There's something fascinating about hoaxes. Usually humans require some good evidence to back up absurd claims, but sometimes a clever prankster manages to pull the wool over our collective eyes. Here are some of my favourite hoaxes that people really should have known better than to believe.
Life on the Moon (1835)
The Museum of Hoaxes has a fantastic article on this media hoax from 1835, and explains why so many people of the time seem to have believed in what is, to modern eyes, so clearly science fiction. These days the field of astrobiology is much more advanced, thanks largely to a greater understanding of how live evolved and survived on Earth as well as having more advanced technology, and it is a growing discipline. You can find Nasa'a own website about astrobiology right here. And in all fairness, most people these days have a more realistic expectation of alien life - certainly out there, but probably quite far away. While there is still a possibility of simple life existing in our own solar system, I wouldn't be dreaming of taking Aayla Secura on a date any time soon.
The Surgeon's Photograph
The Loch Ness Monster is an enduring symbol of Scotland and a big draw for tourists, and even if they go disappointed they can still enjoy the beautiful landscape of Loch Ness and the Great Glen. The stories go back at least as far as the 6th century, when Saint Columba supposedly battled a monster in the River Ness. While the chances of a plesiosaur living in Loch Ness are very, very small, especially since the loch has now been thoroughly examined, a lot of people cling on to Nessie.
But the Surgeon's Photograph is probably the most iconic of all the alleged photographs of the LNM, and...it's a little silly.
By taking a close look at the scale of the image, especially comparing the 'monster' with the ripples, it's clearly a very small model floating on water. And there's quite a story behind the hoax photograph as well. But could Nessie exist? In my opinion, it's unlikely. Such a large creature - in face, quite a few of these large creatures, to keep the gene pool healthy - really seems like a hard thing for modern sensory techniques to miss. Loch Ness and the Scottish Highlands around it are beautiful, but relatively small if compared with, say, the Great Lakes region of North America.
Bigfoot videos on YouTube
Speaking of cryptids, Bigfoot is another contender for Grand Master of Stealth. Stories of large hairy animal men living in the woods are ancient and common to many cultures (see Daegling, David J. (2004). Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America's Enduring Legend. Altamira Press), and large hominids such as the Gigantopithecus have roamed the Earth in the past (though in that case it was in Asia), doubtless encouraging modern belief. In fact Bigfoot is probably the go-to image to represent the cryptid collection.
Although Bigfoot's supposed range is rather large, it also covers a well-developed and trafficked area of the world. The woods of the Pacific Northwest may be deep and wide, but the chance of something so large, and again requiring a sufficient population to keep reproduction viable, managing to evade the prying eyes of humans is small. New species are indeed discovered every day, but nothing quite on the scale of the Sasquatch. People have made claims that perhaps the Sasquatch is highly intelligent, burying the dead and avoiding humans deliberately, but this is an extraordinary claim that does not have extraordinary evidence to back it up. Folks have every right to believe in Bigfoot, but if many YouTube videos are believed, a lot of Bigfoot sightings have very mundane explanations. ParaBreakdown deconstructs fakes regularly:
A recent video has also shown an alleged Bigfoot sighting to be...Harry, from Harry and the Hendersons. Yeap.
Crop Circles
First of all, if you haven't seen the Nostalgia Critic's review of Signs, go watch it now. The original crop circles have long since been confirmed as hoaxes, with a lot of confessions and displays of how they can be created with very low-tech equipment. The Smithsonian has an excellent article on their history right here. It is particularly interesting to read about ostension, the phenomena in which false evidence corroborates an existing legend, encouraging belief in it still further. It goes some way to explaining why some folks would believe in such a strange hoax. Crop circles are often very beautiful:
But the more you think about them, the less sense they make. They couldn't be a way for aliens to contact us, because the aliens would have to be technological and capable of realising that there are better ways of talking to us, despite having very different minds. Perhaps other aliens could be capable of reading and understanding them, but crushing big shapes into fields of corn seems like an inefficient way to send messages. Maybe it's a more secure way of sending messages than leaving a probe which Earthlings could find, but then why do it that close to Earth at all? As for being a result of alien craft landing on Earth, it seems a bit lazy or low-tech for what are supposedly meant to be covert observation missions. And I've yet to see a convincing photograph or video of an alien spacecraft.
Don't get me wrong, even if life in the universe is incredibly rare, I'm very comfortable saying that its existence is a mathematical certainty. Thankfully crop circles are a confirmed hoax, and a pretty piece of art they can be too.
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If you want to read more about the real search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you can read all about SETI on their website.
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