Famous Hoaxes !! OT !

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When eccentric billinonaire Howard Hughes died in 1976, a puzzling handwritten will was found in Salt Lake City Utah. The document divided up Hughes estate into 16 shares, with one-sixteenth going to a Melvin Dummar. Reporters tracked down Dummar, a gas station operator in Willard Utah, and found that he had allegedly given a ride to Hughes in 1968.
Dummar stated the he had picked up a "bum" in the desert and drove him to Las Vegas. He never really believed that the stranger was Howard Hughes, and was surprised to have been named in the will. Hughes realtives contested the will in court, and a jury declared it to be a fake.


Broadway producer Daivd Merrick managed to fool the theather-going public in 1961. An add ran in the New york paper promoting his play Subways Are For Sleeping. The ad featured rave reviews from seven prominent theater critics. the only problem was, the photos by each name in the add werent of the famous critics.
It turns out that Merrick had gone through the phone book and found 7 people with the same name as the noted theater reviewers. He took the name-doubles out to dinner and they agreed to be quoted in his advetisement.
The trick worked, because Subways Are For Sleeping ran for a surprising 205 strong performances!

These Both started on April 1st!
 

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The one about Phil Collins getting a guy arrested at a concert who supposedly didnt help someone who drowned while "in the air tonight" was playing is a pretty famous hoax.
 

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Crop circles.

Probably the most famous pic of the Loch Ness monster was a hoax. 50 years after it was taken, the photographer on his death bed admitted that he took the pic in his bathtub.

You play "I am the Walrus" backwards and it repeatedly says "Paul is dead, Paul is dead." Beatles were on hiatus when this was discovered in the late 60's, so for a couple months, some fans thought McCartney was dead.

Orson Welles' 1930's radio show "War of the Worlds" led many to thinking aliens had invaded.
 

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080902-Bigfoot.jpg
 

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What is that supposed to be a picture of Jounrey? The great spaghetti caper of 1998?
 

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This classic gag took place way back in 1957. In those simpler days people still believed what they saw on television - especially when it was on the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama. Credit for the idea is usually given to camerman Charles de Jaeger.

This particular April 1st edition of Panorama included a section on the bumper spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. A deadpan BBC voice (Richard Dimbleby) talked over footage of workers taking strands of spaghetti from trees and placing them into baskets. An audience of around 8 million viewers sat engrossed as they heard about the perils of the spaghetti weevil.

The hoax was so successful that the BBC apparently received many calls asking for advice on how to grow spaghetti! The standard response was reportedly "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".

It sounds incredible that people fell for this, but back then "exotic" food like pasta was almost unknown in Britain - a tin of soggy spaghetti hoops in orange "tomato" sauce was the closest to it most people ever came.
 

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tooran said:
Crop circles.

Probably the most famous pic of the Loch Ness monster was a hoax. 50 years after it was taken, the photographer on his death bed admitted that he took the pic in his bathtub.

You play "I am the Walrus" backwards and it repeatedly says "Paul is dead, Paul is dead." Beatles were on hiatus when this was discovered in the late 60's, so for a couple months, some fans thought McCartney was dead.

Orson Welles' 1930's radio show "War of the Worlds" led many to thinking aliens had invaded.


I loved it when those 2 old men came forward and said they had been doing the crop circles for like 20 years, using a stick and rope. So there was this "Dr." who had devoted 13 years of his life studying crop circles and their validity, he comes back and said that was impossible b/c some of the dates didn't coincide and they couldn't have been in 2 places at one time.
So one of th old guys says "I didn't say we were the only ones doing it"
I love that. Guy wasted half of his professional life studying a joke 2 Irishmen/Englishmen came up with.
 

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volhound said:
I loved it when those 2 old men came forward and said they had been doing the crop circles for like 20 years, using a stick and rope. So there was this "Dr." who had devoted 13 years of his life studying crop circles and their validity, he comes back and said that was impossible b/c some of the dates didn't coincide and they couldn't have been in 2 places at one time.
So one of th old guys says "I didn't say we were the only ones doing it"
I love that. Guy wasted half of his professional life studying a joke 2 Irishmen/Englishmen came up with.

:lolBIG: :lolBIG:
 

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volhound said:
I loved it when those 2 old men came forward and said they had been doing the crop circles for like 20 years, using a stick and rope. So there was this "Dr." who had devoted 13 years of his life studying crop circles and their validity, he comes back and said that was impossible b/c some of the dates didn't coincide and they couldn't have been in 2 places at one time.
So one of th old guys says "I didn't say we were the only ones doing it"
I love that. Guy wasted half of his professional life studying a joke 2 Irishmen/Englishmen came up with.

To me, the real mystery with crop circles is why would Led Zeppelin put pics of crop circles on the cover of their 1990 box set -- apparently to signify the 'mystery' of the group, the myth of the hammer of the gods, etc -- when crop circles were already exposed at that time as a hoax?
 

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volhound said:
I loved it when those 2 old men came forward and said they had been doing the crop circles for like 20 years, using a stick and rope. So there was this "Dr." who had devoted 13 years of his life studying crop circles and their validity, he comes back and said that was impossible b/c some of the dates didn't coincide and they couldn't have been in 2 places at one time.
So one of th old guys says "I didn't say we were the only ones doing it"
I love that. Guy wasted half of his professional life studying a joke 2 Irishmen/Englishmen came up with.




Tooooooooo Flippin Funny !!! I betcha those 2 old fellers Laughed Thier Ass Off !!
 

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Sad days for sure. But the hoaxes were the lies and deceit perpetrated on the American people.

Insiders said:
Those were FAR from Hoaxes. Sad days there!!
 

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