In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made his treacherous solo voyage across the Atlantic, flying his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New York to Paris and becoming an instant hero for accomplishing a feat long thought to be impossible—crossing an ocean in a day and a half; traveling 60 miles an hour for more than 3,000 miles; flying alone through the night, through storms, without sleep. It was the most daring and astounding achievement of its day.

Months later, Robert Ripley—a connoisseur of mosts and bests, of fastest and furthest—featured Lindy in his popular syndicated New York Evening Post cartoon, Believe It or Not. Instead of heaping more praise on the aviator, however, he declared that Lindbergh was not the first but the 67th man to make a nonstop flight across the Atlantic. Thousands of irate readers sent incredulous letters and telegrams, berating Ripley for insulting an American icon, and calling him all sorts of names, primarily a liar.

At the time, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was nearing its 10th anniversary. Although he and his cartoon weren’t yet household names, for a decade Ripley had entertained and taunted readers with hundreds of illustrated bits of arcana—the armless man who played the piano, the chicken that lived 17 days with its head cut off—and the public had responded with increasing loyalty and, at times, anger and frustration. Despite Ripley’s avowal that everything in his cartoon was absolutely true, many readers simply refused to believe him, and they wrote letters, sometimes thousands each day. The letter writers had even created their own fad, addressing envelopes simply to “Rip,” while others wrote backwards, upside down, in Braille, Hebrew, shorthand, semaphore, or Morse code (“.-. .. .--.” equals “Rip”)—or to “The Biggest Liar in the World.” When Ripley sponsored a contest seeking readers’ own Believe It or Nots, he received 2.5 million letters in two weeks. (The winner: Clinton Blume, who was swimming at a Brooklyn beach when he found the monogrammed hairbrush he’d lost in 1918 when his ship was sunk by a German U-boat.)

During the Depression, as Americans sought affordable means of escape and entertainment, Ripley provided both. His cartoons appeared in more than 300 newspapers around the world, in dozens of languages, and were read by many millions. With a $100,000-plus salary from newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, beginning in 1929, followed by endorsement deals, speaking engagements, and earnings from his best-selling books, radio shows, movies, and museums, he was earning well over half a million dollars a year during the height of the Depression. By 1936, a newspaper poll found, Ripley was more popular than James Cagney, President Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and even Lindbergh.

Along the way, Ripley had discovered that remote lands and bizarre facts were only strange and fascinating in “kinship” to people’s own lives. “Facts, to be interesting, must be very close or very far away,” Ripley believed. His mission was to prove to readers that veracity and reality were elusive—Buffalo Bill never shot a buffalo, for example; he shot bison; Ireland’s St. Patrick wasn’t Irish or Catholic, and his name wasn’t Patrick—and that sometimes you can’t recognize truth until someone shines a sharp light on a subject, as Ripley did when his cartoon divulged that the “Star Spangled Banner,” based on a crude English drinking song, had never been formally adopted as the American national anthem, which led to a 1931 petition to Congress bearing five million signatures, and the anthem’s official adoption.

The truth about Lindbergh was this: two aviators named Alcock and Brown had flown together from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919, and that same year, a dirigible carrying 31 men had crossed from Scotland to the United States; five years later, another dirigible had traveled from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey, with 33 people aboard. That meant 66 people had crossed the Atlantic nonstop before Lindbergh.