History is riddled with hoaxes. There always seems to be someone out there that is willing to try and fool us. Sometimes it is for monetary gain, sometimes it is for power and sometimes just for fun.

About 30 years after Lincoln's death, a mummy was put on exhibition that was said to be John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin. This body toured different side shows and carnivals. In truth it was not Booth, just a hoax that was thought up in a bar. This was not so unusual in those times. One has to realize that this is the time of P. T. Barnum and George Hull. Oh you never heard of George Hull? He was an evangelist who was interested in archeology that wanted to pull off a great hoax. How was he going to do this? At the time, people were preaching of great giants in the earth and Hull felt he could use this. He got hold of a large piece of gypsum. Gypsum has blue veins running through it that looks like human veins He had it carved to look like a giant and used different treatments to make it appear human such as a pin mallet to create skin pores. The figure was carved to look like it was bent over with an agonizing look on it's face. It just so happened that fossil bones were discovered about six months later near the location where Hull said he found the body. Everyone became interested in the giant and Hull sold a 2/3s interest in it to a banking consortium for $30,000. P. T. Barnum is said to have stated that there was a sucker born every minute but he didn't, it was Hull who actually said it. Hull's giant was the famous Cardiff Giant.

Pope Gregory XIII declared in 1582 that New Years Day would be celebrated on 1 January not 1 April anymore. Some people resisted and still celebrated it on 1 April. These people became the butt of jokes and pranks and became known as April Fools. In France they were called April Fish. The idea was to stick a paper fish on their back without them knowing it. Funny joke? To this day people still get tricks played on them on April Fool's Day. In the U.S. is was relatively easy to hoax people out of their land before 1827 because most people were illiterate. In 1827 Massachusetts introduced compulsory education and from that point on people in the U.S. became more literate. There were still gullible people around, as there are today, but at least most people knew what they were getting into when they read the "terms".

It was August 2001 and a photo was circulating on the internet of a helicopter with a British Navy diver standing outside. A shark had jumped up and was about to grab him. The photo became very famous but was a hoax as was the 9/11 photo of a tourist on top of the world trade center with a 747 about to crash into the building that could be seen behind him. Some might say that these were relatively harmless jokes or pranks but the 9/11 photo was at the least a photo in bad taste. Be that as it may, no one was physically hurt or duped out of funds. These types of hoaxes. are rampant on the internet.

What about British Crop Circles. These strange designs and pictures would appear in the morning out of no where. Ufo clubs started to say that they were made by aliens working at night when no one could see them. Then it happened, two Brits working with boards and ropes admitted to having created the crop circles, but wait there is a twist here. The circles they created had flattened wheat storks but some circles had storks that were just sort of folded over but not flattened, they couldn't have made those. Could those ufo guys be right on some of the circles after all?

In the 1904 olympics one of the runners got a bad case of cramps, so bad in fact that he had to ride in an officials car for most of the way. When he got out of the car, no one noticed that he had got back into the race. Not only did he get back in, but he ran across the finish line in first place and the president's daughter put a laurel wreath on his head. Laughing, he admitted what happened, he thought this was a great joke but the olympic officials didn't agree with him and he was briefly suspended. After he was reinstated, he won the Boston Marathon in 1905.

Some people think that there is a hoax that was perpetrated against the entire world by the government. It bothered NASA so much that they were going to publish an answer but decided against it. The hoax that I am talking about is the moon landing. There are literally hundreds of web sites on the internet that claim to offer proof that shows we didn't really land there and the entire series of moon landings was just an elaborate deception. They claim that many background that are identical show up on different parts of the moon, that lighting and shadows are wrong and even that the flag that was planted proved there was a breeze. For every accusation, NASA has an answer. Was the moon landing a cruel hoax or did it actually happen?