The ocean is a goldmine? Perhaps, not California Digital Newspaper Collection/Centre for Bibliographic Studies and Research/University of California

The history of science is replete with frauds and fakers – here are eleven of the most creative.

You want fusion, President Perón?

Ronald Richter worked as a scientist in Nazi Germany before arriving Argentina after the second world war. President Juan Perón was desperate to forge a bold, empowered Argentina, so when Richter claimed he could produce endless energy from nuclear fusion, Perón lapped it up. Richter was given colossal amounts of money and free rein to build his fusion facility, on a beautiful lake island. A few years – and secret experiments – later Richter announced that he had reached his goal. Perón quickly made a grandstanding announcement to the media of the world… A staggering achievement, if only it had been true. The rest, as they say, is hoax history.

CRAP paper accepted by journal

At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science. So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.


Fatal flaw fingers fake fossil fly

A fossil fly that was been one of London’s Natural History Museum’s greatest entomological treasures for 70 years, is a Victorian fake. In a piece of detection worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Andrew Ross, a student of ancient insects, uncovered an entomological crime on a par with the Piltdown hoax (see below) – but perpetrated at least 60 years earlier.

Get gold from the sea

The discovery of gold in seawater in 1872, created a kind of gold rush – or gold slosh, perhaps. “The ocean is a goldmine,” the newspapers crowed. Even with an estimated gold content of less than 1 grain per tonne of water that meant a lot of precious metal just there for the taking. Prescott Jernegan’s Electrolytic Marine Salts Company promised gold from the sea, and the town of Lubec, Maine, boomed as company’s gold-accumulating machines got to work, apparently very successfully. You can probably imagine what happened next.

Piltdown Man

In 1912, solicitor and amateur palaeontologist Charles Dawson “found” the Piltdown fossils, a skull and jawbone that appeared to be half-man half-ape, in Sussex. They were hailed as the evolutionary “missing link” between apes and humans.

It was over 40 years later, in 1953, that the fossil was exposed as a fake. In fact, the skull was constructed from a medieval human cranium attached to the jaw of an orang-utan.

The Cardiff Giant

A ten-foot “petrified man” was dug up on a small farm in Cardiff, New York, in October 1869. The “Cardiff Giant” became a huge news story and many Americans travelled to see it.

Early in 1870, it was revealed as a fake, the creation of New Yorker George Hull, who had paid for it to be carved out of stone.

Beringer’s fraudulent fossils

Physician Johann Beringer was amazed when he was presented with fossils “found” in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1725, which depicted incredible scenes: the forms of birds, bees, snails, lizards, plants with flowers, frogs mating and insects feeding, not to mention comets, moons and suns.

It turned out that he was the victim of an elaborate plot: envious colleagues of Beringer had planted the fossils.

Unfortunately, Beringer fell for it hook, line and sinker, and even published a book to tell the world about the fossils. Rumour has it that once Beringer realised the hoax, he tried to buy up any unsold copies of his book. (See Johann Beringer and the fraudulent fossils)

There are many more examples of fossil fraud, such as the fake “entombed toad” and the fake fossil fly in amber.

The Sokal hoax

In 1996, American physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper loaded with nonsensical jargon to the journal Social Text, in which he argued that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. (Read Sokal’s paper)

When the journal published it, Sokal revealed that the paper was in fact a spoof. The incident triggered a storm of debate about the ethics of Sokal’s prank.

The spaghetti tree

In 1957, the BBC show Panorama broadcast a programme about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland. It showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree.

After watching the programme, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree. Alas, it was an April Fools’ Day joke.

Watch the BBC’s spaghetti tree footage

The Upas tree

An account was published in the London Magazine in 1783 by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch (his initials were variously given as NP and JN). It claimed the existence of a tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius.

Read the original account (scroll down to find it)

This was the start of a legend. Even Erasmus Darwin wrote about it in a poem in 1791. A note to the poem read, “There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country… in a district of 12 or 14 miles round it, the face of the earth is quite barren and rocky, intermixed only with the skeletons of men and animals; affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described or painters delineated.”

You really can find the Upas tree in Indonesia. Though not as potent as legend would have it, the latex of the tree does contain a powerful toxin, which was traditionally used on arrow points.

Read more about the Upas tree (PDF: go to page 8)

The secret of immortality

Johann Heinrich Cohausen, an 18th-century physician, wrote a treatise on the prolongation of life, entitled Hermippus redivivus. Amongst other secrets of longevity, it claimed that life could be prolonged by taking an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles.

Actually, Cohausen admitted in the last few pages of the work that it was a satire, so any gullible readers wouldn’t have been duped for too long.