10 case files, newest first.
In 1873 a Dunedin paper announced that a live moa had been seen “alive and in the flesh” in Southland. The runholder wrote in to say his shepherd hadn't said “moa” at all. Eighteen months later a Christchurch paper printed a letter about two moas roped near Browning Pass. They then “escaped,” and another paper called the whole thing a hoax.
In the summer of 1891 the Colorado River spilled into the dry Salton Sink and made a real new lake. Within days a “special” dispatch had put a fifty-foot sea serpent in it. Some papers played along, one claimed to confirm it, and Yuma's paper later dismissed the serpent stories as “trash.” Part one of a two-part case.
For a month in the autumn of 1894, people on South Main Street in Tucson reported a night prowler that changed shape: a dog, a hog, a burro, a man on all fours. Armed parties hunted it, and rumor blamed an elderly Tohono O'odham woman. Then the Citizen announced that “the Main street spook has been laid.” It was a thief in a pillow-case mask.
Six weeks after Phoenix's Salton sea serpent, a Tucson paper told how a fire bell, a frightened teamster and a moonlit crowd led to a seven-headed monster rising from the flooded Santa Cruz and preaching a sermon about rain and real estate. Yuma's paper called it “trash.” Part two of the Salton serpent case.
On April 19, 1897, The Dallas Morning News printed a dispatch saying an airship had crashed into a judge's windmill in Aurora, Wise County, killing a pilot 'not an inhabitant of this world.' The Texas State Historical Association calls it what it was: a fictional story written to put a dying town back on the map.
Forty years after the Hydesville rappings, Margaret Fox Kane stood on the stage of New York's Academy of Music and made the famous raps with her toe joint. A year later she took the confession back.
During the 1897 airship wave, a Kansas rancher's story of a craft that lassoed his heifer became one of the era's best-known yarns. Kansas City's Journal treated it as comedy within days; a 1943 item quoted the local editor saying it was invented.
In April 1890 the Tombstone Epitaph reported that two ranchers had shot a 160-foot winged creature in the desert. A week later a Florence paper reprinted it and signed it “The Epitaph Liar.” The famous photograph of the beast doesn't show up until 1963, and nobody has ever produced one.
Between 1924 and 1930, lead crosses and swords with Latin inscriptions came out of the caliche beside an old lime kiln on Silverbell Road. They seemed to tell of a Roman-Jewish colony in eighth-century Arizona. The 1925 skeptics had it right: they're a hoax.
1869 “petrified man” exhibited as wonder, quickly exposed as carved gypsum — museum-education staple about evidence standards.
