Operation Blackbird
In the summer of 1990 the BBC and Japan's Nippon TV, with the British Army, set up round-the-clock surveillance of the fields near Bratton in Wiltshire: image intensifiers, thermal cameras, radar and a camp on the hill. It was called Operation Blackbird and broadcast live. On the fifth morning, 25 July, a flawless pattern of circles was found in the field beneath the cameras, and the breakfast bulletin went out announcing a breakthrough. Within hours it emerged that a wooden Ouija board and a cross of sticks lay at the centre of each circle: a hoax carried out in the night directly under observation. None of the equipment had recorded anything at all.
The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic
The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.
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