Famous Hoaxes
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50 free Famous Hoaxes trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A good hoax needs two things: a story people want to believe and someone bold enough to tell it with a straight face. For centuries, forgers, pranksters, bored journalists and ambitious showmen have supplied both, fooling scientists, museums, newspaper editors and millions of ordinary readers and viewers along the way. This quiz covers the hoaxes people still talk about. There are fake fossils and sea monsters, forged diaries and counterfeit masterpieces, April Fools' broadcasts that jammed switchboards, invented athletes and authors, and internet-age fabrications that spread faster than anyone could check them. The questions ask who was behind each trick, who fell for it, and how the truth finally came out. It suits pub quiz teams, history buffs, teachers running a media literacy lesson and anyone who enjoys a tall tale. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing how each deception worked and why it lasted as long as it did.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which food did a 1957 BBC Panorama April Fools' report show a Swiss family harvesting from trees?
Spaghetti
Spaghetti was an exotic delicacy in 1950s Britain, so hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC to ask how to grow their own. They were told to place a sprig in a tin of tomato sauce.
Q 02In 1726, Englishwoman Mary Toft tricked several doctors into believing she had given birth to which animals?
Rabbits
Rabbits were Toft's claim, and a surgeon to King George I's household judged the case genuine. Under close scrutiny she confessed and was imprisoned as a fraud.
Q 03Which famous author championed the Cottingley Fairies photographs, taken by two young cousins in 1917, as genuine?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle, a prominent spiritualist, used the photographs in The Strand Magazine. The cousins later said they were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling him.
Q 04The 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph' of the Loch Ness Monster was later revealed as a model head mounted on what?
A toy submarine
A toy submarine bought from Woolworth carried the wood-putty head. Hoaxer M. A. Wetherell wanted revenge on the Daily Mail, which had ridiculed him over fake monster footprints.
Q 05Which showman displayed a plaster copy of the Cardiff Giant when the fake petrified man's owners refused to sell?
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum had the giant secretly modelled in wax, then claimed his copy was the real one and the original the fake. The original is still displayed in Cooperstown, New York.
Q 06Where was six-year-old Falcon Heene hiding while rescuers chased an empty balloon in 2009's 'balloon boy' hoax?
In the attic
In the attic above the garage is where Falcon had been the whole time. The sheriff called the saucer-shaped balloon's flight a publicity stunt to help sell a reality show.
Q 07The 'dihydrogen monoxide' parody asks people to ban which everyday substance by using an alarming chemical name?
Water
Water fits every scary claim the parody makes: it speeds up corrosion and can cause suffocation, which is the parody's way of describing rust and drowning.
Q 08The Turk, a 1770 'automaton' that beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, secretly hid a human expert at which game?
Chess
Chess was the trick: a master crouched in the cabinet and moved the pieces with levers and magnets. The machine toured for 84 years before a fire destroyed it.
Q 09Which fast-food chain claimed in 1996 April Fools' ads that it had bought a cracked Philadelphia landmark?
Taco Bell
Taco Bell said it had bought the Liberty Bell to help reduce the national debt. The White House joked back that Ford was buying the Lincoln Memorial.
Q 10Rosie Ruiz lost her 1980 winner's title after officials found she had jumped into which famous race near the finish?
Boston Marathon
Boston Marathon officials stripped Ruiz of the title eight days later. A photographer then recalled meeting her on the subway during the race she had used to qualify.
Q 11The Piltdown Man 'missing link', unearthed in England in 1912, paired a human skull with the jawbone of which animal?
An orangutan
An orangutan supplied the jaw, with its teeth filed down to look more human. The forgery was broadly accepted for decades and was only definitively exposed in 1953.
Q 12Which website hosted 'lonelygirl15', a teenager's video diary exposed in 2006 as a scripted series starring an actress?
YouTube
YouTube viewers grew suspicious, and forum users traced the character's messages to the offices of a talent agency. Actress Jessica Lee Rose had been cast partly for her anonymity.
Q 13A 1998 internet hoax describes an endangered tree-dwelling species of which sea creature in the Pacific Northwest?
Octopus
Q 21The girls behind the Cottingley Fairies photographs later admitted propping up their cardboard cutouts with what?
Hatpins
Hatpins held up figures copied from a popular children's book. The pair confessed in the early 1980s, though Frances kept insisting that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.
Q 22Sports Illustrated's 1985 April Fools' hoax invented Sidd Finch, a pitcher with a 168 mph fastball, for which team?
