Hoaxes & Hard Lessons
Fakes, cons and honest mistakes, and how each one was caught. 12 entries, oldest first.
The Great Airship Wave
Fifty years before 'flying saucers,' Americans saw mysterious airships.
The Maury Island Incident
A tale of falling slag, men in black and a deadly plane crash.
Roswell
A 'flying disc' press release, a weather balloon retraction and a legend that took 30 years to form.
The Aztec Crash Hoax
A bestselling book about a crashed saucer, built on a con man's sales pitch.
The Contactees
Friendly 'Space Brothers' from Venus, desert conventions and a new kind of UFO believer.
Apollo 11's Traveling Light
Buzz Aldrin sees a light pacing the spacecraft. A science fiction writer's hoax made the story much bigger.
The Hudson Valley Boomerang
Thousands saw a huge, silent boomerang of lights. A group of pilots had a secret.
The Majestic 12 Documents
Supposed top secret papers about a secret UFO control group. The FBI called them bogus.
Gulf Breeze
Dramatic Polaroids of a glowing craft, and a model found in the attic.
Bob Lazar and S-4
A man on TV says he worked on alien craft near Area 51.
The Belgian Wave
Triangles over Belgium, F-16s scrambled, and a photo that turned out to be fake.
The Alien Autopsy Film
Black-and-white footage of an autopsy on a Roswell alien, broadcast around the world.