The history of hoaxes dates back to centuries ago. It seems that even prior to the invention of the Internet, hoaxes have been invented and too many people have fallen for them time and time again. To gain a better perspective of why this is, perhaps taking a look at some of the most famous of the famous should be investigated.

One of the oldest known hoaxes came about in 1770 and involved the Turk. This was a machine that was comprised of an adult man dressed in a turban and robes, along with a cabinet that as three feet long, two feet in width and a half-foot tall. It included a chessboard that was positioned atop the cabinet. The Turk would play games of chess against human opponents once activated, resulting in it winning more often than the human would. The Turk oddly went on a tour of Europe in the 1780s and was known to beat such opponents as Ben Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. The hoax was that there was a hidden area containing a chess master who played for the Turk. It fooled people for about a century.

In 1934, there was a famous image of none other than the Loch Ness Monster being circulated in the Surgeon’s Photograph. This picture was supposed captured by British surgeon Colonel Robert Wilson, who claimed to have been traveling by car past Loch and detected something odd in the water. It was a hoax that people bought into for 60 years, although the image gained a great deal of debate.

In 1938, Americans listened to the radio regularly, and the day before Halloween that year, there was a broadcast that announced that the earth was under attack by Martians. Having missed the disclaimer at the beginning of the program, many people took it for being real. This resulted in mass hysteria, with people panicking and fleeing their homes, rushing to police stations and newspaper offices and flooding radio stations with calls for questions about it. In fact, it was a dramatization of H.G. Wells’ famous War of the Worlds, which was narrated by Orson Welles. While not truly a hoax, it became notorious as one due to the reactions to it.

Of course, the Internet is famous for hoaxes and one of the most famous is from 2001. The helicopter shark was an image that circulated through email and was said to be National Geographic’s “Photo of the year.” It was actually two images merged together, aka Photoshopped, of a helicopter over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and a great white shark in waters in South Africa.

Hoaxes have taken place for centuries and will continue due to how easily people fall for them. They draw attention and those who create them are either sociopaths or thieves who wish to obtain financial gain with them. Of course, some people just find it fun to fool the masses.

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