Often, scientific studies are meant to advance our understanding of the world, providing us with irreplaceable tools to solve our daily problems. Occasionally, though, science goes beyond the necessary and enters the realm of the ridiculous just because the scientists didn’t have anything better to do that day.

Ever hear a child ask stupid questions like: “What if birds pooped lying down?” Although most of us would laugh and ignore those questions, some scientists make a serious face and say, “Well, let’s find out.”

To know what we’re talking about, here are some of the most hilariously unnecessary scientific studies ever conducted.

10 How Different Are Apples And Oranges Really?

We’ve been comfortably using the supposed differences between apples and oranges in arguments at parties ever since someone came up with the simile ” . . . like comparing apples and oranges.” It makes sense, too, as they look and taste quite different and it serves the purpose of the argument well. That clearly didn’t sit well with surgeon James E. Barone, who decided to take a closer look at the whole thing.

As it turns out, according to an elaborate paper that was presented at the Connecticut Society of American Board Surgeons, apples and oranges are actually quite similar. After carrying out experiments—presumably hunched over their work desks for hours and looking all serious—they concluded that the only difference between apples and oranges was in their color and type of seeds. Otherwise, they might as well be the same fruit.

Thanks to them, we’re back to having no phrase to compare two seemingly unrelated things in casual conversations.^[1]

9 How Do Shrimps Fare Walking On A Treadmill?

What do you think when you look at shrimp?

For the foodies, it may be all about their texture and what they could be paired with. For the casual observer, they may look like just another one of the countless marine species that have no significant impact on our lives. For the scientists who carried out this study, though, the first question that came to their minds was: “So what if we put them on a treadmill?”

Under the guise of studying the effects of stress on marine life when they were only trying to decisively answer a ridiculous question by one of their kids, a couple of scientists injected some shrimp with bacterial infections and put them on a tiny underwater treadmill to see what would happen.

In a result that would not surprise—or even interest—anyone anywhere whatsoever, they concluded that uninfected shrimp performed better than their infected counterparts. The best (or worst) part? The study got $682,570 of taxpayer funding from the National Science Foundation.^[2]

8 Is It Better To Smash An Empty Or Full Beer Bottle On Someone’s Head?

Anyone who has ever been in a bar fight would remember the things that were going through his head at the time: “What’s happening?” “Am I bleeding?” “How will I get home?”

These are probably the most common things, though we can surely say that the science of what kind of beer bottles you should use to smash someone’s head wasn’t one of them. For the scientists who went forward and conducted that exact study, however, it was a question worth answering.

They took full as well as empty half-liter beer bottles and conducted a stress test on them in a drop tower, which tells us that they really prepared for this. As they found out, empty beer bottles broke at 40 J of energy and full ones at 30 J.

If that sounds like a significant difference, it’s really not. Both of those are enough to fracture the human skull, something that bar brawlers have known since bars (or beer bottles) were invented.^[3]

7 How To Pee To Avoid Splash Back?

For all the men out there, peeing in unfamiliar washrooms has always been a sort of gamble. One of the reasons is the splash-back mechanics of the pot. You never know how much of it you’re going to get on your shoes and pants, and we’ve all really made peace with the fact.

Is it worth spending resources and conducting a full-fledged scientific study on? No, most men would say—but not these three scientists who believe it’s a problem worth investigating.

In a study conducted at Brigham Young University in the appropriately named Splash Lab, they 3-D-printed a urethra and did all kinds of elaborate experiments to determine exactly what causes the worst kind of splash back. And by “elaborate,” we mean “elaborate”—with a team of scientists and a full-fledged lab setup.^[4]

They determined that the size of the pee droplets or the speed with which you pee doesn’t matter at all. Rather, it’s about the angle, even if most of us would have figured that out on one of our drunk nights without any lab equipment whatsoever.

