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Confessed UFO and Paranormal Hoaxers


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Sentry

Sentry

Paranormal Adept
The discussion between @Burnt State and @ufology in the TravisWalton thread got me wondering...
The list of hoaxers is long, but how many confess to it?
There's not many, but here's one, John Lane, a copycat of the Pascagoula Abduction case, seen at this clip at 1:14:
Kingsport Times, Friday, October 19, 1973 : Front Page
Oct 19, 1973 - Police Chief Craig Monroe said John Lane, 18, indicated that the story started as a joke but admitted his story was false after voluntarily voluntarily submitting to a lie detector test in Jackson.

Lane got caught, that seems to prompt the few confessions.
Some like Fred Crisman at Maury Island got caught, confessed, then retracted the confession!

Who are some of the other UFO or paranormal hoaxers that confessed?
 
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I suppose this is a little vague and I don't really have time to dig into it right now, but want there a number of confessions regarding the Amityville Horror?
 
Sentry said:
Kingsport Times, Friday, October 19, 1973 : Front Page
Oct 19, 1973 - Police Chief Craig Monroe said John Lane, 18, indicated that the story started as a joke but admitted his story was false after voluntarily voluntarily submitting to a lie detector test in Jackson.
Lane got caught, that seems to prompt the few confessions.
Some like Fred Crisman at Maury Island got caught, confessed, then retracted the confession!
Who are some of the other UFO or paranormal hoaxers that confessed?
Click to expand...

Interesting clip. Just to be clear, I'm not saying Walton either is or isn't part of a hoax, just that without more substantial evidence, there are reasons to have serious reservations. I've heard of a couple of admitted hoaxes by skeptics who were out to prove the gullibility of people, in particular UFO researchers, but I don't recall the details of the cases. I imagine they wouldn't be too hard to scrounge up, but I'll leave that to someone else. I don't want to get too bogged down on the forum again. I've got a lot of catching up to do on the USI website ;) .
 
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To me a classic hoax promoted endlessly by Art Bell on Coast to Coast (long after he had solid proof in his hands of the hoax) was the Jonathan Reed story in the 90's. This was summarized at the time as the "Alien in the Freezer" Story. Jonathan supposedly went hiking with his dog, saw an alien, who freeze dried his dog. Jonathan supposedly bashed the alien, rolled it up in a sleeping bag or blanket, and put it in his home freezer. Art Bell adored this story. Jonathan kept adding wonderful conspiracy details, e.g., that men in black broke into his house/garage and took the body (which had a tendency to start screaming whenever Jonathan opened the freezer door). Jonathan mentioned a number of doctors and others who validated his story, only to find out that these others were in collusion with Jonathan. I believe one doctor was actually a gas station attendant. Interestingly, when Art Bell came back with DARK MATTERS, what did he do? He resurrected this known hoax from the 90's and had Jonathan Reed on his show. This revealed to me that Art Bell was an example of arrested development. He thought he could come back in 2013 and book shows as if it was still 1997. His die hard fans loved his return, but for those of us who try to stay on the cutting edge of ufology, Art seemed hopelessly out-of-date and out-of-touch.
 
ufology said:
I've heard of a couple of admitted hoaxes by skeptics who were out to prove the gullibility of people...
Click to expand...
Yes, I can think of three off the top of my head: Warminster, Caltech students mid1960s and the two numbskulls with balloon in New Jersey a few years back.
Oh- another one, this by a pro-UFOer, Wilbert Smith of Project Magnet. His team launched a gimmicked balloon to test the public's reaction but it went unnoticed.
 
The two recent standouts for me are the Trindade Island Photo and the Belgian Wave infamous Triangular Craft nightime photo which both Almiro Barauna and 'Patrick' confessed to their respective hoaxes. Barauna had faked a treasure trove earlier in his photographic career and the very famous UFO photo seen below was supposedly two spoons he had previously shot indoors against a neutral background. The UFO confession though is 3rd party reporting.
forgetomori » Trindade Island case photographer admits hoax
194dbc5ec96f.jpg

'Patrick,' however actually produced other slides from the same series and even explained the numerous attempts to create this image using a small scale model with plastics. What's quite interesting about this image is that numerous experts verified this photo, though skeptics long contended that without any background image reference there was no way to determine scale. Their assumption that it could easily have been a model was proven correct. Chalk one up for those evil mongrels, or villains or whatever the skeptics get branded. I appreciate their diligence but wish some would not froth so much at the mouth, the way that conspiracists also can't help from getting all worked up most of the time.
PetitRechain2.jpg

Finding out that both these iconic photos were faked was a series of landmark disappointments for me. I wonder sometimes if it's even possible to take a picture of a UFO.

