Famous UFO hoaxes

Famous UFO hoaxes

Type	Topic overview
Also known as	UFO hoaxes, fake UFO sightings
Famous examples	Alien autopsy film, MJ-12 papers, crop circles, the Black Knight satellite
See also	Debunked & explained sightings on ufos.dev

Hoaxes have been part of UFO history from the very start — older, in fact, than the phrase "flying saucer". Some were pranks or student stunts, some were schemes for money or fame, some were "social experiments" meant to show how easily people are fooled, and at least one, the MJ-12 papers, grew out of a deliberate deception campaign aimed at UFO researchers.^[1][2][7] They matter because every exposed hoax makes genuine reports harder to take seriously, and because several of the best-known "cases" in UFO lore turned out to be fabrications. This page covers the most famous ones, in date order, and how each was uncovered. For sightings that ufos.dev members have explained, see disinformation and hoaxes and the site's Debunked & explained list.

The airship era (1880s–1900s)

Long before flying saucers, newspapers printed hoax stories about mysterious airships:^[2]

• Dundy County, Nebraska (1884). The Nebraska State Journal ran two hoax articles about a crashed flying machine.
• Omaha (1897). For April Fool's Day 1897, two jokers in Omaha set aloft a helium balloon with a burning wicker basket hanging beneath it.
• The turkey vulture (1897). On 17 April 1897 The Dallas Morning News reported that three boys had faked an airship sighting by tying a kerosene-soaked cotton ball to the leg of a turkey vulture. Witnesses shouted "Look, it's the airship!" — and the hoax was discovered only when the bird landed on the local high school and set its roof on fire.
• The Kansas cow (1897). Alexander Hamilton of Leroy, Kansas, claimed that an airship had lassoed one of his heifers with a red cable and sailed off with it.
• Wallace Tillinghast (1909). During the 1909 airship wave, Tillinghast claimed he had built an airship and flown it more than a hundred times over the north-eastern United States.

Aurora, Texas (1897)

The most enduring airship story is the Aurora crash. On 19 April 1897 The Dallas Morning News printed an article by S. E. Haydon saying that an airship had hit a windmill on Judge J. S. Proctor's property two days earlier, and that its pilot, "not of this world", had been buried "with Christian rites" in the town cemetery.^[3] In 1980 an 86-year-old resident, Etta Pegues, told Time that Haydon "wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying."^[3] A Texas historical marker in the town describes the tale as a "legend".^[3]

The flying-saucer wave of 1947

The first great wave of saucer reports in the summer of 1947 brought the first saucer hoaxes:

• Maury Island. Harold Dahl said that on 21 June 1947 he saw six doughnut-shaped craft over Maury Island, near Tacoma, Washington, one of which spewed out white metal and lava-like slag that broke a worker's arm and killed a dog. His associate Fred Crisman said he had recovered the debris.^[4] When two Army Air Forces officers who had collected fragments were killed in the crash of their B-25 on 1 August, the story gained a sinister reputation. The FBI quickly found the claims false; Dahl said that "if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax", and the FBI concluded that the pair had hoped to build the story up for a profitable deal with a pulp magazine. Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book called it "the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history".^[4] See Maury Island incident.
• Twin Falls. In Idaho, a home-made "saucer" found during the 1947 wave was revealed by the FBI to be the work of young pranksters.^[2] See Twin Falls saucer hoax.

The Aztec crash (1949–1953)

In 1949 the Variety columnist Frank Scully wrote that a saucer containing sixteen humanoid bodies had landed in Hart Canyon near Aztec, New Mexico, in March 1948, and expanded the story in his best-selling book Behind the Flying Saucers (1950). The craft was said to be 99 feet across, to come from Venus and to run on "magnetic principles".^[5] In 1952 the story was exposed as a fabrication by two con men, Silas M. Newton and Leo A. Gebauer, who had used it to sell equipment supposedly based on alien technology; they were convicted of fraud in 1953. Aztec residents denied anything had happened, and no contemporary press reports of a crash have been found. Even so, some ufologists revived the story from the 1970s, and parts of it — alien bodies and indestructible metal — were absorbed into the Roswell legend.^[5]

Contactee photographs (1950s–1970s)

The photographs of the 1950s contactee George Adamski, who said he had met a Venusian in the California desert, were concluded to be hoaxes; critics noted that his "Venusian scout ship" closely resembled a chicken-egg incubator.^[2][6] The Swiss contactee Billy Meier produced photographs of "beamships" from 1975. He admitted to author Gary Kinder that he had used models to recreate scenes, and in 1997 his former wife said the photos showed models made from items such as dustbin lids and carpet tacks.^[6]

The 1967 British flying saucer hoax

On 4 September 1967, six "flying saucers" were found across southern England, evenly spaced along a line from the Isle of Sheppey to Clevedon in Somerset. Each was 54 inches long, weighed 100 pounds and emitted an eerie electronic noise. Police, army bomb-disposal teams and the RAF responded.^[8] The saucers had been made by aircraft engineering apprentices from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for their charity Rag Week: fibreglass shells with an aluminium-powder coating, half-filled with smelly fermenting flour paste, with an electronic oscillator and loudspeaker inside.^[8] See 1967 British flying saucer hoax.

