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1. A very young artist, at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance in 1496, carved a statue called "Sleeping Cupid" ("Il bambino" in Italian), and then aged it with acid, and sold it as a genuine Greek classical work. The deception was uncovered, and the purchaser furious. Somehow, the statue, which was subsequently regarded as worthless, disappeared. If it had survived, it would be priceless, as an original work of which then 20-year-old?
2. The Turk was an automaton, or what we might in modern parlance call a robot, that played a game with a human opponent. It was a human-like figure from the torso up, at a table, with movable arms that could manipulate objects. Its owner began exhibiting it in 1770, and it fooled many people until it was exposed as a fraud in 1820. It was such a good trick, though that it continued to attract audiences (and opponents) until it was destroyed by fire in 1854.
What popular game did it play?
3. Fake mermaids were produced in Japan and the East Indes for a long time before one made its way to the US. They were usually created by artfully stitching together the upper body, arms, and head of a monkey or juvenile ape, and the lower portion of a large fish, including importantly, the dorsal fin, the upper half of which was attached to the primate's body; the tail, the hallmark of the mermaid was of course there as well. Taxidermy was then performed on the hybrid corpse as though it were one carcass. Sometimes less artful ones had clay faces, meant to look more human than the primate faces, but usually just looking uncanny. The first one to appear in the US seems to be one bought by Sea Captain Samuel Edes, and exhibited by PT Barnum, which Barnum rented from the then owner, Moses Kimball, for $12.50 a week, (a huge sum at the time) beginning some time in 1842. What was this particular "mermaid" nicknamed?
4. In 1904, Wilhelm von Osten, a mathematics teacher, and amateur animal trainer, exhibited an animal that seemed to show human comprehension of mathematics and other topics. It could tap out answers to complicated questions with its foot, tapping out numbers, and symbolic taps for letters. Its name was Clever Hans. What type of animal was Hans?
5. In 1912, Charles Dawson "discovered" pieces of what appeared to be a prehistoric hominid skull, with a very modern human-like (large) braincase, albeit with thick skull bones, and an ape-like jaw. It was named "Eoanthropus Dawsoni," or "Dawn-man of Dawson," but commonly called "Piltdown Man," after its place of "discovery." It turned out to be a complete fraud.
Joining Dawson in his discovery was his good friend, a young and unknown man, who later would become a famous religious philosopher with a large following, and a number of publications. Although there is no definitive proof this man was involved in the hoax, or aware in any way of Dawson's deception, the great natural scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould believed he was. Who was he?
6. A woman who later came to call herself Anna Anderson was discovered in 1920 attempting suicide in Berlin. She was taken to a mental institution, where she began insisting she was the Grand Duchess (daughter of the Czar) Anastasia of Royal Russia, and that she had survived the assassination attempt which had killed the rest of her family. She found a large following, many among them Russian Royalists who wanted to see the Soviet government fall and be replaced by a restoration of the monarchy. She eventually came to live in the US, and died there. Tissue samples were saved from her, and compared to a close relative of the Czarina's. The mitochondrial DNA did not match hers, and so it was proved, at last, that she was not Anastasia.
What member of a European royal family volunteered a DNA sample for comparison?
7. In 1992, Michael Barrett, a Liverpool scrap metal dealer, out of work at the time, came forward with a document he claimed was the "diary of Jack the Ripper." He said his friend Tony Devereux had given it to him in a pub. The diary's author does not state his name, but hints and references are consistent with the life of a real person, and it is clear readers are expected to believe it is him. Who is this person?
8. In 1995, a TV network aired a show called "Alien Autopsy." The claim was that it was a film of an autopsy done on an actual alien that landed in Roswell, NM in the 1940s. What TV network aired it?
9. In 1999, the "Guinness Book of World Records" recognized Emily Rosa as the youngest person to publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal. The journal was "JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association)," and Rosa was 11 at the time of publication. She wrote a debunking of the nursing practice of Therapeutic Touch (holding hands above a patient, and "massaging their energy fields"), by demonstrating that practitioners of it could detect her hand under theirs no better than by chance when they could not see it.
The experiment that was the basis for Rosa's paper was a typical type of project any child might engage in. What was it?
10. In 2012 two major cable networks, Discovery and Animal Planet, each aired a mockumentary (also called "docufiction") on the discovery of [a] legendary creature[s]. The disclaimers were small and obscure, and many people in the US didn't know what to think after viewing this special. Many were left believing that indeed, the show was factual, while skeptics were sure there was fraud or a mistake somewhere, but just where wasn't quite clear.
What creature[s] did the show purport to have found?
Source: Author
RivkahChaya
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