The London Hammer
In 1936 Mr and Mrs Hahn, walking by a waterfall on Red Creek near the town of London in Texas, picked up a lump of rock with a piece of wood sticking out of it. The stone was later split and an iron hammer with a wooden handle was inside. The creationist Carl Baugh bought it and opened a museum, announcing it as the tool of an antediluvian man hundreds of millions of years old. The surrounding rock is not Ordovician sandstone but a calcium carbonate concretion, which forms around iron in a matter of years and is common in that creek. The hammer itself matches a pattern of miner's tool mass-produced in Texas in the nineteenth century.
Philadelphia and the Kangaroo with Bronze Wings
For a week in January 1909 southern New Jersey and Philadelphia lived in a panic: thousands reported tracks in the snow and a flying creature, schools closed, factories sent workers home. In the middle of it Norman Jefferies, publicity agent for Philadelphia's Arcade Museum, announced that the Jersey Devil had been captured. In the case sat a kangaroo he had bought, with bronze wings fastened to its back, and a man poking the cage to keep it moving. Jefferies admitted it himself years later — along with the fact that some of that week's eyewitness reports had also been his work.
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