The Philip Experiment in Toronto
In 1972 the Toronto Society for Psychical Research ran the experiment backwards: instead of looking for a real ghost, eight people under Iris Owen invented one. They wrote the biography of a seventeenth-century English aristocrat, Philip Aylesford, gave him a castle, a gypsy mistress and a suicide, drew his portrait — and sat for a year addressing a character they had made up themselves. In the second year the raps began, the table moved and rose, and all of it was filmed in front of a studio audience. The point of the experiment was precisely that Philip had never existed: the group obtained the classic phenomena of the séance room from a knowingly fictional spirit.
De Loys's Ape
In 1920 the Swiss geologist François de Loys, prospecting for oil on the Venezuela–Colombia border, shot what he described as a large tailless ape that came at his party by the Tarra river. The single photograph — the animal propped on a crate with a stick — was published in 1929 by George Montandon as Ameranthropoides loysi, the missing link of American man; Montandon used it in a racist theory of the separate origin of races. The picture shows an ordinary white-fronted spider monkey, common in those forests: the crate gives a true height of about a metre, and the tail is hidden behind the body. De Loys's companion later said the whole thing had been a joke at Montandon's expense.
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