6 What’s The Mathematical Formula For Perfect Cheese On Toast?

Putting cheese on toast seems like a perfectly straightforward thing to do. You just take the cheese and the toast and . . . put the cheese on top of the toast.

Sure, some people may want it to be perfect and may go to some lengths to incorporate advanced cheese-putting techniques into their breakfast routine. But by and large, people don’t seem to, say, need a mathematical formula to do it.

The Royal Society of Chemistry along with the British Cheese Board vehemently disagrees, though. They actually have a mathematical formula—complete with complex variables and units of measurement that have no business being on a formula for cheese on toast—to perfectly do it.^[5]

They tweaked the different variables—like the temperature and texture of the cheese—under strict lab conditions to come up with it, too, though we still maintain that there was absolutely no need for them to do so in the first place.

5 How To Walk Without Spilling Your Coffee?

Anyone who has ever had to get up from his desk and walk somewhere with a cup of coffee in one hand knows the problems that come with that decision. Unless you’re gifted at the art of balancing—or at least have spent considerable time practicing exactly that—there’s a good chance that you’ll spill some of it.

And for most of us, that’s a trade-off we’re willing to make as the more time that the coffee is in your immediate reach, the more coffee you can drink because coffee is awesome. Is the problem big enough for a scientific study, though? We don’t think so.

However, that’s not true for the scientists who have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the physics behind coffee spills while walking. Using complex phrases like “fluid-structure interaction of the coffee cup,” “resonance region,” and “maximum spillage,” the study took an in-depth look into how we can optimize our walking-with-coffee experiences.

They concluded—totally without irony and presumably with straight faces—that one of the best ways to walk with coffee is to walk backward, even if you’d look stupid doing it and the spilling thing really is not that big of a problem anyway. They also suggest a clawlike hold of the cup to further improve the results.^[6]

4 Take A Photo Without Anyone Blinking?

If you’re the designated photographer for any family gathering (it’s not because you’re ugly, we swear; you’re just very good at it), you’ll be familiar with the problem of that one person who always ends up blinking in the final image, no matter what you do.

It’s not always the same person, either. It can be anyone, and they probably didn’t even do it consciously (unless some evil person is actually timing their blinks with the click for the kicks).

What’s really a nonissue for most casual photographers, however, is something worth studying for CSIRO physicist Dr. Piers Barnes. He employed probability and calculus to come up with an equation to determine exactly how many photographs you’d need to take (with a 99 percent confidence level) to ensure that you get one without anybody blinking.

He determined that the greater the number of people in the photo, the higher the chances of unintentional blinks. If the number of people is in the mid-range, say somewhere around 20, you’d have to take about six photographs if the light is good and about 10 if it’s not.^[7]

3 How Does Sitting For A Long Time Affect A Cow’s Ability To Stand Up?

We all know that cows are difficult to understand. You’re never sure what they want from just the expressions on their faces as they’re spectacularly devoid of any show of emotion. However, we can’t complain because they provide us with food and milk. They also laze about for a long time depending on how leisurely they’re feeling that day because, let’s face it, they’re cows and that’s what they do.

For the scientists who conducted this study, which was published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, there was evidently some scientific data to be collected among all the sitting down and standing up that the cows were doing, which the researchers set out to find. Data like “are cows that have been sitting down for a longer time more likely to stand up?”^[8]

After recording and studying tens of thousands of instances of cows lying down with specially installed sensors, the scientists concluded that, yes, the longer a cow sits, the more likely it is to stand back up.

2 How Uncomfortable Is Wet Underwear Really?

If you’ve ever found yourself in the rain or jumped into the water without a change of clothes at hand, you’d know the trouble you’re in—wet undergarments. Despite our presumably best efforts to advance underwear tech, not much progress has been made on how to minimize that discomfort. It’s bad, but then it’s also something we learn to live with.

Except for these scientists, who were just not buying it. Does it really make you uncomfortable?

