Daily Dose of Common Sense

Sick of hearing about the Balloon Boy hoax? We are, too. But, we love to read about hoaxes that some nutjobs people have perpetrated over the years. It reminds us 1) don’t believe everything you hear and, 2) some people will believe anything.

Don’t believe us? Check out Live Science’s list of the World’s Greatest Hoaxes. A few of our favorite items are:

Crazy for crop circles
Though many people believe that crop circles have been reported for centuries, in fact they only date back about thirty years. The mysterious circles first appeared in the British countryside, and their origin remained a mystery until September 1991, when two men, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, confessed that they had created crop circles for decades as a prank to make people think UFOs had landed. They never claimed to have made all the circles–in fact many were copycat hoaxes done by others–but their hoax was responsible for launching the crop circle phenomena.

Aliens landed on Earth and all I got was this lousy crop circle.

Mary Toft’s bunny births
In 1726 England, a young woman named Mary Toft told a neighbor that she had been sexually assaulted by a huge rabbit while weeding a nearby field. Her story was dismissed as a bizarre delusion until six months later a doctor was called to her bedside. According to his published report, the woman gave birth to five bunnies! While news of the strange birth spread throughout England and Europe, Toft gave birth to a few more rabbits, astounding many learned men of the day. Eventually skeptical investigators exposed her, and she confessed to having her husband secretly hide bunnies in her bedsheets, whereupon she would further secrete them in what was euphemistically called the “dumb oracle.”

A woman giving birth… TO BUNNIES. If only she hadn’t taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Amityville horror
In 1974, six members of an Amityville, New York, family were killed by their youngest son, Butch DeFeo. The following year George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into the home, and soon, they claimed, they were supernaturally attacked by a demonic ghost or spirit. They collaborated with novelist Jay Anson, who embellished their tale, and the story was soon adapted into a screenplay for the hit film “The Amityville Horror.” Investigators, skeptical of their claims, were proven correct years later when DeFeo’s lawyer admitted that he and the Lutzes made up the whole thing, and all profited handsomely from the hoax.

Why invent ghosts when the original story is probably scary enough? The kid killed SIX members of his family. What went wrong in that family tree?

Live Science talks about other hoax gems, like the original alien abduction hoax, the 2012 end of the world, and more. There’s no shortage of people trying to get attention from crazy stories.

Photos courtesy of Flickr: Kecko, aussiegall, camshafter

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 7:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.