Hoax, proven

On 9 September 1991 the British tabloid Today reported that two Hampshire men, Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, had started the crop circle craze back in 1978 for a joke.

The medium Francis Ward Monck gave two séances in Huddersfield in October 1876 and was charged with deceiving his sitters. Wikipedia records that he was convicted and jailed for three months.

The jenglot is a creature that Wikipedia calls an actively believed myth, one many people hold to be real. A 2009 study in the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences found jenglot hair unlikely to come from any animal species.

Documents that surfaced in 1984 describing a secret committee called Majestic 12, said by ufologists to prove a hidden UFO group. The FBI called the document bogus.

In autumn 1726 Mary Toft was reported to have given birth to rabbits. On 7 December 1726 she confessed in front of the physicians examining her.

On the twelfth of February, 1949, Radio Quito aired a live drama about an alien invasion in Quito, Ecuador. When listeners learned it was fiction, a mob attacked the station's building, and six or more people died.

An 1897 Dallas Morning News story by S. E. Haydon told of an airship crashing at Aurora, Texas, and its pilot being buried in the town cemetery. The Texas State Historical Association calls the story fiction.

On 1 April 1957 the BBC's Panorama programme showed a Swiss family harvesting spaghetti from trees. Viewers phoned the BBC afterwards asking for tips on growing spaghetti trees at home.

On 10 December 1869 Hull told the press that the Cardiff Giant was a fake. Yale's Othniel C. Marsh had already denounced it, but visitors still turned up.

On 10 January 1877 Jacob Gass dug two engraved slate tablets from a mound at Cook Farm near Davenport, Iowa. A later study concluded that Academy members likely planted them as a joke on him.

In April 2021 a video of a wild boar being put into a cage drew crowds of residents in Bedahan, Sawangan, Depok, as a babi ngepet. Police declared it a hoax and arrested the organiser, a local religious teacher, whom a court sentenced to four years in prison.

A small cabinet that Kevin Mannis sold on eBay in 2003, with a long haunting story he later said he wrote himself.

On 28 August 1995 Fox aired a special on film of an alien body examination. In 2006 Santilli, who supplied the footage, said it was his own reconstruction of an earlier film.

On 21 October 1888, Margaret Fox appeared at the Academy of Music in New York City and demonstrated how she made rapping sounds.

From 25 August 1835, the New York newspaper The Sun ran six articles describing life and civilisation on the Moon, wrongly credited to the astronomer John Herschel.

Red lights floated over Morristown, New Jersey, from 5 January 2009. Two local men later said they had launched them as a hoax.

In Stockwell, on 6 January 1772, in Mrs Golding's house, crockery was reported flying from shelves and violent noises were heard.

A photograph of a long-necked head above Loch Ness appeared in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934. In 1994 Christian Spurling said it showed a toy submarine topped with a serpent head.

In 1920 ghost reports in Tonawanda and North Tonawanda drew crowds. On 14 June police said local business people had invented them.

On 26 November 1977 a voice calling itself Vrillon, speaking for a group it named the Ashtar Galactic Command, replaced the sound of a Southern Television broadcast in parts of southern England. The person responsible was never identified.

On the night of 22 December 1909, thousands of people in Worcester, Massachusetts, reported seeing an airship. The sightings followed inventor Wallace Tillinghast's claim to have built a fast aeroplane.