To get to the bottom of it, they set up a study of their own—complete with test subjects and verifiable scientific research. They took eight men, put them in wet underwear, and monitored their skin and rectal temperatures as well as weight loss during a 60-minute period. This included details like the rate of shivering and visible discomfort.

In a result that would not be called surprising in any way, they concluded that, yes, wet underwear does make you colder and more uncomfortable and the thickness of the material played a big role in the results.^[9]

1 What’s Up With Navel Fluff?

The belly button serves no discernible purpose other than being part of the overall look of the body that we’d all look pretty creepy without. The only times we give it any attention are the few days we decide it needs to be cleaned out. Other than that, it’s sort of just there in the background.

If we asked you the exact nature of the fluff that accumulates there, most of us would reply with “probably dirt, who cares?” Though that’s not enough for this scientist from Vienna University of Technology, who spent over four years studying the precise contents of navel lint.

From 2005 to 2009, Georg Steinhauser collected 503 pieces of his own navel fluff and carefully studied it for clues as to what it could be. You can say that it turned into an obsession at some point as he also started asking other people about their navel fluff.

Hopefully, he added to his readings—or maybe he just weirded some people out for no reason. He concluded that the lint was actually directed by the type of hair found in the belly button and mostly came from the shirt or T-shirt he was wearing that day.^[10]

Himanshu can be found shouting obscenities at strangers on Twitter @RudeRidingRomeo or making amateur drawings on Instagram @anartism_. He has written for Screen Rant, Forbes, Cracked, Modern Rogue, and Arre. Pay him money for writing stuff for you here: [email protected]

Gingerbread houses tend to abound during the holiday season. Not all of the ginger-flavored molasses cake buildings are simple residences, though. Some are gigantic constructions built by teams using hundreds of kilograms of confectionery of all types. These chefs spend long hours baking and assembling their gingerbread creations, but in the end, they all agree that the joy their creations bring to them and others makes their labors of love worthwhile. These ten elaborate gingerbread houses indicate why they felt this way.

10 US Capitol Building

In 2013, the US Capitol building occupied the entrance to the Pentagon’s Army Executive Dining Facility. Made of licorice garland and candy adornments and decorated with icicles of sugar and melting drifts of “snow,” the replica building was 1.4 meters (4.5 ft) long and 0.9 meters (3 ft) wide and weighed over 23 kilograms (50 lb). Finishing touches included a lawn of green-dyed, crushed cornflakes mixed with melted marshmallows and inverted ice cream cone trees, tiny candles in the windows, and miniature wreaths made of green icing and festooned with red icing bows. Candy canes doubled as columns, and a Statue of Freedom carved by Sergent Kyoungmin Park topped the gingerbread building’s dome.

The Capitol was designed by Specialist Samantha Poe, whose family includes several engineers. Before joining the Army, Poe was a chef at five-star restaurants, and she enjoyed the mathematics that went into designing the gingerbread building to correct scale and proportions. Sergent Rose Picard, a pastry chef, assisted in assembling the gingerbread building. The project took the soldiers six days to complete, constructing it in addition to their regular duties. The Capitol impressed generals, who came to shake the soldiers’ hands.

9 Waddesdon Manor

In 2016, a team of Biscuiteers (a London cookie boutique) employees spent an astonishing 500 hours constructing a huge cutaway gingerbread replica of Waddesdon Manor, a French Renaissance–style chateau in Buckinghamshire. The gingerbread edifice showed off several splendid rooms, each constructed in astonishing detail.

The pink guest bedroom was furnished with a chest, a vanity, and a canopy bed. The paneled walls were decorated with carved wall molding and baseboards. There were also paintings, parrot statues, lamps, a mirror, curtains, and an elaborate rug.

The billiard room contained a billiards table, a red love seat complete with pillows, triangular windows with green panes, embossed walls, and a red carpet. The dining room featured a table set for ten, an elegant rug, a plank floor, and sideboards and was decorated with paintings, flower baskets, a clock, and other exquisite touches.

