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  There was gypsum at a nearby construction site, and Hull gave the workers a barrel of beer to cut out a big block of the stone for him. The massive block was transported to Chicago, where a sculptor carved a 10-foot giant. The figure was contorted, as if the man died in pain. To add more realism, the figure was repeatedly struck with a set of needles to simulate the appearance of pores, and then ink and acid gave the surface an ancient, weathered appearance.

  The next stage of the plan was to bury the giant on a relative’s farm in Cardiff, NY. However, as many people had seen something big being transported along the route to the farm, Hull wisely decided to wait at least a year to make the “discovery.” Fate was apparently on Hull’s side, as about six months later, legitimate fossilized bones were found on a nearby farm. The stage was now set for the great Cardiff Giant Hoax.

  William C. “Stub” Newell, on whose farm the sculpture was buried, hired some neighbors to help him dig a well near his barn. When their shovels struck something hard and they started to push away the dirt, one of the men at first thought they had found an old Indian burial site. After a little more digging, he realized it was unlike any Indian he had ever seen! While Stub pretended to be shocked, the other men were genuinely astonished.

  Word of the discovery spread quickly, and right away a tent was erected over the giant man and a twenty-five cent admission was charged to the throngs of visitors who began arriving. To handle all the tourists, a stagecoach line set up four trips a day from Syracuse to Newell’s farm. The admission fee to see the giant ancient man was quickly doubled and it looked like Hull’s $2,600 investment was going to pay off. Then the scientists and experts began arriving.

  Hull was sure the jig was up, but to his amazement they didn’t say his giant was a hoax. Half claimed it was indeed a petrified man, while the other half declared it was an ancient stone sculpture—in either case, well worth the long trip and fifty cents admission.

  The real payoff came when a group of investors, led by banker David Hannum, paid Hull over $30,000 to put the Cardiff Giant on display in Syracuse. As $30,000 in 1869 was roughly the equivalent of three-quarters of a million dollars today, Hull instantly became a wealthy man.

  Enter Othniel Charles Marsh, a vertebrate paleontologist from Yale. Upon close examination of the alleged giant, Marsh found telltale chisel marks and areas where the ink and acid hadn’t been sufficiently applied to create that ancient look. Marsh announced the Cardiff Giant was clearly a recent fake, a hoax, a crude fabrication made to fool the public and take money out of the pockets of the gullible. And how did people react to this news that they had been duped? They kept coming and paying money to see “Old Hoaxey” the fake giant!

  (Clearly there was nothing else better to do in rural upstate New York in 1869. Come to think of it, there still isn’t…)

  The Cardiff Giant being raised from his “grave.”

  With all this money passing hands to see an obvious hoax, it was bound to attract the king of blatant fraud and deception, P.T. Barnum. He wanted the Cardiff Giant for himself, but when his offer of over $50,000 was turned down, he had only one option—make his own. He hired someone to surreptitiously make a plaster replica, which he promptly claimed was the “real” fake Cardiff Giant—not that “fake” fake one in Syracuse—and he put it on display in New York City. Even more people paid good money to see this reproduction fake.

  Upon hearing that Barnum’s phony giant was making more money than his original fake, David Hannum uttered the immortal words, that, “A sucker was born every minute.” That phrase was later attributed to Barnum, a mistake he probably neglected to correct, but then veracity was never his strong point.

  The other thing Hannum did was to file a lawsuit against Barnum for the unauthorized copying of a fake, as well as Barnum’s slanderous claim that Hannum’s original fake was the reproduction fake. (This is getting confusing, isn’t it?)

  So, what happened to the principle players in this story? George Hull lost his fortune to bad investments. (Can you say bad karma?) He tried to “discover” another giant in Colorado, but this time the public didn’t buy it. He eventually went to England and faded into obscurity.

  Hannum’s lawsuit was dismissed, as making a copy of an admitted fake wasn’t a crime. Barnum continued to make boatloads of money with his Cardiff Giant and many other fakes and oddities. His version of the giant is now on display at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum near Detroit. The original fake is in the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

  So, almost a century and a half after the enormous, bogus Cardiff Giant emerged from the dirt of an upstate New York farm, people are still paying to see both him and his twin!

  Behold the enduring power of the hoax!

  Another Giant Hoax

  One would have thought that memories of the Cardiff Giant hoax would still be fresh in people’s minds just ten years later, especially in a town only 50 miles away. But there truly is a sucker born every minute (or second), and hotel owner John Thompson correctly surmised that what fooled people once could fool them again.

  While Thompson gets an “F” for originality, he most certainly scores an “A” for composition and execution. Whereas the Cardiff Giant was carved out of rock, Thompson was far more ingenious, or at least the local mechanic he enlisted, Ira Dean, was, when he came up with a concoction of cow’s blood, eggs, and iron filings all mixed together in some type of thick plaster. With this semi-organic material, Dean sculpted a 7-foot-tall “prehistoric” man, and then baked the massive figure until it hardened like a rock.

