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Top Ten Paranormal Hoaxes

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The following list appeared in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER for July-August, 1998. I find myself wondering if anyone other than a Professional Skeptic would so easily dismiss EVERYTHING on the list as hoaxes.

The comments below are my own. I'd appreciate reading other opinions.

1. The Roswell Incident. While the evidence for a Roswell Crash doesn't look anywhere near as (almost) convincing as it did 15 or 20 years ago, I'm not ready to jettison the entirety of the evidence.

2. Spiritualism. While I realize that the whole field has been replete with frauds, I'm reluctant to say that nothing Paranormal has ever taken place in a seance room.

3. Psychic Phone Networks. No disagreement from me.

4. Shroud of Turin. Still up in the air. I think the Shroud may be First or Second Century AD, but that hardly proves it to be Christ's shroud.

5. Cottingley Fairies. No disagreement, although the photographs remain quite charming.

6. Crop Circles. I'm still undecided.

7. Amityville Horror. I'm in 90 percent agreement as to hoax but that still leaves 10 percent.

8. Piltdown "Missing Link." Of course it's a hoax but what in blazes does it have to do with the Paranormal? The hoax was entirely carried out within the scientific establishment.

9. Psychic Surgery. Fraudulent, but has a study ever been made of recovery/death rates? I'm still curious.

10. King Tut's Curse. Dubious against but not fully decided.
 
I object to the list on different grounds. Spiritualism is not a hoax, it is a religion, though it is a religion which has been riddled with hoaxes and hoaxers playing on the faith of believers. Crop circles are not a hoax - they are a whole series of interlocking pranks, hoaxes, artworks, and (in the case of simple circles) natural phenomena. And so on.

Categorizing things is always tricky, but this is sloppy and not even fun. When I see a list of the top ten hoaxes of all time, I want a series of distinct, enlightening stories about human gullibility and ingenuity, and the uncontrolable nature of the genie once it's out of the bottle.

Now, the Cottingley Faires belong on such a list, because this was a brilliant case of a private hoax meeting public credulity and spinning beyond control. And of course there's the capper - Frances's confession, which includes the contention that, though the pictures were faked, the fairies themselves were real. The aesthetics of this are stunning. I can gaze at this case for hours, admiring.
 
I agree that a lot of those aren't hoaxes, Roswell, whatever the core event has become a 20th century legend.

Psychic phone networks IMO are a fraud, not a hoax.

Piltdown man was a hoax, but scientific not paranormal.

King Tut's curse, I'm not sure whether you'd count this a hoax or legend. The curse in the tomb "Death will come on swift wings..." etc was certainly fiction and was more of newspaper spoiler story (also it wasn't consistent with Egyptian curses).

Crop circles, IMO some of the simple circles are probably natural phenomena, most of the rest are hoaxes.

Spiritualism, in general isn't a hoax because it isn't a attempt too deliberately mislead people it's a religion. However, a lot of hoaxers an fraudsters have battened onto it.

Shroud of Turin, IMO what's known as a "pious fraud".

Cottingley Fairies, brilliant hoax.

Psychic surgery, IMO either fraud or self delusion (practioners and patients). Some people recover, but then some people recover for unexplained reasons whatever you do.
 
I´m not sure what the difference is between hoax and fraud, so I might mix them up. But I would say crop circles belong in this list. There may well have been natural made ones, but the ones that people were obsessing about in the eighties and caused the whole phenomena to be world famous seems to have been all hoaxes.

Spiritualism certainly seems to have been full of frauds, and being a hoax and a religion doesn´t seem mutually exclusive.

King Tut´s curse is something people still believe in, despite so many of the supposedly cursed people died happily at old age. So also a rather effective hoax.

Roswell seems to be just one big money-spinning hoax. Sure some secret goverment airplane probably crashed, but so many stories seem to have been spun trying to create and maintain the alien angle.
 
Yeah, a hoax is usually a deliberate attempt to deceive.

I would put the "Gelller phenomenon" of the 1970s up there high - and one person was responsible for that - though many were taken in - and still are. Probably legal reasons they couldn't include it in the list.

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It's probably a bit arbitary, but I'm thinking that a hoax is a deliberate attempt to mislead people into believing something untrue, the more outlandish the better, but with no motives beyond making them look silly or gullible, or ridiculing their ideas, whereas fraud is a deliberate attempt to mislead people to extract money, gain influence and power, and in some cases to get sexual favours.
 
According to my dictionary, a fraud is a hoax for unlawful gain. So all frauds are hoaxes, but not all hoaxes are frauds.