8 Town Hall Village

To create the gingerbread village that occupied the lobby of Melbourne’s town hall in December 2014, pastry chefs Deniz Karaca and Anna Polyviou enlisted the help of Karaca’s 12-member team and a number of volunteers, who spent 2,000 hours building the tiny town. The backdrop for the village required 800 miniature Christmas trees, according to Karaca.

The village’s buildings included such local landmarks as the Melbourne Town hall, the Melbourne Cricket Hall, Luna Park, and Flemington Racecourse. Polyviou and her team also constructed a gingerbread-brick house decorated with lollipops, M&Ms, chocolate freckles, and licorice. Visitors were asked to donate a gold coin; proceeds went to Make-A-Wish Australia.

7 Life-Size House

Each year, the gingerbread constructions of Scott Tennant, the executive pastry chef of Nemacolin Woodlands Resort’s Chateau LaFayette, are different. In 2016, he, his staff of ten, and the resort’s carpentry shop joined forces to create a house large enough for adults to enter. The house was edible, and some visitors tried to break off samples. Tenant found “a fingerprint in the piping, or candies missing.”

After the carpenters finished the base for the house, Tennant and his staff took over. After their regular hours, he and his team worked 600 night hours to create the house. Tennant gave away a few of his trade secrets: With a hand saw, he cut notches into cookies before slicing them to size. The resulting discs adorned the edge of a wall.

6 Two-Story House

In 2016, a 7-meter (22 ft), two-story gingerbread house was built over a wooden frame in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Chefs added 7,750 pieces of gingerbread as well as hundreds of kilograms of icing and candy. The hotel’s executive pastry chef, Kimberly Tighe, and her staff rebuild the house each holiday season. The construction materials are reused each year, and the uneaten edible parts are composted.

Children often sample the exterior of the house, but repair materials, in the form of peppermint canes, gingerbread men, jelly slices, Christmas tree marshmallows, and gumdrops, are on hand for the twice-daily, four-hour sessions the chefs spend replacing eaten items. The house features a balcony, an electric train that runs in and out of the house, cookie trim, a clock, gingerbread bricks, and icing mortar.

5 San Francisco Ferry Building

Angela Salvatore, the pastry chef of San Francisco’s Waterbar restaurant, has experience creating confectionery replicas of famous places, including Candlestick Park and the Palace of Fine Arts. But, in 2016, she outdid herself with her latest construction, a 1.8-meter-long (6 ft), 0.8-meter-tall (2.5 ft) tall replica of the San Francisco Ferry Building. Salvatore and her team toiled for 130 hours to create the massive replica.

Cookie reindeer pull Santa’s sled across the gumpaste flag–bedecked rooftop, Rudolph halting inches from the structure’s central tower. Down below, a farmer’s market is in full swing, as vendors sell fruit (aka Runts) and soap (aka Pez) as well as flowers, eggs, and ice cream made of candy. A snowman and a Christmas tree piled high with gifts add touches of good cheer. The gingerbread Ferry House helped to bring more visitors to the Waterbar.

4 Hotel Corque House

Again, in 2016, the lobby of the Hotel Corque in Solvang, California, was home to a giant gingerbread house created by baker Bent Olsen and his assistant, Louis Rojas. The children’s playhouse–size edifice wasn’t the first that the seasoned baker has created. “He’s been doing this since 1984,” the hotel’s hospitality manager, John Martino, said. For Olsen, variety adds spice to his art. Each year, he changes colors and designs.

The edible ingredients of 2016’s construction weighed 113 kilograms (250 lb). Olsen and Rojas assembled the house, which was then transported to the hotel lobby, where they put on the finishing touches. The house was on display throughout the holidays, and Olsen returned weekly to replace icing icicles that children broke off as samples.

