- Ha! I've actually had hair this entire time! You don't believe that, huh? Okay, well then you're
smarter than these people. There have been many cases in the past where people have gone to
elaborate lengths to trick others. But surprisingly, some of
these hoaxes were pulled off so well despite them being very bizarre, that seemingly everyone believed them. They made a lot of waves,
and after you see these, you might question how they
went as far as they did. Here are the 10 strangest
hoaxes that tricked everyone. (intriguing music) Number 10 is the Cardiff Giant. In 1969, the Cardiff Giant was uncovered in Cardiff, New York. This discovery of a
three-meter-tall, fossilized man created so much interest
in the American press at the time, it was crazy! It was claimed that the Cardiff Giant was proof of biblical stories
about a race of giants which lived on Earth before modern humans. However, it was soon apparent
that the giant was a hoax. It had been made by a New York tobacconist and atheist, called George Hull. He hired a group of
men to carve the statue from a large piece of gypsum. Acids and other liquids were used to stain the surface of the giant while needles were driven
into the statue's surface to mimic the holes seen
in petrified stone. Despite the Cardiff Giant
being revealed as a hoax, this didn't stop showman P.T. Barnum from creating his own replica and charging the public to see it. So it was a fake of a fake? That's very meta. Number nine is balloon boy. One of the strangest recent hoaxes is the 2009 balloon boy case in Denver. On October 15th of that
year, the media reported that a six-year-old
boy's life was in danger. The boy's name was Falcon Heene, and his parents claimed
that he had floated 2,100 hundred meters into the air onboard a homemade balloon, which was shaped like a flying saucer. Falcon's parents were distraught, and the authorities had no
idea how to catch the balloon or bring the boy back down to safety. When the balloon finally landed, more than 80 kilometers away
from its original launch site, Falcon was nowhere to be seen. It was revealed that he was safe at home, and the entire event had
been staged by his parents. Both parents were fined for the hoax and given short-term custodial
sentences for their prank, which cost the emergency
services thousands of dollars. Sounds like old YouTube videos when they used to do fake
pranks, and it was like boy trapped in balloon in
the air, question mark. I don't know, question mark
means maybe it happened. Number eight is Raelian cloning. In 1997, the UFO religion Raelianism set up a company to
experiment with human cloning. Their aim was to create
genetic duplicates of people so that if a person died,
their mind could be uploaded to a brand-new version of themselves. In 2002, the company claimed to have made an incredible breakthrough
in creating a female clone creating a viable healthy human baby. The Raelian company claimed to
have perfected the procedure through a cell fusion
device, which could be used to produce human clones easily. These claims caught on like wildfire and became international news. But when scientist asked for proof of this miraculous cloned baby, the Raelians refused to provide any. Kinda like religion itself. It's now widely believed that
the entire affair was a hoax engineered to bring attention to those running the Raelian religion. Is it really a religion at that point, or is it just a group of hoaxters
trying to get your money? Think about it. Number seven is the quantum gravity paper. Also known as the Sokal Affair, this hoax was devised to show
how scientific publications sometimes publish papers
without verifying the facts. The hoax was put together
by a physics professor at New York University called Alan Sokal. He wanted to see if a
respected scientific journal would publish a paper
filled with nonsense. And that's exactly what happened. He submitted a paper to
the Social Text journal, which at the time deed not
use a peer review process where other scientists
would go over the paper before it was published. Instead, the editors
there accepted the article and published it simply because
of Alan Sokal's reputation. Because the paper was published without the editors realizing that it was essentially nonsense, this began an important debate about how scientific data
is promoted to the public. It's like the beginning of fake news, except in the scientific community, so, yeah, everything begins somewhere. Number six is BitConnect. BitConnect was an
opensource cryptocurrency which claimed to be able to
generate significant profits for those who paid into the scheme. The platform used several well-known social media personalities in
the cryptocurrency community to promote the service and
gain the trust of the public. Investors were asked to give their money to BitConnect as a new for of currency which would gradually
accumulate value over time because of the number of
people investing in it. If this sounds familiar, well, that's because it's
essentially a Ponzi scheme. But it was so well orchestrated that it managed to pull the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting
victims by the thousands. Literally thousands of people
