Don't Stop Deceiving Trivia Quiz

Answer: He fabricated the story of The Priory of Sion

Pierre Plantard (1920-2000) was the perpetrator of one of the greatest deceptions in history - the creation, out of whole cloth, of the Priory of Sion. If you've read 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, or 'The DaVinci Code' by Dan Brown, you're familiar with the Priory of Sion.

Much too much information surrounding this hoax to go into here, but suffice it to say that between 1965 and 1985, Plantard managed, with the help of his friend Philippe de Cherisey, to plant forged documents that supported his claims in the Bibliotheque Nationale of France.

It's a fascinating story and it leaves a whole lot of people with egg on their faces, and makes Brown's claims of years spent researching information which formed the basis for 'The DaVinci Code' laughable!

Answer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The girls were cousins Frances Griffiths (aged 10) and Elsie Wright (aged 16) and in 1915 they produced the first of five photographs of - wait for it - fairies. They took the photograph in Elsie's home village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire. While Elsie's dad, keen photographer Arthur Wright, didn't believe the photo was genuine, his wife did and took the photograph to a meeting of the Theosophical Society of which she was a member. It caused a great stir, and when Elsie and Frances produced two more photos, one showing a fairy hovering near Frances and the other Frances about to shake hands with a winged gnome, Theosophists and Spiritualists throughout England got all excited. One of them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the great rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was a Spiritualist and fervently believed in the existence of fairies and in the authenticity of the photos (even when his friend Sir Oliver Lodge, a prominent researcher into psychic phenomena, said they were fakes). In all, Elsie and Frances produced five photographs featuring what came to be known as The Cottingley Fairies, and Conan Doyle believed that each of them was genuine, despite the skepticism of his peers.

Years later, an aged Elsie confessed that the fairies and the gnome were cut from the pages of 'Princess Mary's Gift Book' (published in 1914) and were illustrations by Claude Arthur Shepperson. The girls had suspended them on wire or fixed them in place with hat pins to take the photos.

Answer: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Written between 1897 and 1903, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is generally believed to have been the work of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the head of the Paris Bureau of the Russian Secret Police, with the aid of others.

This despicable and utterly false document claims to be the minutes of a secret meeting of an international cabal of Jewish leaders during which they planned to take over the world by corrupting the morals of non-Jews, by controlling the international economy and by taking over the world press. Rachkovsky and his co-writers based the book on an 1864 novel, 'Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu' by the French political satirist Maurice Joly, and on one chapter in 'Biarritz', written in 1868 by the anti-Semitic German writer Hermann Goedsche.

First published in Russia in 1903, it quickly gained credence with those who already had anti-Semitic tendencies, was translated into most languages and by the early twentieth century, it was available internationally. Henry Ford - yes, that Henry Ford - personally paid for a print run of half a million copies which he distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s.

Another major fan was Adolf Hitler and the book was required reading for members of the Nazi Party. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' was used as a text book in German classrooms, and was studied as if it was fact - even though it had been proved to be a fraud years before! In the view of many historians, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' was Hitler's justification for the atrocity we know as the Holocaust.

It is truly sad that, even today, this nasty piece of work is still in wide circulation, both in book form and on the internet, and is still being presented as fact and believed to be so.

Answer: A deed known as 'The Donation of Constantine'

According to the forged document, the Emperor Constantine I was cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester and in gratitude awarded Sylvester a deed that gave the Church sovereignty over most of Western Europe. Apart from the fact that Constantine the Great never suffered from leprosy, it is interesting to note that the document was never referred to until the latter half of the ninth century, some 400 years after the deaths of Constantine and Pope Sylvester. It's also interesting to note that this was a period in which the Church was aggressively asserting land claims over the protests of European monarchs great and small.

During the later Middle Ages, and for centuries thereafter, whenever those who bore the title of Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in power struggles with the incumbent Popes, the false deed was played as a trump card by the Vatican. Lorenzo Valia, a scholar of the early Renaissance, was able to prove, by virtue of obvious anachronisms and other inaccuracies, that the deed was forged, but the Vatican continued to maintain that it was genuine.

Little by little, the Vatican ceded its claim to most of Western Europe (the Reformation played a hand in that, along with the rise of nationalism,) but it wasn't until 1929, under pressure applied by Il Duce that the Vatican gave up all the land under its dominion in Italy (a piece of real estate that covered not only Rome but also a wide swath across the country, from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic).

Answer: Fox

Fox showed the fake film three times between August and November, 1995, garnering higher and higher ratings each time, and all the while claiming it was genuine. Maybe Fox really believed what it said, but it wasn't true. Actually, the 'autopsy' was filmed in the early 1990s and promoted by a London entrepreneur named Ray Santilli. Santilli claimed to have received it from the military cameraman who shot the 17 minute film.

In 2006 Santilli admitted that the film was not authentic. Even after experts had declared any time in the intervening ten years that the film footage was a hoax, Santilli maintained it was a 'reconstruction' of of the original which he claimed to have seen in 1992. Unfortunately, said Santilli, the original film "had deteriorated and was unusable".

London sculptor John Humphreys was hired to create two dummy 'aliens', which were stuffed with a mixture of pig knuckles, sheep brains and raspberry jam. Humphreys also portrayed the chief medical examiner of the 'corpse' in the fake film. Part of the Fox broadcast included an interview with the unidentified military cameraman who was supposed to have shot the original. He was later found to be a homeless man from LA whom Santilli paid to be part of the deception.