The 1980s and 1990s

MJ-12

The "MJ-12" documents, which first circulated in 1984, describe a secret committee of twelve set up by President Truman in 1947 to recover and study crashed alien spacecraft.^[7] The first batch arrived as an undeveloped roll of 35 mm film posted to the television producer Jaime Shandera in December 1984; everyone who received the documents was connected to the ufologist Bill Moore.^[7] The FBI, after the Air Force told it that no such committee had ever existed, declared the document "completely bogus". Researchers found that its date format matched Moore's personal notes, that a Truman signature was a pasted-on photocopy from a real letter to Vannevar Bush, and that the "Cutler/Twining memo" planted in the National Archives carried a security marking not used until the Nixon administration.^[7] MJ-12 had begun as part of a deception campaign by Air Force agent Richard Doty and others against amateur researchers; at a 1989 MUFON conference Moore confessed to feeding fake evidence to other ufologists.^[7] See MJ-12.

Crop circles

In 1991 two English pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, said they had made more than 200 crop circles since 1978 using a plank, rope and a baseball cap fitted with a wire loop for sighting straight lines.^[9] To prove it they made a circle in front of journalists, which the "cereologist" Pat Delgado examined and declared authentic before the hoax was revealed. Rather than ending the phenomenon, their confession inspired increasingly elaborate formations around the world; a 1992 circle-making competition in Berkshire showed that people could make every feature of the best formations of the day.^[9] See crop circles.

Gulf Breeze

In November 1987 Ed Walters, a contractor in Gulf Breeze, Florida, began publishing Polaroid photographs of a glowing UFO in the local Gulf Breeze Sentinel, along with claims of a paralysing blue beam, telepathic aliens and abductions.^[10] Ufologist Bruce Maccabee believed the photos genuine, but in 1990, after the Walters family had moved, the new owners of their house found a styrofoam model UFO hidden in the attic. Pensacola News Journal reporter Craig Myers was able to duplicate the photographs almost exactly with it; Walters said the model had been planted.^[10] See Gulf Breeze UFO incident.

The alien autopsy film

In 1995 the British record producer Ray Santilli released grainy black-and-white footage that he said showed an autopsy of a Roswell alien. Fox broadcast it as Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction on 28 August 1995 and re-ran it twice to rising ratings, and Time said it had sparked a debate "with an intensity not lavished on any home movie since the Zapruder film".^[11] In 2006 Santilli and fellow producer Gary Shoefield admitted creating it. The "aliens" were hollow plaster casts made by the sculptor John Humphreys and filled with sheep brains, chicken entrails, knuckle joints and raspberry jam, filmed in a flat in Camden Town; the "cameraman" who vouched for the film was a homeless man they had found in Los Angeles.^[11] Santilli still claimed it recreated genuine footage he had seen in 1992.^[11] See Alien autopsy film.

The 2000s onwards

Morristown (2009)

On 5 January 2009, and on four more nights that winter, red lights floating over Morris County, New Jersey, drew 911 calls, air-traffic attention and national news. On 1 April two local men, Joe Rudy and Chris Russo, came forward with video showing that they had released flares tied to helium balloons — a "social experiment", they said, to show how unreliable eyewitness claims and "ufology" were. They had even given a fake eyewitness interview to local television. They were fined $250 each and given 50 hours of community service.^[12] See Morristown UFO hoax.

Alien mummies

The Mexican journalist Jaime Maussan has promoted several supposed alien remains that turned out to be hoaxes.^[13] A "Metepec Creature" turned out to be a skinned monkey, and a "Demon Fairy" in 2016 was made from a bat, wooden sticks and epoxy. At a 2015 event called "Be Witness", attended by almost 7,000 people, he unveiled what were claimed to be slides of a dead alien child; they showed a mummified human child that had been on display at a museum in Mesa Verde, Colorado.^[13][14] In 2017 he promoted three-fingered "Nazca mummies" from Peru; Peru's prosecutor's office reported that such bodies were "recently manufactured dolls" covered with paper and synthetic glue to imitate skin. When Maussan presented two of them to the Mexican Congress in September 2023, the forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada said they were assembled from animal and human bones: "They are not extraterrestrials... they are not a new species, they are not hybrids."^[13]

The Black Knight satellite

The "Black Knight" is supposed to be an alien satellite that has orbited Earth for 13,000 years. A photo taken during the December 1998 STS-88 Space Shuttle mission, often presented as proof, is catalogued by NASA as space debris; space journalist James Oberg explains it as a thermal blanket known to have been lost during a spacewalk.^[15] Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium described the legend as "a jumble of completely unrelated stories" — old radio echoes, fringe books, spy satellites and over-interpreted photos — "stewed on the internet to one rambling and inconsistent dollop of myth".^[15]

How hoaxes are caught

The cases above show the usual ways hoaxes come apart:

• Confession. Bower and Chorley, Santilli, Rudy and Russo and Bill Moore all eventually admitted what they had done.^{[7][9][11][12]}
• Physical evidence. The Gulf Breeze model in the attic, the Black Knight's NASA catalogue entry and the forensic examination of the Nazca dolls.^[10][13][15]
• Document errors. Anachronistic markings, wrong date formats and photocopied signatures exposed MJ-12.^[7]
• Investigation of witnesses. The FBI's interviews with Dahl and Crisman, and local residents' denials at Aztec and Aurora.^[3][4][5]
• Reconstruction. Myers recreated the Gulf Breeze photographs, and circle-makers repeatedly showed that people could make "genuine-looking" formations.^[9][10]

See also: disinformation and hoaxes, MJ-12, crop circles, Alien autopsy film, Billy Meier.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Unidentified flying object”, “List of UFO-related hoaxes”, “Aurora, Texas, UFO incident”, “Maury Island incident”, “Aztec crashed saucer hoax”, “Billy Meier”, “Majestic 12”, “1967 British flying saucer hoax”, “Crop circle”, “Gulf Breeze UFO incident”, “Alien Autopsy (1995 film)”, “Morristown UFO hoax”, “Jaime Maussan”, “Roswell incident”, “Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.