3 Wrigley Field

A gingerbread replica of Chicago’s Wrigley Field created in 2016 measured 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters (4 ft x 4 ft) and weighed over 180 kilograms (400 lb). The construction taxed Gerald Madero’s math and carpentry skills and took him and his team 70 hours to complete. One of the trickiest tasks was shaping the walls by adding “curves,” Madero said, and making the gingerbread building work with the structural confines of the baseball stadium’s diamond shape.

Before he became the head chef at the Forest Hills Country Club in Rockford, Illinois, Madero was a carpenter, which helped him to figure out the angles of the stadium’s construction. Complete with a playing field, a gigantic scoreboard, and seating and festooned with peppermints and candy canes, the Home of the Cubs also featured Santa waving from his sleigh.

2 World’s Biggest Village

In 2014, his home’s kitchen and dining room were a mess, chef Jon Lovitch admits. They looked as if they’d been visited by Betty Crocker while high on mushrooms. Competing for a world record, Lovitch set out to build the planet’s largest gingerbread village, basing his community on the Clement Clark Moore poem, “A Visit from St. Nick.” His 45-square-meter (480 ft²) town weighed 2.5 tons and occupied a circular platform in the New York Hall of Science. A skylight above the platform brought sunlight to the village, called GingerBread Lane. Independent inspectors examined the complete village and reported their findings to Guinness.

Lovitch’s hard work paid off. His village, containing 1,102 buildings, won him the coveted honor, the third he has collected. Against a background of pine trees, his village wound around the wall of the Hall of Science’s elevated walkway behind a protective transparent plexiglas screen to guard it from children who may have wanted to see it a little too up close and personal.

1 School

Katie Wood, a Kansas art teacher, gave her place of employment a special Christmas gift in 2016: a gingerbread replica of Topeka High, where she teaches. The school, she said, is “a kind of magical place at times,” where she feels at home among her second family, the school’s students and her colleagues.

The gingerbread high school is 102 centimeters (40 in) long, 76 centimeters (30 in) tall, and 51 centimeters (20 in) wide. It is made of graham crackers, Tootsie Rolls, M&Ms, icing, and other ingredients. Inverted ice cream cones and upright miniature Hershey’s chocolate bars form part of the clock tower’s rooftop.

Gary Pullman lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His 2016 urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt, was published by The Wild Rose Press. An instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he writes several blogs, including Chillers and Thrillers: A Blog on the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror Fiction and Nightmare Novels and Other tales of Terror.

A hoax is usually defined as a humorous deception. While people may set out to deceive for all sorts of reasons – money, pride, guilt, being just a few, the hoaxer’s motives are purer. They will spend days, sometimes years, perpetuating the hoax for their own private amusement.

Some hoaxers go to enormous trouble, time and money to really sell their hoax to their unsuspecting target. Unfortunately, when, inevitably perhaps, the joke is rumbled, the targets do not always appreciate the amount of effort that was put in.

Here are 10 hoaxes that were perpetrated, just for the fun of it.

See Also: 10 Viral Photos That Were Proven To Be Hoaxes

10 Martin Marty and Franz Bibfeldt

Franz Bibfeldt was, supposedly, a German theologian who had written extensively about the Year Zero, that in-between year when the old BC calendar ended, and the new AD calendar began. Bibfeldt’s 1927 PhD thesis has been cited extensively in a number of academic periodicals.

Which is strange, since he never wrote a PhD thesis.

In fact, Bibfeldt never wrote anything. He began life as a footnote in a college essay. Robert Clausen, with a deadline looming, invented Bibfeldt and quoted him in his essay, relying on the fact that his tutor wouldn’t check. His roommate, Martin Marty, thought the made-up name was funny, and the two began to cite him everywhere. They wrote about him in the college magazine, and placed orders for his books at the university bookshop (the request always came back as out of stock), and made loan requests at the library. (Same).

