Advertise on podcast: Hoax!

In January 2019, ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett was the victim of a racial and homophobic hate crime perpetrated in Chicago that shocked the nation and sparked an outcry from seemingly Hollywood’s entire A-list. But it didn’t take long for cracks in his story to emerge. In our season 1 finale, we explore the logic holes, inconsistencies, and downright bizarre twists in this years-long saga involving race, sexuality, police brutality and celebrity. Plus, a lot of tangents. SOURCESThe Truth About Jussie Smollett? (Netflix)https://www.biography.com/actor/jussie-smolletthttps://www.out.com/entertainment/2016/1/28/exclusive-jussie-smollett-being-black-and-gay-hollywoodhttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/03/im-the-gay-tupac-jussie-smolletthttps://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/jussie-smollett-video-shows-brothers-red-hat-ski-mask/https://time.com/5560430/jussie-smollett-donald-trump-fbi/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chicago-police-chief-eddie-johnson-fired-after-series-ethical-lapses-n1094301https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/12/02/jussie-smolletts-legal-team-begins-defense-at-actors-trial-for-allegedly-staging-and-reporting-a-phony-hate-crime/https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/samuel-l-jackson-offered-support-for-smollett-in-letter-read-at-sentencinghttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/21/jussie-smollett-conviction-overturnedhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/25/jussie-smollett-chicago-charities-settle-lawsuithttps://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/prosecutor-kim-foxx-defends-jussie-smollett-decision-in-wbez-interview/ddc80843-d6ee-4c25-a635-02ad49c325e6https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47317701https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/jussie-smollett-2007-dui-arrest/4508/https://www.businessinsider.com/jussie-smollett-2007-false-information-case-2019-2https://variety.com/2025/film/news/jussie-smollett-hate-crime-netflix-documentary-comeback-1236487316/https://www.citybureau.org/black-caucus-timelinehttps://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chicago-police-department-routinely-violated-people-s-rights-feds-say-n706586 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A landlord claimed that his daughter was haunted, by the deceased wife of a former tenant. Most shocking of all, this ghost was accusing her husband of murder. Ghosts aren't real (most of the time, sorry), but murders plots can be very, very real. But who is the real murderer here? SOURCES:Gentlemen’s Magazine archives (by Samuel Johnson) “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency,” Jennifer Bann“Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost,” Travis Glasson“We See a Ghost: Hogarth’s Satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs,” Bernd Krysmanski“Samuel Johnson and Spectral Media,” Rachael Scarborough King Elizabeth [called the C**k Lane Ghost], Oxford Dictionary of National Biography See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From 1998 to 2001, a man claiming to be visiting our "world-line" on a mission from the year 2036 enthralled a corner of the nascent internet with his explanations of time travel, the world of the future, and the wars to come. While few of his "predictions" came true, his story remains haunting -- who was this enigmatic early forum poster? Why did he claim time ended in 2564? How did he know so much about early computers? And where, or when, did he go? SOURCEShttps://rileyraccoon.substack.com/p/time-travel-taleshttps://vimeo.com/11661023https://web.archive.org/web/20170622161305/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11945420/Who-was-John-Titor-the-time-traveller-who-came-from-2036-to-warn-us-of-a-nuclear-war.htmlhttps://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/john-titor-the-internets-most-mysterious-time-traveller/https://web.archive.org/web/20260102173511/https://www.postbulletin.com/rochester-magazine/john-titor-who-was-the-time-traveler-that-visited-rochesterhttps://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/john-titor-time-traveler-predictions-storyhttps://johntitorresearch.wordpress.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anastasia Romanov inspired a play, an Academy Award-winning movie, and a Dana-and-Lizzie-loving animated feature. But the legend of the missing princess is stranger and more involved than a movie with a talking bat might have led you to believe. SOURCES:https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-6/anastasia-arrives-in-the-united-stateshttps://phys.org/news/2018-07-fresh-dna-authenticate-bones-russia.htmlhttps://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19600212&id=tuUlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EncDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7046,629353&hl=enhttps://www.nytimes.com/1958/08/24/archives/anastasia-grand-duchess-or-grand-hoax-the-last-act-in-the-drama-of.