbusters tested it. It doesn’t work, and plenty of people plugged their electronics into vegetables for nothing.

4. Bieber Goes Bald (2012)

A photoshopped Entertainment Tonight tweet claimed Justin Bieber had been diagnosed with cancer, spawning the hashtag #baldforbieber and a wave of fans shaving their heads in solidarity.

The truth: Bieber never had cancer, and the tweet was fabricated.

5. Taylor Swift and the School for the Deaf (2012)

A contest from VH1, Papa John’s, and Chegg promised that Taylor Swift would perform at whichever school won the most votes. Reddit and 4chan rallied votes for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, mostly to see if they could pull it off.

The truth: The school won by a landslide, and Swift and her sponsors disqualified it anyway.

5 Reasons People Create Hoaxes

To show off a talent for deception.
To gain financial benefits through deceit.
To target and discredit specific people who feel threatening, a pattern more common among sociopathic hoaxers.
To validate a belief or prejudice they already hold, which is part of why so many forged “masterpieces” look absurd a generation later.
Because fooling people is fun.

Curious how far this kind of deception can go? 30 Most Unethical Human Experiments in Psychology covers what happened when researchers crossed a much darker line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most famous hoax of all time?

The Mechanical Turk is a strong candidate, if only because it fooled the world for 84 years. But the Surgeon’s Photograph of the Loch Ness Monster held public debate for six decades and still comes up whenever someone mentions Nessie. Famous hoaxes tend to stick around as long as people want to believe in them.

Why do people fall for hoaxes?

Research in psychology points to a few consistent culprits: goodwill, naivety, greed, deference to authority, and a tendency to believe things that confirm what we already want to be true. Successful hoaxes almost always find a ready audience, people who already half-believe in chess-playing robots, or living dinosaurs in Scottish lochs, or Hitler memorabilia too good to be fake.

Was the War of the Worlds broadcast actually a hoax?

Not really. The October 30, 1938, CBS broadcast opened by identifying itself as an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel narrated by Orson Welles. Listeners who tuned in late and missed the introduction panicked, but the producers never intended to deceive anyone. Most historians now think the newspaper coverage of the panic was itself exaggerated. Print media had reason to make radio look irresponsible.

What was the Piltdown Man hoax?

In 1912, skull fragments discovered in a quarry near Piltdown, England,d were presented as the “missing link” between apes and humans. Anthropologists largely accepted them as genuine for four decades before forensic testing in 1953 revealed that the skull was human. Still, the jawbone belonged to an orangutan, with the teeth filed down and the bones chemically stained to look ancient. It’s one of the most damaging scientific hoaxes in history, and the perpetrator has never been definitively identified.

If hoaxes like these make you want to understand why people believe what they believe, that curiosity is basically the job description for a psychologist. Explore accredited psychology programs to see where they could take you.

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Megan Hartley

Megan Hartley, M.S., is a psychology educator and career advisor with more than ten years helping students choose degree and licensure paths. She holds an M.S. in Psychology from a state university.

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10 Famous Hoaxes that Fooled The World