The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the biggest literary forgeries of all time, and since it appeared over 100 years ago, its effects have been unbelievably far-reaching. The book, which was deliberately forged by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski sometime around 1900, purports to describe the secrets of a clandestine group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion. Mixing outright fabrication with plagiarism from other sources, it details a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination through...

The superstardom earned by The Beatles in late 1960s helped produce the “Paul is Dead” hoax, which still remains one of the biggest legends in music. It started when some fans began to claim that hidden messages stating that Paul McCartney was dead could be heard when certain Beatles songs were played backwards. The rumor gained steam with the help of radio disc jockeys and conspiracy theorists, and a legend arose that McCartney had died in a car accident during the recording of one...

The Hitler diaries were a collection of documents penned by master forger Konrad Kujau and passed off as the personal journals of Adolf Hitler. The scammers claimed that after being recovered from the wreckage of a plane that crashed in Germany in 1945, the diaries were* smuggled out of East Germany by a man known as “Dr. Fischer.”* They were eventually bought for 10 million German marks by the magazine Stern, which published extracts from them in one of its issues in 1983. But the extreme...

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<p>If the story behind it is indeed true, then the Idaho hoax...

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<p>In the 1920s, renowned industrialist Howard Hughes was one of...