Grammar is important for accuracy. Spiritualism may be a religion based on a hoax and supported by numerous other hoaxes, but it is not A Hoax as it is not singular. Genuine phenomena may be buried inside the interlocking hoaxes, and innocently mistaken interpretations of natural events certainly are.
 
PeniG said:
When I see a list of the top ten hoaxes of all time, I want a series of distinct, enlightening stories about human gullibility and ingenuity, and the uncontrolable nature of the genie once it's out of the bottle.
Click to expand...

That's what I thought this list was going to be.
 
Timble2 said:
Shroud of Turin, IMO what's known as a "pious fraud".
Click to expand...

The problem as I see it is that the fraudster would have had to have been several intellectual levels greater than Leonardo.

Psychic surgery, IMO either fraud or self delusion (practioners and patients). Some people recover, but then some people recover for unexplained reasons whatever you do.
Click to expand...

My question is whether the ritual and "symbolic drama" of psychic surgery might itself have had a measureable healing effect. And might this have in fact been the original intent?
 
Seems UK crop circles only occur in Wiltshire :? Not 100% true I know, I've seen one in Warwickshire but whilst I agree the simple ones are caused by natural phenomena, there is a thriving localised fraternity who are producing the majority.

Spiritualism: will never be proved a hoax/fraudulent. No-one can prove spirits don't exist, only that they don't communicate with us.
 
Xanatico said:
Spiritualism certainly seems to have been full of frauds, and being a hoax and a religion doesn´t seem mutually exclusive.
Click to expand...

But the question remains whether every paranormal phenomena reported from the seance chamber over the past 159 years has been a hoax. I'm not willing to go that far.
 
so - Scientology? Hoax or Fraud? Or pehaps I shouldn't even be asking that, just in case John Travolta and Tom Cruise turn up on my door with bits of lead piping? :lol:
 
IMO L Ron Hubbard was almost certainly an old fraud, although I suspect he started believing it himself towards the end of his life. Unfortunately, the thing's taken on it's life of it's own and a lot of the current crop of practioners are true believers with no intention to deceive, they think it's the truth.
 
I agree with a lot of the things on there like the Amityville horror & cottingley fairies but there are a lot of other famous things that could go on there; eg: the "surgeons photo" of the loch ness monster which was confessed as a fake, the nonsense alien autopsy film, the face on mars which has been proved to be just a rock, possibly even the bigfoot film although its difficult to prove, or like you say uri geller should at least be in the top three.

I don't know about the turin shroud because if its a fake then its the world's first photograph. So the hoaxer would have to have invented photography several centuries early, so I supposed that would mean it would have to go in at number one. (Diffficult to top really)

You could argue the case for other things being hoaxes like alchemy - there doesn't seem to be any such thing as the philosopher's stone that confers eternal life according to modern science but people devoted their lives to finding it. What was that belief ever based on? Lies that some alchemist or whoever lived for hundreds of years?

All those people died during the witch trials but was there ever such a thing? Maybe some of those people might have even comitted crimes but the "tests" to identify witches were all frauds & fakes.

i'm just rambling really so many things have been lies and hoaxes.
 
Spiritdoctor, I think you (and the original list) are misusing the term "hoax" to include all sorts of false statements. A hoax is a specific instance of a deliberate deception, more elaborate than a simple lie. Many hoaxes, in fact, are pulled off specifically as practical jokes with the intention of its being revealed later - the girls who took the Cottingley photos, for instance, fully intended their photos to show up the grownups and to be capped with a revelation, only things got way too out of hand, way too fast.

Alchemy itself wasn't a hoax - it had many serious pratictioners and forms the basis for chemistry. Many demonstrations of the supposed power of alchemy, specifically the operation of the philospher's stone to turn lead into gold, were hoaxes, but alchemy itself was just a belief system, large chunks of which were factually incorrect. The Ptolemaic system for ordering the solar system was factually incorrect, too, but it wasn't a hoax.
 
It should maybe be borne in mind that the list was written nearly 10 years ago.

My thoughts...

1. Roswell. Not a hoax, but rather some real incident (weather balloon? military tests?) which was shoddily covered-up and led to a mythology being created.

2. Spiritualism. Not sure whether a religion can be classified as a hoax, as it may set out to deliberately deceive or distort the truth, but not usually with the intention of making fools of people (as in a hoax) or of making money (as in fraud).

3. Psychic Phone Networks. Yep.

4. Shroud of Turin. Yes, albeit a very old hoax! Even if the shroud is genuinely 1st-2nd century AD, at some point someone has perpetrated the hoax that that particular cloth is what they claim...

