Hoaxes

 

Long before there was a Fear Factor reality game show, Clark “The Rattlesnake King”

Stanley is said to have held crowds spellbound at the 1893 exposition in Chicago as he slaughtered hundreds of rattlesnakes and processed the juices into a cure-all called Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment.

An ad for Stanley’s snake oil described it as “a wonderful pain-destroying compound.” It was “the strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness.” It treated “rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings,” and it cured “frostbites, chilblains, bruises, sore throat, [and] bites of animals, insects and reptiles.”

 

Wrong. There was no snake oil in Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment. In 1917, tests of a federally seized shipment of Snake Oil Liniment revealed it to be mostly mineral oil containing about one percent fatty oil — thought to have been beef fat — along with some red pepper and possible traces of turpentine and camphor. Clark Stanley was no Rattlesnake King. He was a certified quack.

That is one hoax. Here is another.

They called him “Piltdown Man.” His fossil skull was found in a gravel pit in Sussex, England, about 90 years ago. Considered by some to be proof of the evolution of man, Piltdown was especially attractive to European anthropologists, since he suggested to them that modern humans originated in their own back yard.

Nevertheless, Piltdown experienced a meltdown. About 40 years after its discovery, the skull was found to be a complete forgery. Piltdown was not a missing link between apes and humans at all, but was, instead, a crudely faked fossil, composed of a modern human skull combined with the jaw of a modern orangutan. All the bones had been chemically stained to give the appearance of age.

Piltdown was a hoax. A trick. A swindle. A prank. A deception. Scientific snake oil. The skull was one of the classic cases of fraud in the annals of modern science.

One more: In 1983, Newsweek and the German magazine Der Stern paid millions of dollars to print excerpts from a bogus diary, advanced in the media as the private musings of Adolf Hitler. “People saw great big headlines and pats on the back,” says one former Newsweeker to U.S. News & World Report. “It was just too tempting to pass up.”

If anything, we are more vulnerable to hoaxes today than ever before. The Web site, BonsaiKitten.com claimed to advocate the growing of custom-molded house cats in glass jars. Its motto: “Dedicated to preserving the long-lost art of body modification in house pets.” After a firestorm of protest among animal lovers, the site was quickly revealed to be a satire created by grad students at MIT.

Says journalist Thomas Hayden, who has received more than his share of phony “virus alert” e-mails: “The Internet’s power is more readily harnessed to proliferate hoaxes than to quash them.” In case you have received an assortment of incredible Internet offers yourself, and are wondering if they are legit or not, do not get your hopes up. The truth is, Bill Gates will not give you a thousand dollars for testing an e-mail tracking application, and you certainly should not trust that dude in Nigeria who swears he needs your help to transfer millions out of the country.

 Hoaxes are out there spiritually. Some might be relatively harmless. Experience will reveal that it is a hoax. However, some of hoaxes are dangerous. One obvious hoax that some young people find attractive is uniting themselves to a vision that includes beheading those with whom they disagree. ISIS will even kill Muslims if they are not the right brand. Human beings can fall for the hoax in matters of the spirit as in other areas of life. Some will be relatively harmless in terms of how it effects relationships with each other. However, some can be extreme, even offering a global Caliphate that, while a utopia to some Muslims would by a dystopia for the rest of humanity.

In a golden age of hoaxes, where is the truth to be found?