List of hoaxes

A–F

• Cedric Allingham, fictitious author who wrote a book about meeting the pilot of a Martian spacecraft. Allingham was created by British astronomer Patrick Moore and his friend Peter Davies.
• Alien autopsy, a hoax film by Ray Santilli
• Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a fake Syrian blogger
• Apollo 20, a series of YouTube videos claiming to show evidence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life on the moon
• The Archko Volume, a collection of documents related to the life of Jesus
• The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book about purported sexual-enslavement of a nun
• The Balloon-Hoax, depicting a cross-Atlantic hot air balloon trip
• The balloon boy hoax – a boy reported to be traveling uncontrollably at high altitudes in a home-made helium balloon was later discovered to be hiding in the attic of his house
• Bananadine, a fictional drug made from bananas
• Bathtub hoax, an imaginary history of the bathtub published by H.L. Mencken
• Johann Beringer's Lying Stones
• Berners Street hoax in 1810
• Franz Bibfeldt, a fictitious theologian originally invented to provide a footnote for a divinity school student, which later became an in-joke among academic theologians
• The Big Donor Show, a hoax reality television program in the Netherlands about a woman donating her kidneys to one of three people requiring a transplantation
• Blue waffle, a supposedly contagious sexually transmitted disease affecting only women, causing a blue discoloration of the vagina
• C.W. Blubberhouse, whose letters in UK national newspapers were exposed as a hoax by the Sunday Times
• Calaveras Skull was a human skull found by miners in Calaveras County, California, which was purported to prove that humans, mastodons, and elephants had coexisted in California.
• The Cardiff Giant, was a hoax of a hoax, when P. T. Barnum made up a replica because he could not obtain the "genuine" hoax item
• CERN ritual, supposed occult sacrifice on the grounds of CERN.
• The Cottingley Fairies; cut-out fairies accepted as real
• Crop circles. English pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed they started the phenomenon, and hundreds of "copycat" circles have been fabricated since by other hoaxers.
• Dahu A legendary creature well known in France, Switzerland and the north of Italy
• Disappearing blonde gene
• Document 12-571-3570 supposedly established that sex had taken place during a U.S. space mission
• Donation of Constantine, a forged imperial decree by which the 4th-century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western Roman Empire to the Pope.
• Dreadnought hoax perpetrated in 1910 by Horace de Vere Cole and a group of friends who, pretending to be an official delegation from Abyssinia, tricked the Royal Navy into giving them an official tour of the battleship HMS Dreadnought
• Emulex hoax, a stock manipulation scheme
• The English Mercurie, a literary hoax purporting to be the first English language newspaper
• Ern Malley, a fictitious poet
• Fiji mermaid, the supposed remains of a half-fish half-human hybrid
• Sidd Finch, fictional baseball player^[1]
• Furry trout

G–M

• Great Moon Hoax, a series of articles published in The Sun describing a Lunar civilization
• Gundala, a superhero movie that was promoted on the web despite the fact that it did not exist
• Joice Heth, African-American slave exhibited by P. T. Barnum as George Washington's nurse.
• Hanxin, a DSP microchip claimed to be developed completely by Chen Jin himself, which was proved as Motorola's microchip with its original trademark sanded away
• Histoire de l'Inquisition en France, the 1829 book by Etienne Leon de Lamonthe-Langan
• The Hitler Diaries, purportedly written by Hitler
• The Horn Papers, a genealogical hoax
• Hotelicopter
• The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries, a collection of Shakespeare-related documents supposedly discovered by William Henry Ireland and published in 1795 by his father, Samuel Ireland; the discoveries included a "lost" play, Vortigern and Rowena
• Clifford Irving's biography of Howard Hughes
• The Jackalope, supposedly a form of rabbit with antlers
• The Jacko hoax, a supposed gorilla or sasquatch caught near Yale, British Columbia, in 1884
• The Lady Hope Story, a claim of Charles Darwin's deathbed conversion to evangelical Christianity
• Maggie Murphy hoax, a hoax that claimed a farmer grew an oversized potato
• Manhattan Airport Foundation, advocating for the development of an airport replacing Central Park.^[2]
• Mars hoax (also called the Two Moons hoax), a yearly hoax, started in 2003, falsely claiming that at a certain date Mars will look as large as the full moon^[3]
• The Masked Marauders, an album issued by a Warner Bros. Records subsidiary that reportedly featured a jam session between Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The perpetrator was Rolling Stone magazine.
• The Microsoft acquisition hoax, a 1994 hoax claiming that Microsoft had acquired the Roman Catholic Church. The hoax is considered to be the first hoax to reach a mass audience on the Internet. Following its debunking by Microsoft, new jokes with similar stories about Microsoft and other companies unrealistically acquiring affluent non-profit bodies have also appeared later.
• The Miscovich emeralds hoax, an attempt by a diver to pass modern emeralds off as treasures from a sunken Spanish galleon.

