Last week’s column on Piltdown Man was supposed to be about scientific hoaxes in general, but my prolixity defeated me: I had a bunch of left-over hoaxes. In the spirit of Hollywood, therefore, I now present Scientific Hoaxes 2: Lost in My Research.
Piltdown Man wasn’t the only fossil hoax. Faking fossils is a tradition in the hoax field, going back to the early 18th century in Wurzburg, Germany, where the recent discovery of mammoth bones had prompted a huge debate. The notion that fossils were the remains of prehistoric life was not yet generally accepted; Dr. Johann Beringer, head of a committee from the University of Wurzburg that investigated the fossils, declared they weren’t bones at all, but “capricious fabrications of God” hidden to test mankind’s faith. He proceeded to write and lecture on the subject for several years, until a couple of colleagues got fed up with his pomposity and decided to take him down a peg or two.
They made fake fossils in the shape of birds, beetles, butterflies, comets, moons, stars and more and planted them for Beringer to find. When he accepted them as genuine, they threw in several tablets inscribed in Hebrew, Arabic and Latin with a single word: God.
Beringer took this as proof of his ideas and wrote a book. The hoaxers confessed, but he wouldn’t believe them. His book came out in 1726 and caused a sensation — but then he uncovered a tablet with his own name on it, and knew he’d been had.
Beringer, his reputation ruined, spent every pfennig trying to buy all the available copies of his embarrassing book, which ironically made it a collector’s item. (A second edition brought out in 1767 as a humorous curiosity sold thousands more than the first!)
Another hoax in the same mineral vein was the Cardiff Giant, the 10-foot figure of a nude man, twisted in agony, carved out of a slab of gypsum in 1868 by George Hull, a cigar maker from Binghamton, N.Y. He wanted to make a fool of a clergyman he’d argued with who’d insisted that giants once walked the Earth because “it’s in the Bible.”
Hull buried the giant on his cousin’s farm near Cardiff, N.Y., and a full year later arranged for it to be “accidentally” found by well-diggers. News of the giant’s discovery spread and crowds thronged the site. As Hull hoped, some religious people thought it was a fossilized Biblical giant, although others, along with some scientists, claimed it was a statue. Some also came right out and called it a fraud, but two distinguished Yale professors declared it to be a real fossil. Crowds grew huge and Hull grew rich.
But then P.T. Barnum tried to buy the giant. Rebuffed, he exhibited a plaster copy of it as the real thing. When taken to court, he argued he was only exhibiting the hoax of a hoax. The public demanded an inquiry, and after a few days’ study, one of the Yale professors who had earlier called the giant genuine said it was a “decided humbug.”
Hull later offered the best explanation for why any hoax works: “I suppose it worked because people wanted to believe in it. I completely underestimated public gullibility.”
Combine public gullibility with mass media and you’ve really got something. In 1835 the New York Sun took advantage of public fascination with astronomy (because of that year’s reappearance of Halley’s Comet), and presented a seven-part series on the astonishing new discoveries of respected astronomer Sir John Herschel, who just happened to be in Capetown, South Africa, where no one could easily contact him.
Reporter John Locke wrote that Herschel had invented a powerful new telescope to observe the Moon, and with it had discovered evergreen forests, rolling meadows, oceans , animals, and, finally, Man-Bats — bat-winged creatures that walked upright like men!
Circulation skyrocketed. A special pamphlet came out containing all the details, plus drawings, and soon the stories were even being reprinted in newspapers across Europe.
Locke finally confessed the hoax to a reporter from a rival paper who demanded to see the “40 pages of calculations” Locke had claimed been appended to Herschel’s original publication of his findings in the (actually defunct) Edinburgh Journal of Science.
Herschel himself finally received a copy of the pamphlet and is said to have been amused until he received a letter weeks later from a Springfield, Mass., women’s club asking how they could contact the man-bats in order to convert them to Christianity.
Man-bats on the Moon, indeed! We are fortunate to live in an age when no newspaper would dare print such far-fetched tales.
By the way — seen Elvis recently?
