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Piltdown Man, a fossil that supposedly proved early humans originated in England, was discovered in 1912, and wasn't proven a hoax until 1953. This fraud was one of the earliest fossil hoaxes out there — but it was actually two centuries too late to claim that distinction. More »
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What is the Loch Ness Monster? No one knows, but that hasn't stopped legions of armchair cryptozoologists from formulating one theory after another on the subject of the world's most famous lake creature. More »
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Here's a guide to the physics of a boomerang's mid-air turn. More »
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In 1934, G. Warren Shufelt told the Los Angeles Times he had discovered the remnants of an ancient reptilian civilization under L.A. Even though Shufelt's story was a load of bullpucky, he left this nifty map as his legacy. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5471611&view=rss&microfeed=true Many were shocked when it was revealed that Falcon Heene's fictitious balloon ride was nothing more than a fame-grabbing hoax, but this is hardly the first time that a fake tale of a high-flying balloon captured people's imaginations. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a detailed piece about famed balloonist Monck Mason's amazing journey across the Atlantic in a gas balloon. The remarkable trip, allegedly detailed in Mason's diary, took a mere 75 hours, an amazing feat of human engineering. The piece ran in the New York Sun, along with excerpts from the journal. More »
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Hoping to spark their students' imaginations, a junior school in England staged an alien invasion, complete with a crash landing and the "abduction" of one of their faculty members while the children watched. What could possibly go wrong? More »
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A prankster who submitted a computer-generated research paper to the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering discovered that not only was his fake paper accepted - its "author" is to chair a panel. More »
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From our earliest dreams of golems and Galatea, people have wanted to create artificial beings with human characteristics and abilities. But in our haste to see a future of walking, talking mechanical humanoids, we're easily fooled by con artists looking to exploit our sense of wonder. Hoaxers and engineers, magicians and advertising agencies have sold the public on "robots" whose incredible abilities seemed to defy explanation. We pull the curtain back on some the fake automata that captured the human imagination. More »
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Is that a little man on Mars in this picture from NASA's Mars Spirit explorer? We didn't even bother to blog this image when we saw it the other day, but tons of British newspapers have seized on it. Sample headline: "Crikey! There's A Little Green Man On Mars!" Actually, my favorite is the one that points out he's naked (gasp!). So what do the experts think? More »
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This teaser trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie popped up a few minutes ago. Is it the real thing? We're skeptical. For one thing, the Spock "space, the final frontier" speech is probably lifted from the end of Wrath of Khan. For another, would Paramount really let Abrams put his Bad Robot logo at the start of the trailer? We're posting it here because if it is real, it won't be on YouTube for long. What do you think? UPDATE: It's a fake. More »
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A camera that can see almost three years into the future might sound like a crazy hoax, but here's the proof. Enitech's new Gardner Project uses tachyons to cut through space time and see 1,191 days into the future. And now you too can get involved. More »
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