Hoaxes are common, and the good ones can significantly muddy the waters of serious paranormal investigation - sometimes for decades. But it's important to know that hoaxes do not negate the real evidence of any particular phenomenon.
Some Famous Paranormal Hoaxes
- In the late 19th century and early 20th century, when spiritualism was at its height, unscrupulous mediums abounded, staging elaborate and often very convincing seances that fooled highly educated and skeptical people.
- In 1848, the Fox sisters claimed that they received communications with spirits through mysterious "raps" on tables and walls. Many "experts" were fooled. It turned out the girls created the rapping noise by cracking their toe joints.
- No less a personage than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was taken in by the "Cottingley Fairies." Sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and a photographer friend created photos of Elsie posing with little dancing fairies. The truth was the fairies were merely paper cut-outs.
- For many years, the so-called "surgeon's photo" of the Loch Ness Monster was considered one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of the creature. It was taken by Colonel Robert Wilson, a respected British surgeon. In 1994, however, a man named Christian Spurling stepped forward to confess that he was involved in creating the photo hoax. The "monster" was only a small toy. (Some researchers still contend that this confession was the hoax and that the photo is genuine.)
- As we covered in recent articles, there have been many Bigfoot hoaxes (or claimed hoaxes), the most recent being Bob Heironimus's claim that he was the guy in the gorilla suit in the famous Patterson Bigfoot film. Others have previously made the same claim. And in 2002, the family of the late Ray Wallace admitted that he had faked many Bigfoot footprints.
There are many, many more examples, of course. People have faked crop circles, Bigfoot photos and footprints, monster photos and sightings, UFO photos and videos, ghost photos and recordings, psychic surgery, mediumship, hauntings and more.
Faking photos and videos has been made easy and more widespread with today's digital cameras and camcorders, combined with computer photo editing software. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the frauds from what might be the real thing.
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