frauds

---------------------- Bizarre Frauds ----------------------  

Some of the amazing and famous hoaxes around Darwin's time:  

Barnum's Fiji Mermaid (he spelled it Fejee Mermaid). This was an ugly, dried-up, black object about three-feet (one-meter) long that was promoted as being half-monkey and half- fish. It was eventually found to be a hoax.  

Poet Edgar Allan Poe ran a long-running hoax promotion of a manned balloon flight across the Atlantic.  

The city of Palisade, Nevada, enticed tourists to visit the city because of its regular gunfights and street brawls. Tourists flocked into town to witness the gunfights, not knowing at the time that they were all staged.  

A report in The Illustrated London News of February 9, 1856 claimed that a living pterodactyl (an extinct flying reptile) had been discovered in France.  

A hotel operator hoaxed tourists to visit his city by creating a "Silver Lake Serpent" that lured many people to the area.  

A cigar manufacturer named George Hull hired stonecutters to carve a 10-foot giant, which he buried on his property.  
In the wake of evolutionists' desire to find fossils of creatures that lived in the ancient past, this Cardiff giant was "accidentally" unearthed in 1869, and wagon-loads of tourists came to see Hull's find. He charged them 25 cents each for the privilege.