From Bigfoot to mermaids and Mars attacks - how hoaxes have fooled the world

It’s not just Donald Trump and the continual lies he tells while simultaneously railing against so-called “fake news” – or Boris Johnson and his fake claims about the European Union.

Cons, phoneys, counterfeits, and forgeries have seeped into every part of society.

There was a fake Kate Adie on Twitter this month. Adie had her identity hijacked online, and the Fake Kate began defending Tommy Robinson, the jailed far-right extremist.

There was the "deepfake" of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. A deepfake is a video where images and sound are manipulated and it’s almost impossible to tell they have been doctored. The Zuckerberg deepfake had the tech billionaire in Bond-villain mode saying: “Imagine this for a second: one man with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures.”

Facebook had previously come under fire for not removing a doctored clip of Nancy Pelosi which made the US Speaker of the House appear drunk. The company had to eat humble pie and keep the Zuckerberg video online.

Warnings have gone out that propagandists could use deepfakes to trigger social unrest.

Fake social media accounts were also set up in the names of Tory MPs Dominic Raab and Liam Fox. Another account posed as the UK’s ambassador to Turkey. One even pretended to be the government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, a British overseas territory. There were fake accounts for the DVLA, the army’s chief of the general staff and also defence ministers Gavin Williamson and Michael Fallon.

A widely-shared video on Facebook showing a man being robbed at knifepoint was captioned “Meanwhile in Sadiq khans [sic] London” – however, the video was from South Africa. Little wonder that BBC director general Tony Hall warned that the world is facing “the biggest assault on truth since the 1930s” and compared the spread of fake news to Nazi propaganda in the run-up to the Second World War.

Sometimes, though, fakes take off because of gullibility rather than malicious intent. Thousands believed the spoof video by Scottish comedian Chris Forbes which said that Jamie and Andy Murray have a secret brother who can’t play tennis. This week Facebook said it was targeting fake ads online, used by fraudsters.

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It may seem that this attack on reality is unprecedented – but, in truth, human beings have a long history of carrying out fakes and hoaxes.

Here’s a run-down of some of the most audacious fakes in history.

1 Mars attacks

In probably the greatest hoax ever, Orson Welles faked a Martian invasion of America, sparking widespread panic.

His radio play of HG Well’s The War Of The Worlds was performed at Halloween in 1938 as if the alien attack was happening live and being recorded by news reporters. There were stories of terrified people taking to the streets.

Sociologists and psychologists speculate that the public may have been particularly susceptible due to the build-up of tension in Europe as war loomed, and the fact that people were listening to many news events – like the Hindenburg disaster the year before – live for the first time.

2 The missing link

In 1912, British archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered the missing link when he unearthed an ancient skull near Piltdown in England. So was born "Piltdown Man" and one of the greatest scientific fakes of all time. It took 40 years to reveal that it was actually an Orangutan’s teeth in a human skull.

3 Anti-Semitic lies

The infamous fake text The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion was published in Russia in 1903 and described a secret plot by Jews for world domination. The lies told by the unknown author would go on to stoke the flames of the Holocaust. Car magnet and anti-Semite Henry Ford distributed half a million copies in America. The Nazis turned it into a textbook for schoolchildren. It is still in print and continues to fuel the anti-Semitic tropes that fester in society.

4 Alien autopsy

In 1995, British TV producer Ray Santilli released a 17-minute black and white film claiming to show the autopsy of an alien. It was claimed the alien had died in a UFO crash at the infamous Roswell site in America in 1947. In 2006, Santilli said the film was a reconstruction of footage he claimed to have seen of an alien autopsy. Apparently, the genuine film had degraded so badly it couldn’t be used. No-one has ever proved the real footage existed.

5 Bigfoot

The footage lasts for less than a minute and seemingly shows a Sasquatch – since nicknamed Patty – loping through the forest in California in 1967. The men who filmed it, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, insisted it was genuine. While some believe what’s on the film is real, most dismiss it as an elaborate fake featuring a man in a hairy suit.

6 Fake towns

In 1787, Catherine the Great of Russia was journeying through Crimea. Catherine’s lover, Grigory Potemkin, was governor and to impress her he had pretty little villages erected along the banks of the Dnieper river where Catherine was travelling by barge. As soon as the empress passed, the fake villages were dismantled and rebuilt further up river in time for Catherine passing again.