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20250331152750/http://www.readthehook.net/86004/cover-jack-amp-anna-remembering-czar-charlottesville-eccentricshttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68616https://blog.newspapers.com/anna-anastasia-anderson/https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/grondahl-anastasia-or-imposter-local-author-12950650.php See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In one of the most famous and widely-reported UFO sightings of all time, a Florida man witnessed, photographed and even interacted with alien beings from another planet several times over the course of many months, sparking a frenzy of speculation and excitement. Then again...a Florida man...SOURCES:War of the Words by Craig R Meyershttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/16/congress-uap-obama-aliens-real-podcast/88699039007/https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-files-released-scientists-trump/https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/10/ufo-hearing-video-hellfire-missile/86073340007/Professor Andrew Fraknoi See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A girl showed up at a town near Bristol in 1817 wearing a turban, and everyone went nuts.  SOURCES:"The Caraboo Hoax," Margaret RussellJohn Matthew Gutch's narrativeEnglish Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell"Devonshire Characters and Strange Events""British Performances of Java," Matthew Isaac Cohen See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of Hoax is no fun at all. April Fool's! For our (almost) April 1 episode, we explore the holiday's origins and some of the best pranks of the 20th and 21st centuries: Google's various exploits (Pokemon Go!), that time the BBC produced a piece on Spaghetti Trees, and the Curious Case of Sidd Finch, the Mets pitcher who could throw 168 MPH. SOURCES:https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-did-april-fools-day-get-startedhttps://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/03/april-fools/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/01/king-kugel-an-april-fools-history-lesson/https://frenchmoments.eu/april-fools-day-traditions-in-france-le-1er-avril/https://bylines.scot/society/hunt-the-gowk-day/https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/hunt-the-gowk-april-fools-scotland/https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-celebrates-april-fools%E2%80%99-day/https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cancels-april-fools-day-pranks-coronavirus-2021-3https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/15/curious-case-sidd-finchhttps://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/21/si-60-curious-case-sidd-finch-mark-mulvoy-myra-gelbandhttps://nypost.com/2025/04/08/sports/legendary-sidd-finch-finally-makes-it-to-mets-home-game-40-years-later/https://niemanstoryboard.org/2014/04/01/whys-this-so-good-no-90-george-plimpton-and-sidd-finch/https://www.milb.com/news/legend-of-sidd-finch-lives-on-in-brooklyn-145695984https://sports.yahoo.com/still-curious-catching-those-brought-150800240.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/sports/baseball/an-old-baseball-april-fools-hoax.htmlhttps://www.mlb.com/news/sidd-finch-hoax-recalled-at-sabr-convention/c-133074166ESPN: Unhittable: Sidd Finch and the Tibetan FastballBBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino https://fox59.com/news/national-world/greatest-april-fools-prank-of-all-time-the-story-of-the-bbcs-spaghetti-trees/https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/09/25/the-spaghetti-trees-of-ticino/https://ericajurus.ca/2024/04/02/the-tradition-of-pranking-and-fooling/http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/cucina/when-i-was-a-kid-i-learned-that-spaghetti-grew-on-trees See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stockmarkets are now battlefields. An aide-de-camp arrived in Dover with the startling, thrilling news that Napoleon had been killed, and the British stock market behaved accordingly. The problem was, Napoleon wasn't dead. SOURCES:Napoleon Is Dead by Richard DaleTrial transcript See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Messages from extraterrestrial visitors? Evidence of strange atmospheric conditions? No one knows where crop circles come from or what they mean. Except, we do know, but for believers, that's the start, not the end, of the story. The history of crop circles is a case study in conspiratorial thinking...plus art in wheat fields! