W"The Balloon-Hoax" is the title used in collections and anthologies of a newspaper article by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844 in The Sun newspaper in New York. Originally presented as a true story, it detailed European Monck Mason's trip across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days in a gas balloon. It was later revealed as a hoax and the story was retracted two days later.
WWendy Anne Bergen was a double Emmy award-winning television journalist.
WCaliphate is a narrative podcast published by The New York Times in 2018 which covers the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). It was hosted by reporter Rukmini Callimachi.
WDark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel. It originally aired on the Franco-German television network Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune.
WFake news is false or misleading information presented as news. It often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. However, the term does not have a fixed definition, and has been applied more broadly to include any type of false information, including unintentional and unconscious mechanisms, and also by high-profile individuals to apply to any news unfavourable to his/her personal perspectives.
WThe "Faux Soir" was a spoof issue of the newspaper Le Soir published in German-occupied Belgium on 9 November 1943. It was produced by the Front de l'Indépendance, a faction in the Belgian Resistance, in a satirical style that ridiculed German propaganda. Though it resulted in significant repression, the Faux Soir's embodiment of zwanze, the characteristic folk humour of Brussels, made it an enduring symbol of the Resistance. The incident was the centerpiece for the 1954 film, Un Soir de Joie.
WTout ça or Bye Bye Belgium, also called "The Flemish Secession Hoax," was a hoax perpetrated by the French-language Belgian public TV station RTBF on Wednesday, December 13, 2006. Regular programming on the channel La Une was interrupted for a news bulletin claiming that the Flemish parliament had issued a unilateral declaration of independence from the Kingdom of Belgium, mimicking the Belgian secession from the Netherlands some 175 years earlier.
WOn April 1, 1980, WNAC-TV aired a fake news bulletin that stated that Great Blue Hill was erupting. Intended as an April Fools' prank, it resulted in panic in Milton, Massachusetts and the surrounding area.
WThe "Great Moon Hoax" refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time.
WThe Great Wall of China hoax was a faked newspaper story concocted on June 25, 1899 by four reporters in Denver, Colorado about bids by American businesses on a contract to demolish the Great Wall of China and construct a road in its place. The story was reprinted by a number of newspapers.
WThe Harcourt interpolation was a scandal of Victorian London in which a rogue compositor inserted an obscene remark—"The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking"—into a page proof for The Times newspaper, in the middle of a speech by William Harcourt, a leading politician of the day. The addition was not noticed until after the first edition had been printed and efforts to recall the copies were not entirely successful.
WThe Hitler Diaries were a series of 60 volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was the British newspaper The Sunday Times, which asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.
WThe Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer is a fictional animal invented by Discover magazine as an April Fool's Day joke.
WThe Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect was a hoax phenomenon purported to cause a noticeable short-term reduction in gravity on Earth that was invented for April Fools' Day by the English astronomer Patrick Moore and broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on 1 April 1976.
WThe Krishna Mandir is a Hindu temple (mandir) dedicated to the Hindu deity Krishna located in Ravi Road, opposite of Timber Market in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. In 2006, the temple became a centre of controversy due to media reports on its demolition which later turned out incorrect. It is one of the two Hindu temples in Lahore, the other being Valmiki Mandir.
WTom Kummer is a Swiss journalist who published numerous celebrity profiles in Germany and Switzerland. Kummer never even met his subjects. His primary publisher, Süddeutsche Zeitung issued a public apology for running Kummer's stories, calling them "a betrayal of monumental proportions". His work was also published in Der Spiegel, Stern, the Tagesanzeiger, the Berner Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Because of the timespan in which his bogus reporting appeared in print, he has earned comparisons to Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.
WJonah Richard Lehrer is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.
W"Paul is dead" is an urban legend and conspiracy theory alleging that English musician Paul McCartney of the Beatles died on 9 November 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike. The rumour began circulating around 1967, but grew in popularity after being reported on American college campuses in late 1969. Proponents based the theory on perceived clues found in Beatles songs and album covers. Clue-hunting proved infectious, and within a few weeks had become an international phenomenon.
W"Rejecting Jane" is the title of a 2007 article by British author David Lassman. The article, which was published in Issue 28 of Jane Austen's Regency World magazine, is a critique of the publishing industry through their inadvertent rejection of Jane Austen.
WSan Serriffe is a fictional island nation invented for April Fools' Day 1977, by Britain's Guardian newspaper. It was featured in a seven-page hoax supplement, published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the island's independence, complete with themed advertisements from major companies. The supplement provided an elaborate description of the nation as a tourist destination and developing economy, but most of its place names and characters were puns and plays on words relating to printing. The original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two Boeing 747s there a few days before publication it was moved to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles Islands. Because of this late decision, the authors made San Serriffe a moving island – a combination of coastal erosion on its west side and deposition on the east cause it to move towards Sri Lanka, with which it will eventually collide, at about 1.4 km/year.
WThe Shed at Dulwich was a spoof restaurant in a garden shed in Dulwich, London. It was created as a hoax by journalist Oobah Butler for Vice Magazine and became the top-rated restaurant in London on TripAdvisor before the listing was taken down. The restaurant was open for one night in November 2017, serving ten guests- including a couple from California.
WPatricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada College.
WThe spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
WSungods in Exile is a book by David Gamon that was published in 1978 under the pseudonym David Agamon, allegedly from the notes of a Dr Karyl Robin-Evans who was said to be a professor at Oxford University.
W"The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in the June 1835 issue of the monthly magazine Southern Literary Messenger as "Hans Phaall -- A Tale", intended by Poe to be a hoax.