Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal
A book titled Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal, during fifteen years captivity on that Island was published in England in 1729. In it, Robert Drury described how, almost forty years earlier, he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar, survived the slaughter of his shipmates by hostile islanders, and then spent the next fifteen years living as a slave, fighting in local wars, taking a wife, and eventually escaping on a slave ship back to England.
The story was accepted as true during the eighteenth century. In fact, it served as one of Europe’s main sources of information about the faraway island of Madagascar. But during the nineteenth century scholars started to question almost everything about it. In particular, there were suspicions that the book was actually a fictional account written by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinsin Crusoe, and that Robert Drury didn’t even exist.
However, the controversy has come full circle, because modern scholars suspect the work may not be a hoax after all. In 1996, Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at Sheffield University, published evidence suggesting not only that Drury had lived, but that his description of early 18th century Madagascar was highly accurate... far too accurate to have been invented by Defoe.
Therefore, while it’s impossible to say for sure, Robert Drury’s Journal may be a case of a factual narrative mistaken for a hoax.
The Electric Kite Hoax
On October 19, 1752, the Pennsylvania Gazette published a brief description of an experiment recently conducted by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the article said, had flown a kite in a thunderstorm, causing electricity to be conducted down the line of the kite and electrifying a key tied to it. This demonstrated that lightning, as many had speculated, was a form of electricity.
Franklin’s electric kite became the most famous experiment of the eighteenth century, helping to make Franklin famous throughout Europe and America. And yet, some historians argue that it probably never happened.
They point to a curious lack of details about the experiment. It is not known exactly when the experiment occurred. Sometime in June, 1752 was the closest Franklin ever came to an exact date. Nor did Franklin ever write a formal report about it. The only witness to the event was Franklin’s son, who never said a word about it. Finally, such an experiment would have been extremely dangerous, possibly fatal, as Franklin knew.
Historian Tom Tucker suggests that Franklin originally proposed the idea for the experiment as a joke. Frustrated because the British Royal Society had been ignoring his letters to them about his earlier electrical research, he might have proposed the deadly experiment as a subtle joke. It was his way of saying, Go fly a kite in a storm! But when his suggestion reached France, where people took it seriously, Franklin decided to play along and claimed he really had conducted the experiment.
Tucker’s theory remains controversial. Other historians argue that Franklin would never have risked being exposed as a liar by the scientific community.
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The Turk
Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated by machines called automata whose sole purpose was to mimic living objects, and they built some amazing examples of them. The frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck that quacked, ate food, and defecated just like the real thing. But no automaton was more praised or more famous than the Great Chess Automaton of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.
The Great Chess Automaton consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (and usually referred to as the ‘Turk’) whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. When wound up, the figure played chess against human opponents.
But this wasn’t a machine that simply mimicked the movements of a man playing chess. The Great Chess Automaton actually moved pieces on its own, planned strategy, and responded to the actions of its opponent. To top it all off, it was an excellent player. It almost always won. In other words, this was not a mere mechanical contraption, such as Vaucanson’s duck. This, in the words of its inventor, was an actual ‘thinking machine.’
Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.
In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. But this was not the end of its career, because in 1805, after Kempelen had died, his family sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German university student.
Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers.
The means by which the automaton operated was a source of constant speculation. Before each show, Kempelen made a point of opening sliding doors on the side of the box to prove that it was occupied only by clockwork gears, and each time the automaton moved the noise of grinding machinery could be heard. Still, most people suspected that there had to be someone hidden in there, somehow. They just couldn’t figure out how. Perhaps, they theorized, it was a dwarf. But there were also many who were convinced that the automaton was an actual thinking machine.
While it was touring America, Edgar Allan Poe had a chance to watch it in action, and he wrote an article in which he tried to use strict logic to solve its mystery. He theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the turk itself. He was almost right, but not quite.
The real secret was revealed on February 6, 1837, almost seventy years after the automaton’s creation, in a tell-all article published by the Philadelphia National Gazette Literary Register. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged (not in the body of the Turk, as Poe thought) was a full-sized man. The identity of the hidden man varied, but Kempelen and Maelzel tried to use chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Among the chess masters who served as the automaton’s hidden operator were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.
A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton’s operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.
So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. This disclosure proved its undoing. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire.
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The Prince of Abyssinia
On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy’s most powerful battleship. Although the Commander-in-Chief of the Dreadnought had only received a last-minute warning of the Prince’s arrival, he had the sailors standing at attention when the Prince arrived. The Abyssinian party acknowledged the greeting with bows as they shuffled onto the ship, dressed in their long, flowing robes, and for the next forty minutes the Commander gave them a guided tour of the vessel. The Abyssinians paused at each new marvel while murmuring the appreciative phrase “Bunga, Bunga!” in their native tongue. Finally the royal visitors departed as “God Save the King!” played in the background.
