Date: Thu Sep 16 1993 09:41:16 Subj: History of Hoaxes UFO - Books: Putting panties on pet

Date:   Thu Sep 16 1993  09:41:16
From:   Sheppard Gordon
Subj:   History of Hoaxes
UFO                            -------------------------------

Books: Putting panties on pets
05/02/92
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  London

HOAXERS AND THEIR VICTIMS by Nick Yapp. Robson, #16.95
THE DIFFERENCE between a hoax and a confidence trick or a fraud
is that the true hoaxer does not hope for material gain and his
exploits have to be in some sense witty. A famous hoaxer was Horace
Cole in the early years of this century - he who organised the
state visit of a bogus Emperor of Abyssinia to the flagship of the
Home Fleet; who dug a hole with a drill in the middle of
Piccadilly; who would stop a passer-by and ask him to hold one end
of a piece of string, go round a street corner and ask another
passer-by to hold the other end of the string, and then disappear,
leaving the two victims standing - once, it was said, for half an
hour.
Hoaxers and Their Victims is a haphazard chronicle of hoaxes and
frauds famous and not so famous. One hoax of wich I had not
previously heard was that perpetrated by a G. Clifford Prout Jr who
inaugurated the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals - the aim of
which, for the sake of public morality, was to clothe all animals,
putting "panties on pets, half-slips on cows, and Bermuda shorts on
horses". The trouble with this plan was that too many people took
it seriously. Prout appeared on television, and his appeal rang
bells - "Why do cows have their heads down in the fields? Not
because they're grazing but because they're hanging their heads in
shame."
The aim of this sort of hoax is the worthy one of exposing the
pomposity of some people and the gullibility of others. Not quite
so worthy, if still amusing, are the intentions of conmen whose
ideas are witty even if they are aimed at making money. There was a
Victor Lustig in Paris in the 1930s who posed as a civil servant
empowered by the French government to sell the Eiffel Tower for
scrap; it was said to be falling down and would have to be
demolished, though ofcourse negotiations with scrap merchants were
being held in secret for fear of public outcry. There was an Arthur
Furguson who in London in the 1920s had sold bits of Nelson's
Column to American tourists with a similar story. One hopes that
such men occasionally got away with it.
More borderline cases are the famous art forgers - Van Meegeren
and Keating - also the literary forgers, in recent times Konrad
Kujau of the Hitler Diaries and Clifford Irving of the Howard
Hughes biography. In such cases the greed and self-importance of
so-called experts were mocked, and there was some virtue in calling
into question the whole business of artistic authentication. But
still, it is not a long step from such conmen to such gigantic
practitioners as Robert Maxwell.
Nick Yapp for the most part tells the stories and does not point
the morals. But at the end he speculates on how we have perhaps
nowadays all put ourselves in the way of being hoaxers and victims:
If we see two men fighting in the street we are as likey to
believe there is a TV, video or cine camera nearby as that we are
witnessing a life-or-death struggle. If we see a young man running
up behind an older man in the street, we are as likely to believe
it's an advertising   campaign for the police as an imminent piece
of snatch thievery.
We may be living in a society, that is, in which it is big
business and official policy as well as entertainment to "con". But
then, Nick Yapp suggests, why should we not accept that humans are
in the business of making of reality what they can? An artist,
after all, is "someone who has presented us with a revered and
expensive version of the truth".
By far the most interesting hoax or non-hoax or counter-hoax
(take your pick) going on  is that to do with the phenomena known
as crop circles. These, as everyone by now must have heard, are the
precisely outlined and meticulously flattened shapes that have been
appearing in standing corn for the past few years all over the
world but especially in certain parts of England At first it was
thought there could be meteorological explanations; then in 1990
and 1991 the forms became so complex that scientists seemed to
agree that the activity had to be that of hoaxers if it was not to
be seen as paranormal.
Towards the end of 1991 two or three groups of hoaxers owned up -
notably Doug and Dave, energetic 60-year-olds, who under
supervision did indeed make one or two crop-formations with a plank
of wood and pieces of string - and even got crop circle "experts"
to pronounce them genuine before the hoax was exposed. But then
Doug and Dave claimed to have been responsible for such a large
number of other crop circles, of far greater inaccessibility and
intricacy of design, that their claim in turn appeared almost
certain to be a hoax - and one was left, as before, with the
prospect of either something paranormal going on, or there being a
worldwide army of conspirators of such dedication and skill and
commitment to secrecy that the existence of such a network  would
itself appear to e paranormal.
Nick Yapp mentions the crop-circle business briefly, and
comments: "What is surprising is the lack of concern on the part of
science or society." But then, science and society are conditioned
to be concerned only with things about which there can be sensible
explanations. One of the claims of those who wish to believe in the
paranormal is that we may be having to learn that there are some
things for which there are no sensible explanations - that indeed,
like artists, we are responsible for our own versions of the truth.


--- Maximus/2 2.01wb
 * Origin: UFOria (Clifton, VA) 703-803-6420 (1:109/369)