Since his first appearance, Franz Bibfeldt has been embraced by theologians with a sense of humor all around the world, although most enthusiastically in the Divinity School at The University of Chicago, where, coincidentally, Martin Marty taught for 35 years.

9 The Dreadnought Hoax

Virginia Woolf is not particularly remembered for her practical jokes. However, in 1910, she, along with several literary friends, dressed in exotic clothes, blacked their faces and blagged their way onto a famous British battleship.

The friends, all part of the Bloomsbury group of modernist writers, posed as the Abyssinian royal family, with Woolf’s brother playing the part of the Abyssinian emperor. To get into the role, the friends all learned a little Swahili. Unfortunately, Swahili was not the official, nor the unofficial, language of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia.

But points for trying.

The welcome committee seemed not to notice that these were white people in make-up, and gave the them the VIP tour of the battleship. They also failed to notice that the beard of one of the party wasn’t quite attached to his face, which was lucky. Luckier still, the beard fell off altogether just after they disembarked.
When the story broke, the Royal Navy were embarrassed and threatened to sue. In the end, they decided to let the matter quietly drop. Which was probably wise. After all, the ‘Abyssinian’s’ disguise was rather thin. And, while the group did take the trouble to learn Swahili, no one bothered to check how to spell Abyssinia when they wrote the memo telling the navy they were coming.

That should have tipped them off right there.

8 The Banana Skin Hoax

The 1960s was an era of peace, love and experimentation. In particular, experimentation with drugs. LSD was the drug of the moment, but, despite what legend would have us believe, it was not always readily available. Nor was it cheap.

A rumor began to spread that bananas had the same chemical ingredients as LSD, and so, with the right treatment, could be turned from humble fruit to fabulous hallucinogenic. Strangely, the rumor was given credence by the song Mellow Yellow, by Donovan, which was released at the same time. The lyrics, which Donovan claimed were about a yellow vibrator, accidentally and coincidentally could be interpreted as referring to the special properties of the ‘electrical banana’, which, Donovan said, ‘Is bound to be the very next phase’.

And it was.

While it is true that bananas did contain some of the ingredients of LSD, principally serotonin, the amounts were far to small to produce any effect on the smoker. The origin of the hoax is thought to have been the 1967 issue of a counterculture magazine called Berkeley Barb, where the Recipe of the Week explained how to prepare the banana skins. (Apparently, you only used the white underside of the banana skin, not the whole thing).

Within a few months, the story was accepted as fact, and stories about the properties of bananas were reported in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Another recipe for cooking the drug appeared in The Anarchist Handbook of 1970, showing that, despite the fact that smokers never got high, the rumor just would not quit.

In fact, the story still resurfaces regularly, despite the fact that it has been thoroughly debunked. No one seems to have gained from the hoax, except, perhaps, banana growers.

7 The Maggie Murphy Potato Hoax

Some hoaxes require elaborate planning. Others, not so much. Joseph B Swan preferred to go with the easy option. Swan was a farmer from Colorado, who, apparently, had a taste for practical jokes. And potatoes.

With the aid of the local newspaper, he persuaded the potato growing community that he had managed to grow 26,000 pounds of potatoes in a single year on one acre of land, with his special variety, called the Maggie Murphy.

Which is a lot of spuds.

Not only that, he said, but he managed to grow a giant potato, so large it weighed in at over 86 pounds.

The potato growing community is, it seems, skeptical by nature, and they wanted proof. Swan, and his reporter friend, decided to provide it, and a photograph of swan hefting an enormous potato over his shoulder went the 1895 equivalent of ‘viral’.

The photograph was reproduced all over the country, but some experts soon declared it to be faked. They were right. The ‘potato’ was, in fact, a piece of wood, specially carved for the purpose. This didn’t stop enthusiastic potato growers inundating Swan with letters begging for some of his special potato seed.

In the end, Swan got fed up with the whole joke, and informed the disappointed potato enthusiasts that the magnificent potato had been stolen, and he was going out of the spud business.

