Famous Fakes

These famous hoaxes fooled many people. When something sounds too good — or weird — to be true… maybe it isn’t. It always pays to check your facts.

Audubon’s Trick Fish

John James Audubon was an artist who explored the American wilderness in the early 1800s and drew the first pictures of many native species. Once, he had a little trouble with a copycat. Another naturalist came to visit and copied notes out of Audubon’s notebook. Then the visitor published the work as his own. When he came back for another visit, Audubon got tricky. He drew some pictures of purely imaginary fish, such as the Buffalo Carp Sucker and the Devil Jack-Diamond Fish, which he described as 10 feet long, with bulletproof scales. Sure enough, his visitor copied Audubon’s fake creatures and put them into his own book on American wildlife. Then Audubon revealed the fakes and had the last laugh.

Save the Pacific Tree Octopus!

Have you ever seen an octopus living in a tree? According to the website zapatopi.net/treeoctopus, tree octopuses are real, endangered, and need saving. The site has lots of scientific-sounding information about the tree-dwelling octopuses, which use their tentacles to climb and hunt for insects and birds’ eggs. There are even photos and videos of tree octopuses in the wild.

But don’t believe everything you see! The site is a joke — octopuses are ocean animals and can’t live in trees. The website is meant to show how easy it is to make fake information seem real, with doctored photos and official-sounding (but made-up) science facts. Some clues give the prank away. Two of the main threats to the octopuses are listed as Sasquatch (another imaginary creature) and people using octopuses as hats.

Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

On April Fools’ Day in 1957, a British television news show reported that Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper crop of spaghetti, thanks to the elimination of that dreaded pest, the spaghetti weevil. Film footage showed farmers pulling limp noodles from the branches of trees.

Spaghetti was not a common food in Britain at that time, so many viewers were fooled. Soon the station was flooded with calls from people wanting to know how togrow their own spaghetti tree! The station advised them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

Loch Ness Monster

Loch Ness is a small, deep lake in Scotland. Many people also believe that it’s home to a long-necked prehistoric sea monster. Radar scans have never found any largecreature living in the lake. But believers insist it’s there. For evidence, they point to a famous photo of what looks like a swimming dinosaur, taken by a doctor in 1934. This single blurry photo has inspired Nessie hunters for years.

But in 1991, two old men finally confessed that the photo is a fake. It actually shows a model they made when they were kids. The Nessie in the photo is a plastic dinosaur head attached to a toy submarine. Since then, pranking visitors with fake Nessies has become something of a Loch Ness tradition.