The term Potemkin village came to be used to describe phoney scenes created by the Soviets to fool foreign journalists – particularly during the 1930s Ukrainian famine. North Korea has its own Potemkin village – also known as Peace Village, or Propaganda village in South Korea.

7 Milli Vanilli

In early 1990, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus were riding high as band Milli Vanilli and had won a Grammy as best new artists, with songs like Girl You Know It’s True. However, it emerged that the duo were just lip-syncing frontmen. The Grammy was revoked and they were shamed globally. They attempted a comeback as Rob & Fab but the album sold only 2,000 copies.

The svengali behind Milli Vanilli – Frank Farian of Boney M fame – produced a new Milli Vanilli album in 1997. During the making of the album, Pilatus got into drugs and crime and on the eve of the album tour was found dead in a hotel room from an overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.

8 The Amityville horror

The tale of the haunted house at Amityville on Long Island, New York, is perhaps the most famous ghost story in America – primarily because it’s all said to be true. In 1974, Ronald DeFeo killed six members of his family at the house. A year later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in and claimed to have had a terrifying paranormal experience, involving a demonic pig, swarms of flies and green slime. A book was written leading to a hit movie and 20 spin-off films. In a 1979 law case, the judge said in his ruling: “Based on what I have heard, it appears that to a large extent the book is a work of fiction.”

9 Fairies at the bottom of the garden

In 1920, a set of pictures came to the attention of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Scot was a keen spiritualist interested in psychic phenomena. The Cottingley Fairies pictures showed two girls frolicking with winged fairies in woodland. The girls were cousins Elsie Wright, 16, and Frances Griffiths, nine. Conan Doyle fell for the pictures and published a story on the affair. In the 1980s, the two cousins admitted the pictures were fakes and that they had mocked them up using cardboard cut-outs of fairies.

10 The Hitler diaries

If true, the discovery of diaries written by Adolf Hitler would have been the biggest historical find of the 20th century. In fact, they were forgeries made by German illustrator Konrad Kujau. German magazine Stern bought the diaries, believing them true, for £2.3 million in 1983. The Sunday Times bought serialisation rights and got the acclaimed historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to authenticate them, forever ruining his reputation. Kujau was eventually sentenced to four years in prison. A number of newspaper editors lost their jobs.

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11 Pasta grows on trees

Of course, journalists aren’t just vulnerable to hoaxes, they also invent them – especially on April Fools’ Day. The most famous prank was carried out on April 1, 1957 by the BBC – incredibly, it was on Panorama and voiced by Richard Dimbleby. The story showed farm workers harvesting pasta from “spaghetti trees”. Some eight million people watched the report and hundreds rang in asking for advice on spaghetti cultivation.

12 Paul is dead

The rumours had been circulating for some time, but it wasn’t until September 1969 that the Drake Times-Delphic newspaper in Iowa published the first story about the death of Paul McCartney. Apparently he died after being decapitated in a car accident, following a row with the rest of the Beatles, and was then secretly replaced by a lookalike.

Soon serious commentators were asking questions and it was being accepted as fact. There were even claims MI5 got involved in order to stop his death triggering mass hysteria among Beatles fans in Britain. Scepticism of the media and politicians amid the Vietnam War may have contributed to the viral nature of the hoax. People began seeing clues everywhere – from hints in records played backwards to artwork on albums, famously Abbey Road which was interpreted as a funeral procession for him. McCartney would later mock the hoax by calling his 1993 album Paul Is Live.

13 Fake memoirs

In 1995, the world of publishing was in awe of the powerful and visceral memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski called Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, describing his life as a child surviving the Holocaust and being liberated from the death camps. It was made up.

Another smash hit memoir A Million Little Pieces was also found to have been mostly fictional. The book tells how author James Frey struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, the suicide of a girlfriend, and finally recovered. One critic called it “the War And Peace of addiction”.

14 Crop circles

From the 1970s to the 1990s, mysterious crop circles with strange and elaborate geometric designs would appear in farmers’ fields. There was speculation the circles were anything from UFO landing sites to Satanic symbols. In 1991, British pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted they’d been behind the phenomenon and demonstrated how it was done using a plank of wood, rope, a baseball cap and wire.

15 The Fiji mermaid

Perhaps the creepiest hoax ever. The mummified body of a mermaid, apparently bought from Japanese sailors, was displayed at PT Barnum’s freak show in the 1840s. It was, of course, a fake. The creature was made from the head and body of a monkey sewn on to the tail of a fish.