lost their life savings when BitConnect collapsed. It closed its doors in early 2018, and litigation is still ongoing, with investors claiming that BitConnect was an elaborate hoax. Really, I've lost so much money in Bitcoin that I feel like it's all a big hoax. Bitcoin, bounce back! Number six is Mary Toft's animals. Mary Toft lived from
1701 to 1763 in England and carried out an elaborate hoax which fooled medical doctors at the time. As incredible as it sounds, Mary was giving birth
to animals. (bleating) Mainly rabbits. Doctors themselves were even
delivering these creatures, who were always dead on arrival. Ew, you can kinda see where this is going. The news of this caused a
great sensation at the time. However, King George I's surgeon believed that the claims were nonsense. Hm, I wonder why! Just popping out rabbits! Nothing weird about that. Though Mary Toft had
become famous by this time, the doctor proved that the
entire affair was a hoax. As it turned out, Mary had been placing, and brace yourself for this, you already knew it was coming, the dead body parts of
animals inside of her and then producing the species as if she had given
birth to them. (heaving) After spending some time in jail, Mary was released, and several doctors were publicly mocked for
believing in her story. Yeah, yeah! As they should. Number four is the Cottingley fairies. The Cottingley fairies appeared in a number of photographs in 1917, and seemed to show real-life fairies dancing in a garden
around two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Elsie was 16 at the time,
and Frances was nine. They took the pictures themselves and claimed that the fairies
had come out to play with them. The photographs were used by
Sherlock Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle was a famous spiritualist and was enthusiastic
about the photographs. Taking them to Kodak, the photographs were examined by experts who said that the film had
not been tampered with. In the early 1980s, both
Elsie and Frances admitted that they had used cardboard cutouts from popular children's books to create the illusion
of fairies being real. A lot of patience, patience which I personally
would not have had. And that was before Photoshop. That must have taken a lot of practice and a lot of patience. Yeah, Instagram models would not have been a thing back then; no Photoshop. Number three is Anastasia
Romanov's escape. During the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia in 1918, members of the Russian
royal family were executed. Since then, there have been rumors and even a number of imposters claiming to be the
descendants of that family. The most famous of these
hoaxes involved a woman claiming to be Anastasia Romanov. The woman first made the claim in Berlin and later moved to Virginia
in the United States. Her name was Anna, and
she had made her claims while in side a psychiatric hospital. But eventually her story gained
international recognition. She died in 1984, still
claiming to be a Romanov. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the graves where most
of Anastasia's family had been buried were found. DNA tests were ran on Anna's hair and showed that her DNA did
not match the Romanov family. That just seems like a weird
thing to want to brag about. Like, why that? Why not be like, "Oh, I'm George Clooney's second, older, uglier brother"? Like, that seems more realistic. I don't know. Number two is F for Fake. Orson Welles' 1975 fake
documentary called F for Fake is one of the greatest hoaxes of all time. It explores forgery and the
lengths people will go to to mislead the public. It focuses on a professional art forger who fooled art experts around the world, and then delves into Clifford
Irving's attempts to fake a memoir by notorious billionaire
recluse Howard Hughes. However, in a stroke of absolute
genius, many of the facts presented in F for Fake
are themselves fake. In fact, the film mixes
truth with misinformation to such a degree that the viewer doesn't know what's real and what isn't. Welles was trained as a
magician when he was younger, and it seems even later on in life he continued to use
illusion to fool all of us, and to teach us a lesson which
is even more important today than ever: television and film
can make any lie seem true. Hashtag fake news! Fake news. And number one is Ghostwatch. On Halloween night in
1992, the BBC broadcast a hoax to the UK which
shocked its viewers. Called Ghostwatch, it was
set up as a fake live show, with a cast in a studio
taking fake live phone calls. That, in addition to an
onsite investigative team in a haunted house, trying to investigate the paranormal phenomena there. As Ghostwatch progressed,
the supernatural phenomena made itself known with terrifying effect. However, because the
program was set up in a way which made viewers
believe that it was real, this caused panic among
the British public. Oh my God, ghosts are real! Time to run. One of the viewers, Martin Denham, committed suicide after watching it. Though it has aged, Ghostwatch remains one of the most effective
television hoaxes of all time, and has been rebroadcast on
British television since. (curious music)
