The (Daily) Oklahoman, Dec. 23, 2003

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Hoaxes Put Focus on Fantasy, Hopes
By Diane Clay

The night of Oct. 30, 1938, 32 million people huddled near their radios to listen to scratchy news reports on CBS of Martians landing in New Jersey and annihilating the population of New York City.

"Reporter" Carl Phillips told the nation of the silvery spaceships sunken into a farmer's field near Grover's Mill and the strange scratching noise coming from inside.

"Someone is peering out of that black hole. Something is wiggling out of the shadow like a snake," Phillips reported excitedly.

"It's as large as a bear. 'Get Back!' It's eyes are black. It's rising up now. ... It's hard to find words."

While Phillips and actor Orson Welles passionately recited their lines in the studio, thousands of Americans loaded their families into cars to escape the Martian attackers. Some listeners were so convinced the program was real, they committed suicide.

In Oklahoma, switchboards at police stations and newspapers were jammed with people wanting to know what to do.

Welles wasn't aware of the mass hysteria until New York City police officers arrived in the studio. They asked producers to tell listeners the program was a theater production, not live coverage of an invasion.

"The War of the Worlds" program became one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, even though the staff never intended to fool listeners. It was simply a gift on Halloween eve.

Such tales of fantasy seem to thrive on peoples' sense of hope and adventure, making hoaxes an unexplainable fascination.

"A good hoax engages one in the world and lifts them out of the ordinary, more mundane aspects of life," said Toby Maloney, spokesman for mental_floss magazine, which features hoaxes this month.

"Like good fiction, a good hoax engages you."

In science, hoaxes have been common for ages, with false claims of accomplishment from scientists and sightings of creatures sparked from someone's imagination.

The following is a list of some of the biggest or greatest hoaxes in science, from cold fusion to Bigfoot.

Bigfoot

For 44 years, residents in northwestern states reported seeing a dark, hairy man more than 6 feet tall, with feet as long as 17 inches. One rancher, Roger Patterson, even claimed to have captured the creature on film in 1967, cementing the belief that Bigfoot was a real link to our Homo sapiens past.

The legend was dashed last year when the family of California man Ray Wallace released a statement from the dying 84-year-old construction company owner who said he had created the first Bigfoot footprints with carved wooden feet. He had reported the find to a local newspaper, and Bigfoot was born.

In the years following the footprint sighting, Wallace and his wife said they dressed in Bigfoot suits to make their own films and recorded Bigfoot noises. Wallace said for Patterson's film, he told the filmmaker he thought Bigfoot would be near Bluff Creek, Calif., that day, and Patterson should try to film it. Patterson showed up, and so did Bigfoot.

The great moon hoax

In 1833, America's first mass-market newspaper, The New York Sun, was launched. To increase circulation, the Sun's editors came up with a sensational story they hoped would sell copies.

In August 1835, the paper announced that famed British astronomer Sir John Herschel had created a powerful telescope that enabled him to detect life on the moon. He apparently had found lunar unicorns, fire-wielding biped beavers and free-loving winged "man-bats."

The hoax provided the Sun with such a huge circulation increase that it became, almost overnight, the most widely distributed paper in the world. The Sun never admitted the hoax.

Piltdown Man

In 1912, 30 years after Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, scientists were frantically trying to find the first missing link. Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson gained tremendous fame when he found bones in a gravel pit in Sussex, England.

Dawson and his team reported they found the skull and bones from a human-like species 500,000 years old.

The Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man, was on display at the Natural History Museum in London for 40 years. It was removed when advanced dating techniques not only showed that the bones were only a few hundred years old, but that some of them weren't even human.

The jawbone was from an orangutan, and the teeth were from elephants and a hippopotamus. While Dawson was suspected of the forgery, no one was ever proved to be the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax.

Cold fusion

A pair of researchers from the University of Utah announced in 1989 that they had achieved fusion with a simple apparatus at room temperature. The find was touted as the answer to the world's energy problems.

Fusion is the joining of two nuclei to form a larger nucleus. If unstable, the nucleus will break apart and release energy. The generally acceptable methods of fusion involve extremely high temperatures or particle accelerators; both methods are dangerous and expensive.

The discovery of reliable cold fusion had the potential to supply cheap energy to the world. Unfortunately, no other scientists were able to reproduce the results, including the original duo.

While the results of the cold fusion claim ruined the careers of the Utah scientists, it did spark debate and research into cold fusion and other unusual energy sources.

Such hoaxes have entertained the masses for centuries and have left historians waiting for the next clever trickster to come along.

Copyright © 2003 The Oklahoman