The Cardiff Giant
On 16 October 1869 men digging a well on William Newell's farm at Cardiff, near Syracuse, struck a stone man ten feet tall. It cost fifty cents to see, the queue lasted all day, and clergymen argued over whether this was a petrified giant out of Genesis. It had been commissioned by Newell's cousin George Hull, a tobacconist and an atheist who had lost his temper in an argument with a preacher: a block of gypsum hauled from Fort Dodge in Iowa, carved in Chicago, aged with sulphuric acid, stippled with darning needles for pores, and buried a year before it was found. Hull confessed that December. P. T. Barnum, refused the original, exhibited a copy of his own — and the public paid to see both.
The Bosnian Pyramids at Visoko
In 2005 the businessman Semir Osmanagić announced that the hill of Visočica above the town of Visoko was the oldest pyramid in the world, 220 metres high and built twelve thousand years ago, and began excavating on donations and municipal money. In 2006 the European Association of Archaeologists issued a formal statement, signed by four leading European archaeologists, calling the project a cruel hoax and demanding a halt to work that was destroying genuine medieval and Roman layers on the hill. Geologists described Visočica as a flatiron — a natural landform of Miocene conglomerate, of which the valley has several; the paved slabs proved to be fractured sandstone.
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