The next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the party they had escorted around the warship had not been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. Instead it had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. Their ringleader was a man named Horace de Vere Cole, but the entourage also included a young woman called Virginia Stephen who would later be better known as the writer Virginia Woolf.
By February 12 the British newspapers were full of the story of the stunt. “Bunga Bungle!” the Western Daily Mercury trumpeted. For a few days the Navy was the laughingstock of Britain. Sailors were greeted with cries of “Bunga, Bunga” wherever they went. One newspaper suggested that the Dreadnought change its name to the Abyssinian.
Humiliated and furious, the Navy sent the warship out to sea until the episode blew over. It wanted to bring formal charges against the pranksters, but dropped the idea for fear that it would simply attract more publicity to the case. Finally it settled on a more informal punishment. In the style of British boarding-schools, the participants (though not Virginia Stephen) were each symbolically tapped on their buttocks with a cane. None of the participants went on to perpetrate any more hoaxes except for Cole, who was known throughout his life as an inveterate prankster.
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Naked Came the Stranger
In 1969, Newsday’s Mike McGrady conspired with twenty-three fellow writers and literature critics to produce a work that reflected the poorly written texts that were quickly becoming favourites among American audiences. Each of the contributors penned a single chapter and combined them together under the title, “Naked Came the Stranger”, with the writing credit given to imaginary author ‘Penelope Ashe.’ The book describes the erotic adventures of Gillian Blake, following the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. For publicity purposes, McGrady’s sister-in-law acted as Penelope Ashe, thereby furthering the hoax’s execution.
The book quickly became a widespread hit, earning itself the number one spot on the New York Times Bestseller list for a week. The authors, having each made a good-deal of money from the book’s sales, eventually decided to expose the hoax on the David Frost Show, thereby ending the ruse. The book continued to sell, and was eventually adapted into a pornographic film of the same name.
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The Real Rampa
The Third Eye, by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was first published in 1956. It purported to be his autobiographical account of growing up in Tibet and studying Tibetan Buddhism.
Rampa claimed he had been born into a wealthy Tibetan family and at the age of seven had joined the Chakpori Lamasery in Lhasa where he studied medicine, astrology, Tibetan history, telepathy, hypnotism, and the theory of reincarnation. He also underwent a painful operation to open up the “third eye” in the middle of his forehead. This operation had bestowed upon him amazing psychic powers.
Rampa’s book sold well, but soon questions began to be raised about his identity. People wondered why he spoke English like a native-born speaker if he had, as he claimed, learned the language in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Scholars also pointed out numerous errors in his book. For instance, they noted that in Tibetan culture the “third eye” was understood to be a psychical centre that was supposed to be opened by meditation, never by surgery.
Keen to debunk what he was sure was a fraud, the Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer hired a private detective, Clifford Burgess, to determine the validity of Rampa’s tale.
Burgess published the results of his investigation in February, 1958 in the Daily Mail. He revealed that Rampa had never been to Tibet, nor had he ever had any operation done to his forehead. Instead Rampa was actually Cyril Henry Hoskins, born in Devon, England, and son of a plumber. He had worked first as an assistant to his father, then as an employee of a surgical-implements firm, and later as a clerk in a correspondence school.
But Cyril, it turned out, had always been interested in the study of the occult. He had studied it as much as he could in his spare time. And one day he had taken his interest a step further by growing a beard, shaving his head, and changing his name to “Dr. Kuan-suo.” He later changed it again to Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.
When his true identity was exposed, Hoskins was initially nowhere to be found. But reporters eventually tracked him down to Ireland, where he said he was too ill to receive visitors. Eventually he offered an explanation for his dual identity. He said that it was true he was born Cyril Henry Hoskins, but that the soul of Rampa had transmigrated into his body. Therefore, according to him, all the information in his book was true.
Despite having been proven to be a phony – a plumber’s son posing as a Tibetan monk – a market still existed for Rampa’s writings. So he continued on with his career as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, authoring numerous books before his death in 1981. However, none of them sold as well as The Third Eye.
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The Sokal Affair
The Sokal affair was a hoax by Alan Sokal (a physicist) perpetrated on the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, he submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in “Science Wars” that year. On the day of publication, Sokal announced (in a different paper,) that the article was a hoax. He said that Social Text was “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”. Much heated debate followed, especially regarding academic ethics.
Another recent example of this same situation is the 2005 Rooter Paper; this was a paper randomly generated by a computer which was submitted – and consequently approved as legitimate – to a scientific conference.
61 True Stories of Gereat Hoaxes & Pranks
Vikas Khatri
