8 Bonkers Hoaxes That Actually Fooled People
Forget the moon landings, NASA is kidnapping scientists and sending them to Mars.
The world is a weird and wonderful place and, which so many news stories that seem frankly unbelievable, perhaps we can be forgiven for letting the odd hoax slip through the net.
After all, we live in a world in which science is helping the paralysed to walk and the blind to see. We've found water on Mars and particles that can be in two places at once, so when the papers report that a time traveller materialised in the middle of New York's Times Square in the 50s, there's a little part of everyone's brain that will probably go, "Sure, why the hell not?"
Sometimes, however, the insane stories that take over the day's headlines are no more than just insane stories, even if they sometimes sound more plausible that the "real" news.
Sometimes they're the result of mistaken identity, sometimes they come out of a nest of wild conspiracy theory, and sometimes they're simply a bid for fame and money by any means necessary.
History is littered with fake fossils, impossible inventions, forged photographs and bogus eyewitness accounts, so it helps to keep your skepticism senses tingling because sometimes, if a story seems to strange to be true, it's because it isn't.