  Obviously, just digging a hole and burying the giant man would elicit great suspicion when it was easily uncovered from the churned up earth. No, Thompson needed something cleverer if he was to draw more customers to his hotel in Taughannock Falls, New York. Workmen were widening a road on Thompson’s property, so he and his associates (Dean and a third man, Frank Creque) carefully planned for these excavators to “discover” the prehistoric wonder.

  Thompson and his two co-conspirators tunneled sideways to a spot they knew the workmen would be digging up. They managed to push the enormous 800-pound giant through the tunnel, and even wrapped some tree roots around it to give the impression that it had been there for ages. And lo and behold, on a hot summer day in July of 1879, one of the workmen was astounded when he uncovered the prehistoric petrified man.

  As the Taughannock Giant was found on Thompson’s property, it was his right to display it and sell photos to the thousands of curiosity-seekers who traveled far and wide to view this huge man from the distant past. In another stroke of genius, Thompson even allowed scientists from Cornell to chip off a few pieces of the giant for analysis, knowing full well that they would find substances consistent with animal blood and tissue. The scientists declared that the Taughannock Giant was indeed the real deal, which brought even more paying customers Thompson’s way.

  The lucrative scheme unraveled, however, when Creque had a little too much to drink. They say loose lips sink ships, and drunk ones sink hoaxes. Creque foolishly spilled the beans on the whole story. However, even with the truth revealed, the scientists who had examined and analyzed the giant still maintained that it was a real petrified man, and that Creque was lying! It wasn’t until Dean mixed another batch of his prehistoric batter and baked a little giant for the scientists that they finally admitted they had been duped.

  The fraud revealed, the flood of tourists dwindled to a trickle, then stopped altogether. As there’s nothing more passé than a fake giant, it was decided to remove the figure from where it had been displayed. Unfortunately, moving an 800-pound hoax is easier said than done, and it was dropped and broke into pieces. The pieces were buried somewhere on the property, and the memory of the Taughannock Giant slowly faded.

  Other hoaxers have subsequently created giants and other creatures, and even today good scientists are going bad by sticking bones of different dinosaurs together and claiming they have discovered new species. While moder
n technology has made it harder to pull off a successful hoax, there will always be those who will try to separate the gullible from their money…and more often than not, they will probably succeed.

  Piltdown Man

  One of the obstacles to firmly establishing the Theory of Evolution in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the incomplete fossil record. The gap from the apelike creatures to the more human forms was bothersome, to say the least, and many sought the elusive “missing link.”

  Enter Piltdown Man, first formally introduced to the world in 1912. Far from being a complete skeleton, all that had been found was a section of an apelike jaw coupled with a large brain-capacity skull—indicative of a modern human—but it was more than enough to confound and amaze the scientific community. Many paleontologists hailed the find as the link that forged the unbroken chain of human evolution. The only problem was that it was about as real as the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  From 1908 to 1912, Charles Dawson, who was a lawyer by profession, claimed that he was given pieces of the bones from someone working in the Piltdown quarry in England. However, there were those who believed that the skull and jaw—with a few worn, human-type teeth—were from different animals, and it was simply coincidence that they were found together. Healthy skepticism abounded until 1915, when more alleged discoveries surfaced.

  Sketch of the reconstructed skull.

  Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the quarry, Piltdown II hit the scene. Skeptics who had discounted the first skull and jaw now also had to consider that the chances of two such sets of bones being found only two miles apart were beyond mere coincidence. Despite the lingering skepticism, however, some Englishmen proudly puffed out their chests and declared that the ancestor of mankind was British. Still, something just didn’t look right…

  The more bits and pieces of ancient hominids that were uncovered in Africa and Asia, the more Piltdown Man didn’t seem to fit into the emerging scheme of things, yet still it held sway over some paleontologists. Then came a truly momentous and legitimate discovery, Australopithecus africanus, which had been painstakingly uncovered in South Africa by Raymond Dart. The skull fragments of the three-year-old Taung child, as it came to be known, were not quite ape, but not quite human, and dated to over one million years. Shaped animal bones found nearby led Dart to conclude that the child’s “people” were toolmakers.

  It was all remarkable new information, if true, and therein lay the dilemma. Those who doubted the authenticity of Piltdown Man cast an equally disbelieving eye at the Taung child, and those who believed in Piltdown Man claimed that it was Dart’s discovery that was the odd link that didn’t fit. So not only did the Piltdown Man waste precious research time and money, it also created obstacles to research into genuine fossils. While Dart was disgusted by the controversy, in the following decades new discoveries did establish Australopithecus as a vital part of the evolutionary chain, although the tool-making debate still continues.