Answer: The Piltdown Man

On December 18, 1912 Mr. Dawson astounded the members of the Geological Society of London when he showed up with the fragments of a fossilized skull and jawbone he claimed to have dug up in a gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex. It resembled no previously known specimen and the learned Geological Society named it Eanothropus Dawsoni (translation: Dawson's Dawn Man). The press dubbed it Piltdown Man.

It took 42 years for the Society to admit it had been the butt of a clever hoax, even though suspicions were raised as early as 1913. The skull and jawbone remained the subject of dispute until 1953 when it was finally exposed as a fraud. Mr. Dawson had combined the mandible of an orangutan (with filed-down teeth) with a modern human skull to produce his masterpiece.

The Cardiff Giant was a hoax perpetrated by an American tobacconist named George Hull after he got into a dispute with some Methodists over their belief that Genesis 6:4 proved that giants once lived on earth. The Feegee Mermaid was the creation of an Indonesian craftsmen who used papier mache and fish bones to create the fake artifact. The Amarna Princess, a 20-inch tall statuette in alabaster, sculpted in the style of 1350 BCE Egypt, was the work of British master art forger Shaun Greenhalgh, who sold hundreds of fakes between 1989 and 2006, and spent four years in prison for his crimes.

Answer: The James Ossuary

When the James Ossuary, purportedly the stone box that had contained the bones of St. James, the brother of Jesus, was discovered in Israel in 2002, Christians around the world were thrilled to bits. We were quickly disillusioned, however, when the box turned out to be the property of Oded Golan, whom the Israeli authorities and Interpol had long suspected of being a forger of biblical antiquities.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority's experts examined the ossuary and concluded that, while the box was probably authentic and dated from the first century of the Christian Era, the inscription, which read "Ya'aqov bar Yosef akhui Yeshua (translation: James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus), was a modern forgery. When police raided Golan's apartment they found a workshop equipped with half-completed 'antiquities', along with the kind of tools and materials a forger would need.

In December 2004. Golan was indicted on charges of forgery, along with Robert Deutsch, an inscriptions expert who teaches at Haifa University and who is also an antiquities dealer, Shlomo Cohen, a collector of antiquities, and Faiz al-Amaleh, also an antiquities dealer. Their trial began in 2005, and ended in October 2010. As of October 2011, the time of writing, the judge had still not rendered his verdict.

So is the inscription a forgery or not? International experts are divided (the judge pointed out that their confusion wasn't helping either him or the defendants).

Answer: A radio play

Wunderkind actor/director Orson Welles did not set out to create havoc. He merely wanted to provide an exciting dramatization of H.G. Wells' novel 'The War of the Worlds' for the October 30, 1938 episode of CBS Radio's 'Mercury Theatre of the Air'. The fact that he and the writers adapting the novel chose to set the invasion from space in the fictional town of Grover's Mill in New Jersey, and presented it as a series of news broadcasts, with 'eyewitness' descriptions of events as they unfolded, heightened the immediacy and more than achieved the level of excitement Welles hoped to create.

Answer: The origin of April Fool's Day

In 1983, Professor Boskin told an AP reporter that, after extensive research, he had discovered the origin of April Fool's Day. According to the professor, and widely reported in the American press, April Fool's Day began when The Emperor Constantine's Court Jester Kugel challenged the Emperor by saying that fools could rule as well as, if not better, than the Emperor himself.

According to the good professor, Constantine accepted the jester's challenge and appointed Kugel Emperor-for-a-day. Kugel immediately delivered the edict that only the absurd would be tolerated while he ruled. All this supposedly happened on April 1, sometime during the reign of Constantine in the fourth century CE, and April Fool's Day has been the day for fooling folks ever since.

The reporter would have been wise to check the calendar because I suspect that Professor Boskin broke that choice bit of news on April 1 (or the day before, so that it would hit the headlines in timely fashion). The reporter should also have checked out the actual origin of April Fool's Day. Besides, whoever heard of a Roman named Kugel?

Answer: Stern

In April 1983, 'Stern', a leading news magazine in Germany, published excerpts from what they had been told were the diaries of Adolf Hitler. 'Stern' staff journalist Gerd Heidemann claimed to have received the diaries from a certain Dr. Fischer who had smuggled the diaries out of East Germany.

The sixty-volume set was supposed to have been recovered from a plane that crashed near Dresden in the final days of World War II. Heidemann was paid 10 million marks for the diaries. However, 'Stern' allowed no expert forensic analysis prior to publication, for fear of leaks.

It didn't take long for historians and German authorities to smell a rat. Within weeks, the Bundarchivs declared that the diaries were fakes, that they were written on modern paper with modern ink and that they were full of inaccuracies.

It turned out that the source for much of the content was speeches made by Hitler. Handwriting expert Kenneth Rendell called the diaries "bad fakes but a great hoax" and noted that "with the exception of imitating Hitler's habit of slanting his handwriting diagonally as he wrote across the page, the forger failed to observe or to imitate the most fundamental characteristics of his handwriting." It turned out that the diaries were the work of a well-known Stuttgart forger, Konrad Kujau. Both Kujau and Heidemann got three and a half years in prison for forgery and embezzlement.