The Kensington Runestone
In 1898 the Swedish farmer Olof Öhman was clearing an aspen on his land near Kensington, Minnesota, and found a slab in the roots with a runic inscription: a party of eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey west from Vinland, ten men killed, the year 1362. The stone became the proof of a Norse presence deep inside the continent. Runologists have pointed to the same thing from the beginning: the language is not medieval Swedish but a nineteenth-century Swedish dialect written in runes, with forms and loanwords that did not exist in 1362 and characters known only from the schoolbooks of the day. No specialist in runes has ever accepted it.
The Great Moon Hoax
From 25 August 1835 the New York Sun ran a series of six articles reporting that Sir John Herschel, from the Cape of Good Hope, had seen life on the Moon through a new telescope: forests, herds of bison, temples of sapphire and intelligent winged people four feet tall, which he called Vespertilio-homo. The material was presented as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had by then been out of print for years. The Sun's circulation rose to fifteen thousand, the largest in the world. The author was the reporter Richard Adams Locke, writing satire on the fashionable speculation about inhabitants of the planets; the paper never printed a retraction, and Herschel learned of his discovery by post.
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