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was purchasing an enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom he displayed as a public spectacle, promoting her a 161-year-old woman who once nursed George Washington. SOURCES:'The Showman and the Slave' by Benjamin Reiss'Medical Apartheid' by Harriet A. Washingtonhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/“P.T. Barnum and Africa” Bernth Lindfors The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader, edited by James W. Cook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer masterpiece to high-ranking Nazi Herman Goring, dutch painter Han van Meegeren had an innovative and shocking defense: he was guilty not of collaboration but of art forgery, faking half a dozen "Vermeers" over the previous decade. But under the reign of the Third Reich, where do you draw the line between opportunism and profiteering? SOURCEShttps://museumhack.com/anniversary-forgery-meegeren/https://www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.htmlhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/27/dutch-masterhttps://www.culturedmag.com/article/2023/03/16/han-van-meegeren-forgery-nazi-vermeer/https://www.salon.com/2016/11/27/faking-it-does-the-forged-vermeer-that-fooled-goering-belong-in-a-museum/The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan LopezHow Pleasure Works by Paul Bloomhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnnkuOz08GQhttps://www.npr.org/2008/07/12/92483237/how-mediocre-dutch-artist-cast-the-forgers-spellhttps://www.thecollector.com/han-van-meegeren/Van Meegeren: The Forger Who Fooled The Nazis (BBC) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In December 1912, Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist at the British Museum, presented something extraordinary to the Geographical Society: a "missing link" fossil, a species he named "Dawson's Dawn-man" after the Sussex solicitor who found the original fossil. It was the find of a lifetime, and a much-needed bit of national pride for the English. The only problem? It wasn't real. SOURCES:The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson by Miles Russell (Tempus, Stroud, 2003)https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-problem-of-piltdown-man/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/23/piltdown-man-remains-exposed-as-fake-1953https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/08/folklore-piltdown-man-hoax/'The Perpetrator at Piltdown' by J Winslow and A Meyer, Science (September, 1983)https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2016/august/piltdown-man-charles-dawson-likely-fraudster.htmlhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/piltdown-man-paleoanthropologys-april-fools-176401927/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Midcentury New Yorkers who couldn't sleep found a friend in Jean Shepherd, the iconoclastic radio personality whose middle of the night monologues made him a cult comedy figure and leader of the underground Night People movement. When he proposed to prank the book world by demanding a novel that didn't exist, the title became so popular his followers more or less willed it into being. SOURCEShttps://web.archive.org/web/20020427051336/https:/flicklives.com/Articles/Wall_Street_Journel/8-1-56/8-1-56.jpghttps://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-media-hoax-of-i-libertine/Excelsior, You Fathead! By Eugene B BergmannI, Libertine by Theodore Sturgeonhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-listhttps://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/did-this-book-buy-its-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list.phphttps://www.vulture.com/2017/09/handbook-for-mortals-lani-sarem-23-hour-new-york-times-bestseller.htmlhttps://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lani-sarem-blues-traveler-manager-novelist-bestseller-list-7957648/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During the 18th century, as the industrial revolution picks up.... steam, people are dazzled by expertly constructed mechanical marvels: automatons. But Wolfgang von Kempelen brings something to the royal court in Vienna that people have never seen before: an automaton capable of playing chess. SOURCES:The Mechanical Turk by Tom Standagehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/debunking-mechanical-turk-helped-set-edgar-allan-poe-path-mystery-writing-180964059/Maelzel’s Chess Player by Edgar Allan Poe Last of a Veteran Chess Player by Silas Weir Mitchell See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When YouTube was barely a year old, the the site's users were gripped by the slowly unfolding tale of Bree, the sheltered, beautiful 16 year old girl whose parents  kept her locked in her bedroom with no one but the internet and her only friend, Daniel, for company. As Bree's situation grew more dire, she became one of the first online obsessions, paving the way for hundreds of hoaxes to come. SOURCEShttps://www.youtube.com/@lonelygirl15https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-m-JXcppohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5S2Kdb8Io4&t=3shttps://medium.com/@vocativ/the-strange-saga-of-lonelygirl15-an-oral-history-dd94687e9976https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-they-now-creators-of-lonelygirl15-turned-web-series-into-a-multi-million-dollar-company-2010-7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnjZzDeepE8https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/16/lonelygirl15-bree-video-blog-youtubehttps://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-lonelygirl15-story.htmlhttps://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/how-the-secret-identity-of-lonelygirl15-was-found/https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/154b603/how_did_people_of_the_2000s_fall_for_lonelygirl15/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.