Sep 2, 2010

No human is perfect in this world full of Errors. So are the scientists, who several times got hoaxed themselves within their own theories, or tried to fool the audiences, may be. Below is the list of few biggest scientific hoaxes of the era.

1. Piltdown Man

“Piltdown Man” is a very famous Anthropological hoax relating to the discovery of the remains of a then unknown early human. The complete story of this scientific hoax began in the year 1912 by Charles Dawson who affirmed the finding out of some interesting bones from a gravel quarry. Apalaeontologist, fossil scientist, put together all the bones and conceived that they constituted the “missing link” between humans & apes. This theory led scientists on a blind path in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food.

The originality of the specimen remained in the controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a deliberate forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

Timeline:

1908: Dawson claimed discovery of 1st Piltdown fragments.

1912 February: Dawson contacted Woodward about his dicovery.

1912 June: Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard formed further digging team.

1912 June: Team found elephant molar, skull fragments.

1912 June: Team also found right parietal skull bones and the jaw bone.

1912 November: News about the discovery broke out in the popular press.

1912 December: Team presented the official Piltdown man.

1914: Talgai (an Australia) man found, which was considered as confirmation to Piltdown.

1923: Weidenreich reported that Piltdown remains consisted of a human cranium and an orangutan jaw.

1925: Edmonds reported Piltdown geology error but his report was ignored.

1943: Fluorine content test was first proposed.

1948: Woodward published The Earliest Englishman.

1949: Fluorine content test established Piltdown man as relatively recent.

1953: Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley  together exposed the hoax.

2. Archaeoraptor

Again in search of finding the “missing link”, this time between the terrestrial theropod dinosaurs and birds, National Geographic in 1999 described a creature as the intermediate between Dinosaurs & Birds. This description was based on a fossil “Archaeoraptor” found in China. Later, through further scientific study, it was found out to be developed from rejiggered pieces of real fossils from different species. Zhou et al. found that the head and upper body actually belong to a specimen of the primitive fossil bird Yanornis. A 2002 study found that the tail belongs to a small winged dromaeosaur, Microraptor, named in 2000. The legs and feet belong to an as yet unknown animal.

The exposure of this “Archaeoraptor” scandal also exposed the illegal fossil deals conducted in China. It also played up the need for detailed scientific scrutiny of proposed “missing links” theory published in journals which are not peer-reviewed. Although “Archaeoraptor” was a hoax, many consistent examples of feathered dinosaurs have been found which demonstrate the evolutionary connection between birds and other terrestrial theropods.

3. El Chupacabra

The Chupacabra is a legendary cryptid bruited to inhabit parts of the Americas. In 1990′s, thegoats and chickens of Puerto Rico began turning up dead with blood all over and telltale neck wounds. The name, El Chupacabra, was coined from the animal’s reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock, especially goats. Chupar means “to suck” and cabra means “goat”, literally “goat sucker”. Physical descriptions of the creature had variance from mouth to mouth. Eyewitness sightings have been claimed as early as 1995 in Puerto Rico. And since the this goat-sucker-chicken-eater’s legends spread like a wild forest fire from Puerto Rico to Mexico, Chile, Brazil and even the United States. It is supposedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.

This savage chicken-eater was actually found out to be just a hairless wolf and nothing more than a hoax.

4. Rabbit Mother

In 18th-century England, Mary Toft, an English woman from Godalming in Surrey, came under spot light when she hoaxed and/but convinced doctors that she had given birth to 16 rabbits.

Toft became pregnant in 1726 but miscarried. Later, seemingly entranced by a rabbit she had seen at work, she declared to have given birth to various animal parts. John Howard, a local surgeon, examined the patient and punctually notified other prominent physicians of the time. This hoax came to attention of Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household of King George I. St. André declared that Toft was true, but the king sent another surgeon Cyriacus Ahlers, to reexamine. He was skeptical. A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits was written by King George’s surgeon about her case. People stopped serving rabbit stew.

