Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
All 10 questions with answers and explanations. Play this daily
Q 01Which celestial body did a famous New York Sun hoax claim was home to winged, intelligent man-bats?
The Moon
The Sun's 1835 series put bat-winged humanoids on the Moon and falsely credited the discovery to the astronomer Sir John Herschel.
Q 02Which New York Times reporter resigned after being found to have invented quotes and datelines?
Jayson Blair
Jayson Blair's fabrications and plagiarism caused such a furor that the Times's top two newsroom executives resigned in his wake.
Q 03What was the fossil hoax of 'prehistoric' remains from a Sussex gravel pit called?
Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man was hailed as a 'missing link' until 1953, when tests showed its jaw came from an orangutan, stained to look ancient.
Q 04Which Orson Welles radio broadcast did newspapers claim sent America into a panic that historians now call exaggerated?
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds panic was largely a press creation: newspapers ran thousands of stories about hysteria, but later researchers found few listeners had been fooled.
Q 05The 'Paul is dead' rumour spread widely after a satirical student review of which Beatles album?
Abbey Road
Fred LaBour's review of Abbey Road invented many of the clues, and he was astonished when newspapers across the United States picked up the story.
Q 06H. L. Mencken published an invented history of which household fixture, later reprinted as fact?
The bathtub
Mencken's history of the bathtub invented city bans and a Millard Fillmore connection, and even after he confessed, the fake facts turned up in reference books.
Q 07Which Manhattan daily falsely reported deadly escapes from the Central Park Zoo on its front page?
New York Herald
The New York Herald's story began with a rhinoceros goring its keeper and ended by admitting not one word was true, but panicked readers had already taken it seriously.
Q 08Which writer invented the New York Sun's report of a balloon crossing the Atlantic in 75 hours?
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe had balloonist Monck Mason land on Sullivan's Island near Charleston, and the Sun soon had to admit the story was false.
Q 09Which city's papers printed the hoax that American firms were bidding to demolish the Great Wall of China?
Denver
Four Denver reporters with nothing to file invented the story at the Oxford Hotel; a later legend that it helped spark the Boxer Rebellion is itself unfounded.
Q 10Which West German magazine paid 9.3 million marks for the forged 'Hitler diaries'?
Stern
Stern's scoop collapsed when federal archive tests found postwar materials in the diaries, and forger Konrad Kujau and reporter Gerd Heidemann were both jailed.