  The Piltdown problem persisted, however, for over forty years. While its importance gradually eroded until it was practically ignored, it wasn’t until 1953 when the hoax was finally confirmed by Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Kenneth Oakley, and Joseph Weiner. The tip-off was the file marks on the teeth, which no one had previously noticed. The teeth had been reshaped to fit the jaw. Newly developed tests then showed that the jaw was actually only a 500-year-old orangutan bone. The skull was human, but found to be of an age of just 600 years—a far cry from an ancient fossil. Whoever perpetrated the hoax had treated the bones to make them appear to be ancient. And many trained observers fell for it all.

  It was most likely Charles Dawson, himself, who produced the fake, and it now appears as though this was not his only hoax. Why his personal character wasn’t examined more closely is a mystery (remember, he was a lawyer, after all), but perhaps it has something to do with British scientists being too eager to believe that the missing link had been found on British soil. Unfortunately, when the hoax was uncovered, Dawson was unavailable for comment—having died back in 1919—but he probably died laughing.

  The Piltdown Man is now a universal symbol of fraud, gullibility, and the failure to be objective when something too good to be true comes your way. It’s a shame that people feel compelled to trick their colleagues, as it is hard enough gathering evidence, conducting experiments, and drawing valid conclusions.

  The writer Dante had the right idea. He placed souls who committed fraud in the Malebolge—the eighth level of hell just one flight up from Satan. Unfortunately today, those who fabricate and deceive are often placed in Congress…

  “The phonograph has no commercial value at all.”

  Thomas Edison 1880s

  “The radio craze will die out in time.”

  Thomas Edison, 1922

  “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”

  David Sarnoff, American radio pioneer, 1921

  “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

  Lee de Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926

  “Television won't last. It’s a flash in the pan.”

  Mary Somerville, radio broadcaster, 1948

  “Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

  Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 1946

  Missing the Link

  Generations have learned about the world from National Geographic magazine. The National Geographic Society has funded important research and education for over a century, and has been a powerful voice for science. Unfortunately, even such venerable organizations as this can have a misstep, such as when they declared the discovery of a missing link in 1999.

  One of the hotly debated issues in paleontology is the origin of birds, with two camps having formed. One supports the theory that they originated from dinosaurs, while the other camp maintains birds descended from a different group, perhaps a common ancestor of both birds and dinosaurs. The National Geographic Society was in the dinosaur camp, and when the perfect, 125-million-year-old missing link fossil appeared in Liaoning,China, they thought they had won their case.

  The society funded the research conducted on the fossil of Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, “ancient bird of prey from Liaoning.” The scientists chosen were Stephen Czerkas of the Dinosaur Museum in Utah and Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their findings were announced in October of 1999 at a press conference in Washington D.C. At the same time, the November issue of National Geographic magazine featured the article Feathers for T. rex? New birdlike fossils are missing links in dinosaur evolution.

  The press conference and article described this animal as having the straight tail of a dinosaur and the feathered body of a bird the size of a turkey. In glowing terms, the fossil was touted as “the true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds. It seems to capture the paleontological ‘moment’ when dinosaurs were becoming birds,” and its “mix of advanced and primitive features is exactly what scientists would expect to find in dinosaurs experimenting with flight.”

  (Uh, oh. If there’s anything in science that should send up a red flag, it’s finding exactly what you are looking for to prove your theory!)

  The discovery that was to change “everything from lunch boxes to museum exhibits” was, in truth, quite a turkey, but one that would neither change lunch boxes or museum exhibits, and certainly not text books. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis actually captured the moment when hoaxers glued the fossil tail of a dinosaur to the fossil of a bird-like animal. Instead of discovering the missing link, the National Geographic team missed the link between the region where the alleged fossil was found and its notorious reputation for producing fakes.

  In fact, people in the L
iaoning province were well known for “enhancing” or just plain fabricating fossils by carving and cementing together fake creatures for fun and profit. It would be similar to going into an art museum’s gift shop and buying a painting, then later being shocked that what you actually purchased was a reproduction.

  Come on paleontologists, if you have just suddenly found exactly what you were looking for to prove your theory of the evolution of birds from a fossil “discovered” in a province with a reputation for fake fossils, shouldn’t you be just a bit more cautious before making any announcements to the world?

  In fairness, they did seek out other experts and they did receive several dissenting opinions. They just chose to disregard them.

  Photos of the fossil had been sent to Storrs L. Olson, the curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution. He disagreed that what the National Geographic team was calling feathers were actually the fossil remains of feathers. University of Kansas paleontologist Larry D. Martin, who specializes in bird fossils, couldn’t find any feathers on the fossil, either. He even went so far as to point out that the fossil looked as though it had been pieced together from more than one animal, and that the all-important bones which should have linked the tail to the body were missing. Other scientists also noted the missing bones and evidence of fakery. Both publications Nature and Science rejected Czerkas and Xu’s report.

  Despite these additional red flags, the society proceeded with their announcement, which prompted Olson to declare in disgust that the society had done nothing less than “reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated tabloid journalism.”

  A harsh, but not unfounded criticism for the century-old society, from which we expect the highest standards to be maintained.