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Why do so many people believe things that aren’t true? In an era when claims of “fake news” come as natural as breathing, and social media allows lies to spread and multiply like viruses, the question feels more relevant than ever. From the teenage girls who convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that fairies were real in the 19th century to “Balloon boy” in 2009, Hoax! will explore the most audacious and ambitious tricks in history. And along the way, we’ll uncover the reasons people let themselves be fooled, and how we can live our lives and engage with the media with a more critical eye. Co-hosted by Noble Blood’s Dana Schwartz and pop culture writer Lizzie Logan, we’ll bring you stories of pranks and grifts throughout history so big and bold they make us question why we believe what we believe in the first place.
**New episodes every other week**
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Recent Episodes
Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane
A landlord claimed that his daughter was haunted, by the deceased wife of a former tenant. Most shocking of all, this ghost was accusing her husband of murder. Ghosts aren't real (most of the time,…
Time Traveler John Titor
From 1998 to 2001, a man claiming to be visiting our "world-line" on a mission from the year 2036 enthralled a corner of the nascent internet with his explanations of time travel, the world of the…
Fake Anastasias
Anastasia Romanov inspired a play, an Academy Award-winning movie, and a Dana-and-Lizzie-loving animated feature. But the legend of the missing princess is stranger and more involved than a movie…
The Gulf Breeze UFOtos
In one of the most famous and widely-reported UFO sightings of all time, a Florida man witnessed, photographed and even interacted with alien beings from another planet several times over the course…
The Bristol Princess
A girl showed up at a town near Bristol in 1817 wearing a turban, and everyone went nuts. SOURCES:"The Caraboo Hoax," Margaret RussellJohn Matthew Gutch's narrativeEnglish Eccentrics, by Edith…
April Fool's Day: Google, Spaghetti Trees and Sidd Finch
This episode of Hoax is no fun at all. April Fool's! For our (almost) April 1 episode, we explore the holiday's origins and some of the best pranks of the 20th and 21st centuries: Google's various…
Napoleon is Dead
Stockmarkets are now battlefields. An aide-de-camp arrived in Dover with the startling, thrilling news that Napoleon had been killed, and the British stock market behaved accordingly. The problem…
Crop Circles
Messages from extraterrestrial visitors? Evidence of strange atmospheric conditions? No one knows where crop circles come from or what they mean. Except, we do know, but for believers, that's the…
Joice Heth
P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was…
Van Meegeren's Vermeers
Arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer masterpiece to high-ranking Nazi Herman Goring, dutch painter Han van Meegeren had an innovative and shocking defense: he was guilty not of collaboration but of…
The Piltdown Man
In December 1912, Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist at the British Museum, presented something extraordinary to the Geographical Society: a "missing link" fossil, a species he named "Dawson's…
I, Libertine
Midcentury New Yorkers who couldn't sleep found a friend in Jean Shepherd, the iconoclastic radio personality whose middle of the night monologues made him a cult comedy figure and leader of the…
The Mechanical Turk
During the 18th century, as the industrial revolution picks up.... steam, people are dazzled by expertly constructed mechanical marvels: automatons. But Wolfgang von Kempelen brings something to the…
Lonelygirl15
When YouTube was barely a year old, the the site's users were gripped by the slowly unfolding tale of Bree, the sheltered, beautiful 16 year old girl whose parents kept her locked in her bedroom…
Mumler Spirit Photography
It's the Civil War, and the nation is in deep mourning. William Mumler of Boston has something to help: "spirit photographs" of you and a deceased loved one. Is it a scam, or is technology now…
Report from Iron Mountain
At the height of the Cold War, a "leaked Top Secret Memo" from inside the government proposed a controversial and radical idea: the worst thing that could happen to humanity was worldwide ... peace.…
The Impostress Rabbit
The court anatomist returned the King George I with astonishing news: a woman named Mary Toft has been giving birth.... to rabbits. …
Salvator Mundi
A painting purportedly by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is discovered at a little-known auction house in New Orleans in 2005; a decade later, it fetches the highest price for a work of art ever sold at…
The Wild West in Palisade, Nevada
People traveling through the west by train in the 1800s expected shootouts and danger and cowboys. The citizens of Palisade gave it to them. Sources:"Westward Hoax: The Secret History of Palisade,…
Ern Malley Poetry
Two bored poets decide to prank their least favorite snobby magazine editor by submitting intentionally bad poetry to his literary journal and watching with mirth as he and his fellows delight in…
Frequently Asked Questions
Hoax! has published 24 episodes since July 2025, covering topics in History, News.
Hoax! is currently highly active with new episodes every 2 weeks. Average episode length is 57m.
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