Stories from the edge of explanation.
About 4 min readIn 1868 a young Mormon lawyer wrote newspaper stories about a serpent in Bear Lake — and 26 years later admitted it was all ‘a wonderful first-class lie.’ The monster, however, refused to die. The last reported sighting was in 2002.
About 4 min readIn 1995, grainy black-and-white footage of an alien dissection was broadcast in more than twenty countries and watched by tens of millions. Eleven years later, the man who released it admitted it had been staged in a London flat.
About 4 min readIn 1950, a bestselling book claimed the US military had recovered a 99-foot disc and sixteen alien bodies near Aztec, New Mexico. The story sold 60,000 copies — and was built entirely on the claims of two confidence men.
About 4 min readIn 1893, a Wisconsin newspaperman reported a terrifying beast in the woods near Rhinelander — frog-headed, elephant-faced, with horns along its spine. Three years later he admitted he had built it from wood and ox hides. The town kept it anyway.
About 4 min readIn 1898 a Swedish farmer in Minnesota dug a carved stone out of the roots of a tree. It claimed that Norse explorers reached the American Midwest in 1362 — 130 years before Columbus. Scholars have been arguing about it ever since.
About 4 min readOn 31 March 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York, claimed they could talk to the dead through mysterious rappings — and launched a movement that would claim millions of followers. Forty years later, one of them stood on a New York stage and showed the audience exactly how the trick was done.
About 5 min readIn 1912, Charles Dawson announced the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans, found in a gravel pit in Sussex. It took 41 years — and new chemical dating — to prove that Piltdown Man was a modern human skull joined to a filed orangutan jaw.
About 5 min readIn October 1869, workers digging a well in Cardiff, New York, unearthed a ten-foot ‘petrified man’. Within two months its maker, George Hull, had confessed: the giant was carved gypsum, buried a year earlier as a hoax.