General Knowledge
Real or Hoax Quiz
Crop circles, Cottingley fairies, Piltdown Man — can you tell real stories from famous hoaxes?
Crop circles, Cottingley fairies, Piltdown Man — can you tell real stories from famous hoaxes?
The Piltdown Man forgery fooled the scientific community for 41 years before being exposed in 1953 — proving that even experts can be deceived by a convincing hoax. This 50-question quiz challenges you to separate genuine events, discoveries, and phenomena from history's most elaborate fakes, frauds, and fabrications.
The Cardiff Giant was a 10-foot "petrified man" unearthed on a farm in Cardiff, New York, in 1869. It was actually a gypsum statue secretly commissioned by George Hull, a tobacco farmer and atheist, to mock a preacher who claimed biblical giants once roamed the Earth. The hoax drew huge paying crowds before being exposed.
The mass panic story is largely a myth. While Orson Welles's 1938 radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's novel did confuse some listeners, newspapers of the era greatly exaggerated the public reaction to boost their own circulation and discredit radio as a news medium.
A jackalope is a fictional creature — a jackrabbit with antelope horns — popularized as a taxidermy novelty in the American West. Douglas Herrick of Wyoming is credited with creating the first jackalope mount in 1932. Interestingly, rabbits infected with the Shope papilloma virus can grow horn-like growths, which may have inspired the legend.