6 The Erotic Novel Hoax

There has always been an argument about what is, and what is not, good literature. When a book contains a lot of sex, the lines can be even more blurred
In an experiment to prove that even reputable publishing houses will publish any old rubbish as long as it contains steamy sex scenes, a group of 24 journalists from Newsday, led by columnist Mike McGrady, jointly wrote ‘Naked Came the Stranger’.

They deliberately wrote the novel badly, with wooden characters, rubbish dialogue and a ridiculous plot. But with lots and lots of gratuitous sex.

Not only was the novel picked up by a publisher, it was reviewed in reputable newspapers, including The New York Times, who failed to spot that it was a spoof. The book even became a best seller.

At which point, the purpose of the joke seemed to go awry a little.

McGrady and his colleagues revealed that the book was a hoax, which only further increased sales. The group ‘outed’ themselves on The David Frost’ show, following which the book spent 13 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List.

A film of the same name, which had nothing to do with their book, but which piggy-backed off its notoriety, also followed.

The moral of the story seems to be, perhaps, that trying to define what ‘literature’ is, is an impossible task. Alternatively, it might just mean that people like mucky books.

Who can tell?

5 The Plainfield Teacher’s College Football Team

1941 was a good year for the Plainfield Teacher’s College Football Team.

Morris Newburger and his friends took an interest in college football, and would study the results, which were printed in the back of the New York newspapers.
One day, presumably when he had nothing much to do, Newburger took to wondering how the scores were gathered, and whether some of the more unlikely sounding colleges were actually real.

Which got him wondering further. What if someone sent in an imaginary score? Would the newspaper print it?

There was only one way to find out, so he called all the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and every other New York paper he could think of. And he told them that Plainfield Teachers College had beaten Winona, 27-3.

That Sunday, the result was printed on the back page of the Herald Tribune. And all 11 other New York papers.

He didn’t stop there.

The following week Plainfield Teachers College won again, and Newburger and his friends phoned all the New York papers, and the papers in Philadelphia. Now the college was playing in 2 states.

Interest in the team grew, and Newburger had a phone line installed, especially for the college football team. They began writing press releases, acquired a nickname, and new school colors (mauve and purple. Ouch).

Then they invented their star player, Johnny Chung. Half Hawaiian, half Chinese, Chung was 6 foot 3 and weighed 212 pounds. They even gave details of his half time snack.

And they composed a song, largely ripped off from Cole Porter’s hit ‘You’re The Top’.

The friends hoped that Plainfield would finish the season undefeated, and they may have succeeded, except that Time magazine received a tip off about the hoax, and they published the story of how the newspapers had been duped

Newburger sent out one final press release to the New York and Philadelphia papers, saying ‘Due to flunkings in the midterm examinations, Plainfield Teachers has been forced to call off its last two scheduled games.’

No one printed it

4 The Chess Playing Automaton

The Mechanical Turk was, supposedly, a forerunner of Deep Blue, the chess playing supercomputer. The Turk, however, was built in the 18th Century and, if authentic, it was almost 2 centuries ahead of its time.

Of course, The Mechanical Turk was anything but authentic.

Billed as a machine that could beat the strongest chess player, the Turk was created by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian inventor, and was unveiled at the royal court in Vienna in 1770, for the amusement of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. It continued to be exhibited occasionally for almost 100 years before it was destroyed in a fire. Napoleon is said to have played (and lost) against it. Ditto Benjamin Franklin and a Russian Czar.

In fact, the Turk won most of his games. Possibly because the player was put off by the strangeness of their opponent.

In fact, the Mechanical Turk was a complete illusion. A human chess player hid in a specially built space behind the ostentatious machinery. The interior of the machine was constructed to so that the audience believed that they were looking all the way through it, while in fact, the back of the machine had a secret compartment. The long robes of the automaton Turk concealed the door. A master chess player would simply hide inside the machine, and play against their opponent, who was usually so unnerved that he lost quickly.