Mary Toft was a famous human by now. She was brought to London for detailed study where, under acute examination, she eventually confessed to her hoax and was subsequently imprisoned as a fraud or hoaxer. The resultant public mockery created panic within the medical profession. Several prominent surgeons’ careers were ruined, and many satirical works were produced, each scathingly critical of the affair criticizing the gullibility of the medical profession over this hoax. Toft was finally released without charge and returned home.

5. Fiji Mermaid

Mermaids had been flaunted at shows for centuries. This concept of presentation of mermaids was first devised and popularizedby circus great P.T. Barnum. He displayed Fiji Mermaid, a mummified body of a creature that was a half mammal and half fish, as all have heard in mermaid stories.  The original presentation was held in and around the United States in the year 1842, but was lost in the 1860s when Barnum’s museum caught fire. This Fiji Mermaid has been copied many times in several attractions since then, including the show of Robert Ripley.

Although there were several believers of mermaids, but the Fiji Mermaid was the torso and head of a baby monkey sewn together to the back half of a fish. This papier-mâché covered artifact in P.T. Barnum’s museum was a biggest hoax of that era.

6. The Turk

It was almost impossible to beat this chess-playing automaton of 1770. The Turk, an Automaton Chess Player was enthusiatically heralded as the next great venture into technology while it toured European countries beating the biggest of the Chess giants. It was constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa. This automatic machine exhibited the ability to play a rock solid game of chess against a human. It also had the ability to perform a knight’s tour*.

The Turk won almost all the games played against human opponents during its exhibitions around Europe and the America for nearly 84 years. It outplayed many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

It was actually a fake chess playing machine that requires a human chess whiz to hide inside and operate the machine using hidden mechanical arms. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was initially revealed only in the 1820s by the Londoner Robert Willis.

* Knight’s tour is in the game of chess that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.

7. Alien Autopsy

In 1990′s, Ray Santilli, a London-based video entrepreneur, revealed a 17 minute blackand white film purporting to be footage of the autopsy of an alien, dating from 1947 from Roswell, New Mexico. This autopsy film was purchased by major television networks internationally and was broadcasted in more than 32 countries worldwide.

In 2006, Santilli himself confessed up to this hoax, saying that the alien autopsy  film was not entirely authentic. All the alien innards in the film were actually sheep brains, raspberry jam and chicken entrails. After this confession, Santilli’s film was largely considered as a hoax.

8. The Cake

In 1997, Brass Eye, UK television series of satirical spoof documentaries, carried an intense andelaborate “investigative report” warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European street drug called “Cake”. It was claimed to purportedly affect an area of the brain called “Shatner’s Bassoon” which results in altering one’s perception of time.

Members of the media lashed out against this Cake, and the UK government even took this serious matter to their Parliament. Whoops-a-Daisy!

It was a satirical hoax!

9. Disappearing Blonde Gene

As the generations are passing, an attention is always driven towards the belief that natural blondes will very soon diappear like a dinosaurs. This hoax has the first impression dating in 1865 and the recent version started in 2012. According to the World Health Organization, and/or few other experts, the people will become extinct by 2202, because of a misinterpretation of recessiveness in genetics.

This story was just a hoax, and the story about the reports from WHO in BBC & CNN was also a hoax. World Health Organization had never done such study and also the blond gene, or alleles for the trait cannot disappear by simple breeding.

10. Nacirema

The Nacirema were purportedly a tribe of individuals living in North America, as depictedbyHorace Miner in his anthropological paper, published in 1956. Miner described that the tribe had many odd and peculiar rituals. Some of these were  “scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument” and “inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.”

Various anthropologists and sociologists generally use this term Nacirema to study and research (with a degree/pretense of anthropological self-distancing) behavioural aspects of citizens of North America.

Nacirema isn’t actually a tribe, but a satire of everyday American life. “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward.

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