5. Cottingley Fairies. Of course.

6. Crop Circles. Most of them. The jury's still out on the small/plain ones, I think.

7. Amityville Horror. No idea, but I'd side with the conventional view that it was a hoax.

8. Piltdown. As others have said, not paranormal...

9. Psychic Surgery. I wouldn't include this in a top 10 of hoaxes (?)

10. King Tut's Curse. More a myth than a hoax, I think.

My list would include the Doctor's Photograph (Nessie), possibly the Bigfoot footage, and GhostWatch.
 
I suppose i was just trying to say that people have always used others incredulity against them throughout history and using alchemy and witch trials as examples. People were believed at the time but with the hindsight of today they were tricks done for power & gain.

Maybe you are right that these things are not the same as a hoax. A hoax is usually more of a joke although people can gain for it. Perhaps a hoax has to take place in modern times when people are less incredulous and fool scientists or the media.

Is suppose for something to be in the top ten of hoaxes it would have to be fooling the largest number of people or the largest number of 'experts' or get points for being the craziest thing you could get people to believe
 
There's a lot of talk about the Cottingley Fairies photos and no-one seems to realise that the published pictures had been specially 'touched up' to make the images less 'fuzzy' for 'magic latern lecture talks / displays' (for want of a better phrase). The actual images were out of focus and looked less like the cardboard cut-outs they undoubtedly were.
 
A lot more was learnt about The Amityville Horror after 1998 when George began doing interviews again... although whether the Sceptical Enquirer would change anything is open to debate.

For the record the two biggest "whistle blowers" on Amityville were Steven Kaplan (refused permission to investigate house) and William Weber (called the original press conference, suggested a book, and his "I helped them make it up over bottles of wine" speech only came when he was suing them for a cut of the profits of their own book)

There's no proof either way on this really, it comes down to which parties you believe.
 
Instead of psychis surgery I would probably put crystal healing.
 
Roswell is somewhat a hoax. The story we know today was more or less invented in the seventies. There wasn't even a cover-up. The military had one of their weather balloons crash and they collected the debris, and informed the town that it was a weather balloon. Granted, it was also a top-secret weather balloon, but there was no reason to mention the top-secret part. The whole Roswell thing as told today is, in reality, a conglomeration of that incident and several others in which the military purposefully crashed planes with test dummies inside to see what happened.
 
Roswell 'hoaxing' started well before the 70s, with the 40s' press story about the recovered flying saucer, but who was hoaxing who, and why, is still a matter for debate!

AFAIK, the existence of the particular newspaper story has always been accepted fact.
 
Didn't Spiritualism really kick off with the Fox Sister's rapping? Made...er with their toes.....

Yep, Dianetics, the New Science of Mental Heralth later the "church of Scientology" (for tax reasons) should be up there.
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The Fox sisters were indeed the first Spiritualist mediums and they did indeed confess in later life to making the raps with their toes. They later recanted the recantation. Both the confession and the recantation were made under circumstances of economic pressure, and there's sufficient give in the facts to allow for the possibility that toe-rapping came into use, under the aegis of the ambitious Leah (Kate and Maggie's older sister and original business manager) when authentic phenomena proved unreliable.

There's almost always that little bit of give in the facts when dealing with
Spiritualism - especially in the case of Victorian female mediums, who are a complex and fascinating social phenomenon all on their own. Some, like the Fox sisters, are tragic figures; some are manipulative little con artists like - well, let's not slander the dead, I'm sure you can think of some - and some are rebels spitting in the eye of patriarchal authority, like Eusapia Palladino. Nor are these categories mutually exclusive.

J'ever notice how much less interesting the question "Is this interpretation of events true?" is than most of the other questions raised in examining Fortean phenomena? And how much more often it is addressed than the really fascinating stuff about human behavior and the choices we make or have forced on us in out social contexts and the complexity of the universe and so on?
 
I'd have to add Borley Rectory to the list. Had some proper ghostie action, if I'm honest, but Harry Price was a fraud when it came to some of the more outlandish claims to do with the house.
 
spiritdoctor said:
You could argue the case for other things being hoaxes like alchemy....
Click to expand...

But does a search for something which ultimately proves to be non-existent, sincerely carried out, become a hoax?

And there's certainly no clear line of demarcation between the late alchemists and the early modern chemists, so is chemistry a hoax too?

Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Does that make him a hoaxer?

Early 19th Century astronomers diligently searched for a trans-Mercurian planet, convinced that they'd discover it. But does the fact that the search ultimately proved fruitless mean that the astronomers involved were hoaxers? I've certainly never heard them so described before.
 
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