New York Mets
New York Mets staff played along, even providing a uniform and a number for Finch. The subhead's first letters spelled out an April Fools' greeting, yet many readers believed he existed.
Q 23Which future novelist joined the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, posing as Abyssinian royalty to tour a Royal Navy battleship?
Octopus paxarbolis is the hoax's invented Latin name, and the site is now used in internet literacy classes. In one 2007 study, over half the schoolchildren tested rated it very reliable.
Q 14Doug Bower and Dave Chorley said in 1991 that they had started which English countryside mystery with a plank and rope?
Crop circles
Crop circles needed only a plank, rope and a cap fitted with a wire loop for walking in straight lines, the pair said. To prove it, they made one in front of journalists.
Q 15The 1995 'alien autopsy' film, which its producer admitted in 2006 was fake, claimed to follow which UFO incident?
Roswell
Roswell was the claimed setting, but the footage was shot in a London living room. The alien bodies were plaster casts filled with offal, sheep brains and raspberry jam.
Q 16Which horror film's marketing listed its three lead actors as missing and posted fake police reports online?
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is thought to be the first widely released film marketed mainly through the internet. For a time its IMDb page listed the cast as missing, presumed dead.
Q 17A 1967 hoax recipe in the Berkeley Barb convinced people they could get high by smoking the peel of which fruit?
Banana
Banana peels drew enough interest that the Food and Drug Administration announced an investigation. The hoax was designed as a thought experiment about making psychoactive drugs illegal.
Q 18Australians scare tourists with tales of the 'drop bear', a predatory, tree-dwelling version of which animal?
Koala
Koala lookalikes that drop onto walkers' heads are the joke, and the Australian Museum's website has a tongue-in-cheek entry on them. Advised defences include Vegemite behind the ears.
Q 19Anna Anderson spent decades claiming to be which member of Russia's murdered imperial family before DNA disproved it?
Anastasia
Anastasia was the youngest daughter of the last tsar. DNA from a lock of Anderson's hair matched neither the Romanov remains nor the family's living relatives.
Q 20The news magazine Stern paid millions in 1983 for sixty forged volumes of which dictator's supposed diaries?
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler's 'diaries' were the work of forger Konrad Kujau, and a noted historian first pronounced them genuine. Forensic analysis then quickly confirmed they were fakes.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, then Virginia Stephen, was disguised with a turban and skin darkener alongside her brother Adrian. Prankster Horace de Vere Cole organised the visit, which briefly made the navy an object of ridicule.
Q 24Which magazine hailed the 'Archaeoraptor' fossil as a missing link in 1999, before it proved to be a forgery?
National Geographic
National Geographic called it a link between birds and dinosaurs, but it was built from rearranged pieces of real fossils from different species. The scandal drew attention to illegal fossil deals.
Q 25Which university's star linebacker Manti Te'o was revealed in 2013 to have mourned a girlfriend who never existed?
Notre Dame
Notre Dame said Te'o had been the victim of a hoax after the sports blog Deadspin reported that Lennay Kekua did not exist. Her published photos showed a different woman entirely.
Q 26Janet Cooke returned a 1981 Pulitzer after inventing 'Jimmy', an eight-year-old heroin addict, for which newspaper?
The Washington Post
The Washington Post story caused such an outcry that the city's mayor organised a police search for the boy. When it found no one, suspicion grew that the story was a fabrication.
Q 27Dutch forger Han van Meegeren became a national hero for selling Hermann Göring a fake by which 17th-century painter?
Vermeer
Vermeer was the name on the canvas Göring prized, and Van Meegeren was arrested for selling cultural property to the Nazis. Facing a possible death penalty, he confessed that it was a forgery.
Q 28In 2017's 'Shed at Dulwich' hoax, Oobah Butler made his garden shed London's top-rated restaurant on which website?
TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor ranked the shed first after Butler's friends posted fake reviews. Swamped with booking requests, he opened for one night and served ten guests thinly disguised £1 ready meals.
Q 29In 1888 Margaretta Fox showed an audience that her famous 'spirit rappings' came from cracking which body part?
Her toes
Her toes made raps that carried through the whole theatre, and doctors came on stage to confirm it. The Fox sisters had been famous mediums for 40 years, and she later retracted the confession.
Q 30Clifford Irving went to prison in the 1970s for selling a fake 'autobiography' of which famous American tycoon?
Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes, a recluse, broke his silence in a televised telephone conference to say he had never met Irving. Irving served 17 months and later wrote his own account, titled The Hoax.