N–S

• Naked Came the Stranger: a 1969 novel by a group of American journalists attempting to satisfy, and thus expose, what they perceived as degraded standards in popular American literature; it succeeded, selling about 90,000 copies before the hoax was revealed.
• Nibiru cataclysm: a rogue planet and doomsday theory involving a planet collision with Earth. Debunked by NASA and others as a hoax.
• Ompax spatuloides, a "fish" supposedly discovered in 1872 in Australia, made of a mullet, an eel and the head of a platypus, as a joke on Karl Theodor Staiger which also fooled Francis de Laporte de Castelnau into writing a scientific description of the "species".
• The Works of Ossian, "translated" by James MacPherson
• "Our First Time", an early popularized Internet hoax.
• Our Race Will Rule Undisputed Over The World: fake document alleging Jewish superiority over Gentiles by a non-existent rabbi named Emmanuel Rabinovich.
• Edward Owens (hoax), perpetrated on the English-language Wikipedia in 2008 by a class at George Mason University.
• The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis)
• Paul is dead (Paul McCartney death hoax)
• The perpetual motion engines built by John Ernst Worrell Keely and Charles Redheffer
• The Persian Princess, a mummy of an alleged princess which surfaced in October 2000, which proved to be an archaeological forgery and possibly a modern murder victim.
• Pierre Brassau was a pseudonym for a chimpanzee whose art was exhibited in a gallery under the presumption that Brassau was a real human artist. The chimpanzee received positive reviews from several critics.
• Piltdown Man
• Plainfield Teacher's College, a fictional school whose football scores ended up in major newspapers in 1941.
• Platinum Weird, deliberate hoax by David A. Stewart and Kara DioGuardi about a fictitious band from 1974 promoted using false advertising
• Pope Joan – the one and only supposed female pope
• The Poppy Fields, a made-up band that earned a number 24 hit for "45 RPM", a song they had not recorded
• Princess Caraboo, aka Mary Baker
• The Priory of Sion, a made-up secret society that plays a prominent role in The Da Vinci Code^[4]
• Progesterex, a date-rape drug
• Prophecy of the Popes
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book instrumental in the surge of antisemitism during the last hundred years^[5]
• George Psalmanazar and his "Formosa"
• Psychic surgery
• Q33 NY, an Internet hoax based on the 9/11 attacks
• A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century: fake document
• Tamara Rand prediction of the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, which was actually made after the fact (Randi 1982:329).
• Redcore, a browser purported to be developed in-house, but was revealed to be based on Chromium ^[6]
• Rejecting Jane chronicles the rejection by publishing houses of the opening chapters of Jane Austen novels submitted to them under a pseudonym by British writer David Lassman
• The Report From Iron Mountain, a literary hoax claiming that the government had concluded that peacetime was not in the economy's best interest
• Rosenhan experiment: the admission of healthy "pseudopatients" to twelve psychiatric hospitals.
• Rosie Ruiz, who cheated in the Boston Marathon
• Frank Scully's 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which claimed that aliens from a crashed flying saucer were being held
• "Seriously McDonalds", a viral photograph apparently showing racist policies introduced by McDonald's.^[7]
• Michael Shrimpton, who perpetrated a hoax that Germany was planning a nuclear attack on the 2012 Summer Olympics
• The Skvader, a form of winged hare supposedly indigenous to Sweden
• The 'Sloot Digital Coding System' (SDCS), a methode of digital compression devised by Dutchman Jan Sloot which allegedly could compress an entire movie into 8 kilobyte
• Songs of Bilitis, supposed ancient Greek poems "discovered" by Pierre Louÿs
• Space Cadets, a 2005 TV programme by Channel 4, in which contestants were fooled into thinking that they were training at a Russian space academy to become space tourists.
• The "R. E. Straith" letter sent to George Adamski by Gray Barker and James W. Moseley (Moseley & Pflock 2002:124–27,331–32).
• James Vicary's Subliminal advertising (Boese 2002:127–8)
• The "Surgeon's Photo" of the Loch Ness Monster
• SETI: EQ Pegasus Hoax of 1998^[8]

T–Z

• Tania Head (Alicia Esteve Head) became the most prominent survivor of 9/11, meeting with politicians and leading a group of survivors. Except on 9/11, she was in Barcelona. Her whole story was a lie, the second famous hoax in her life.

Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax

• Thatchergate Tapes, a fake conversation with which the punk band Crass fooled the governments of the USA and UK
• Slowing of Satellites above Tirunallar Saniswaran Temple, because of mysterious UV rays from Saturn, claimed to have been admitted as a Miracle, by NASA^[9]
• Robert Tilton's "prayer cloths"
• Mary Toft, the rabbit mother
• Toothing, an invented fad about people using Bluetooth phones to arrange sexual encounters
• Tourist guy, fake photo of a tourist at the top of the World Trade Center building on 9/11 with a plane about to crash in the background
• Trodmore Racecourse, a fictitious Cornish race meeting
• Taro Tsujimoto, a fictional Japanese ice hockey player selected by the Buffalo Sabres in the 1974 NHL Amateur Draft. The Sabres' general manager, Punch Imlach, made the selection as a protest against the NHL's draft procedures.
• The Turk, a chess-playing automaton that actually contained a person
• Tuxissa, a computer virus hoax
• Benjamin Vanderford's beheading video
• Villejuif leaflet, a pamphlet distributed in Europe with claims of various food additives having carcinogenic effects.
• Southern Television broadcast interruption hoax (1977), hoax message inserted into an IBA broadcast in the United Kingdom on 26 November 1977
• David Weiss, a fictitious person that was used by the Jerusalem Post as a source
• Laurel Rose Willson's claims to be a survivor of Satanic ritual abuse (as Lauren Stratford), and of the Holocaust (as Laura Grabowski)
• Wolpertinger, a Bavarian cousin of the Jackalope
• Yellowcake forgery, the false documents suggesting Iraq's Saddam Hussein was to purchase uranium from Niger
• Zzxjoanw, a fictitious word that fooled logologists for 70 years