Which is just as well because the cavity in which the hidden player sat was small and very uncomfortable.

3 The Dictionary Hoax

Lexicographers and logologists are not renowned for their abilities as pranksters. Rupert Hughes was obviously an exception. He compiled the Music-Lovers Encyclopedia, which was published a number of times between 1905 and 1956.

The final entry in the encyclopedia was ZZXJOANW, which, he said, was pronounced ‘Shaw’ and was defined as a Maori word meaning ‘Drum’ or ‘Fife’.

Which was odd.

The entry remained in the encyclopedia for 70 years before anyone realized quite how odd. The Maori language has 14 letters, which does not include either Z or X. Maori words also always end in a vowel.

Whatever ever else the word might mean, it was extremely unlikely that it was a Maori word meaning drum.

The compiler of a musical encyclopedia would probably also have been aware that Maoris do not use drums in their traditional music.

There have been lots of theories about the entry (the discovery of which came too late for anyone to question the author), but it is entirely possible that they merely wanted to send kisses to someone named Joan Shaw.

Which, if true, is kind of nice.

2 The Science Fair Hoax

Most Science Fair projects are a bit boring. A baking soda volcano, or invisible ink, powering your alarm clock with a potato (great excuse for being late for class), or growing crystals are the usual sorts of things you will find in a school science fair.

In 1997, however, Nathan Zohner decided to think bigger. His Science Fair Project was, he said, an investigation into that dangerous chemical compound dihydrogen monoxide, or DHMO.

He gave 50 of his fellow students a copy of a report entitled “Dihydrogen Monoxide: The Unrecognized Killer”, in which he accurately listed the dangers of DHMO. If ingested it could cause excessive urination, bloating, sweating or even death. It is also known to be a major component of Acid Rain, and was so strong it could even cause metal corrosion.

Based on this information, Zohner’s classmates voted to ban DHMO.

Or water, as it is also called.

It turned out, Nathan Zohner’s Science Fair Project was not called “Dihydrogen Monoxide: The Unrecognized Killer”, it was called, “How Gullible Are We?”, and was an investigation into the lack of critical thinking in our responses to what we perceive to be scientific fact.

He took first prize.

1 Johann Beringer’s Lying Stones

Dr Johann Berringer was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Würzburg in Germany in 1725, and was known to be just a little bit pompous. Which is perhaps why his colleagues decided to prank him.

Berringer had a particular interest in ‘lapides figurati’, stones which had formed naturally into recognizable images. His colleagues ‘planted’ a large number of stones. A very large number. In all, over 2000 stones were ‘discovered’ in 6 months, to Berringer’s great delight, and to the particular amusement of 2 of his colleagues

The joke soured, somewhat, when Berringer decided to write a book about his finds. His collection included stones in the shape of insects, small animals, astronomical features, and even a Hebrew text which spelled out the name ‘Jehovah’, which you might think would have tipped him off.

It didn’t.

He published Lithographiae Wirceburgensis in 1726, in which he wrote “The figures expressed on these stones, especially those of insects, are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor. For there is scarcely one in which the dimensions of the figure are not commonly commensurate to the length and breadth of the tablet.”

Still didn’t twig.

In short, Johann Berringer was well and truly had. His colleagues, realizing that the joke had gone too far, tried to dissuade him from publishing, without acknowledging what they had done. They pointed out that some of the stones bore what looked uncannily like chisel-marks, but Berringer asserted that any chisel must have been wielded by God himself.

His colleague’s apparent skepticism, mixed with Berringer’s own pomposity, was a fatal combination and he published, only to become a laughing stock.

When he finally realized what had happened, Berringer sued his 2 colleagues, and the resulting scandal ruined the careers of all 3 of them

About The Author: Ward Hazell is a freelance writer and travel writer, currently also studying for a PhD in English Literature