What's a fascinating twist to it all is the great gift of skepticism: it's ability to reinvent reality. When I was looking for the original article that identified great details about how the Petit Rechain photo was faked in an interview with anonymous 'Patrick' I found this article instead, examining whether or not the confessed hoax was also a hoax.
Is the Petit Rechain UFO Photo Hoax a Hoax Itself? | Martin J. Clemens

Here's the original article I read documenting the case:CAELESTIA Triangles over Belgium (addendum)
 
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The 2008 bigfoot in the freezer was rick dyer. Who in 20 13 ran around with a stuffed fake bigfoot. And killed 3 bogfoot in Pennsylvania. And kept the body's in his house..
In ufo. .billy mierer
 
Billy Meier? I'm not aware of him ever admitting fraud. Some of these I didn't know about or had forgotten - The Belgian one had slipped my mind.

Of course, Jim Moseley goes on the list of confessors. Part of the title of his book was "Confessions!"

Ed Walters, when accused of hoaxing, copped to a lesser crime, admitting faking the ghost photos, but still claimed his UFO picture were real.
 
I remember reading here on the forum Trainedobservor's appreciation for the extremely well written narratives of Walter's tale that he found highly compelling. I think a great plus for convincing people f a hoax is to have an exceptional & surreal narrative attached to your one piece of evidence and *poof* you have UFO history in the making. Walton doesn't even have the evidence piece, nor does Pascagoula. But Michalak fits that model. Meier also had a great story and some 'nifty' evidence. (not saying that all these are hoaxes btw). The Guardian hoax is also anther example of lovely details that makes for a convincing narrative.
 
Just came across a golden oldie:

"The Steep Rock Echo, of Steep Rock, Canada, carried an amazing story 1n 1ts September- October 1950 issue. According to the story, a man and his wife went fishing in a remote cove of Sawhill Bay on July 2, 1950... stunned to see a shinning object, like two saucers rim to rim hovering just above the water only 400 yards distant. Around the edge were holes about four feet apart and on the top surface were opened hatches, evidently exit ports for some very queer faceless little gents 3! to4 feet in height wearing blue skull caps and gleaming metallic breast cloth...

As late as 1967, Frank Edwards told the story again in one of his UFO books. It wasn't until the late 1970's that a civilian researcher by the name of Robert Badgley learned that a Gordon Edward had created the yarn for the amusement of the Steep Rock Echoe's readers. The robots of Sawhill Bay were as fictitious as Frank Scully's little men which no doubt was the inspiration."
http://sohp.us/collections/ufos-a-history/pdf/GROSS-1950-Aug-Dec.pdf
 
It's sort of sad that any yahoo with Photoshop can create a reasonable ufo hoax. You just can't believe any photos these days. Just another wrench thrown into Ufology trying to make people take it seriously.
 
Burnt State said:
I'm surprised we don't see more hoaxes in an age where everyone wants to create hype for their movie. video game or convention ...
Click to expand...
Actually, like @DaveM says, with all the fake photos ( and videos ) out there, I suspect there are more hoaxes than we can count in a day. It's just that many of them are so obvious that we we've become used to writing them off as publicity stunts or practical jokes, but there must be thousands of them on the Internet and I wouldn't be surprized if dozens more show up daily. And I agree with Dave. It is sort of sad. It's gone beyond the point of good natured humor. It's cheap exploitation of a field that does have a serious side.

Did I say a serious side ...

sprinfield-files.jpg
 
ufology said:
Actually, like @DaveM says, with all the fake photos ( and videos ) out there, I suspect there are more hoaxes than we can count in a day. It's just that many of them are so obvious that we we've become used to writing them off as publicity stunts or practical jokes, but there must be thousands of them on the Internet and I wouldn't be surprized if dozens more show up daily. And I agree with Dave. It is sort of sad. It's gone beyond the point of good natured humor. It's cheap exploitation of a field that does have a serious side.

Did I say a serious side ...

sprinfield-files.jpg
Click to expand...
You might as well throw crop circles into the mix. There may be a few percent that are real but who is to know. You have all these knuckleheads out there in the night destroying farmer's crops, to what end? I heard the excuses, "for my art." Give me a break!
 
Sentry said:
Billy Meier? I'm not aware of him ever admitting fraud. Some of these I didn't know about or had forgotten - The Belgian one had slipped my mind.

Of course, Jim Moseley goes on the list of confessors. Part of the title of his book was "Confessions!"

Ed Walters, when accused of hoaxing, copped to a lesser crime, admitting faking the ghost photos, but still claimed his UFO picture were real.
Click to expand...

Billy Meier has not only never admitted being a fraud, his minions are still flooding researchers in the U.S.with e-mails proclaiming the validity of that stuff. My spam filter now handles those.
 
Here's one I haven't pinned down yet, perhaps the 1st incidence of a physical UFO hoax by skeptics.

In 1896, The newspaper Examiner trying to prove their rivals and their readership were being fooled by balloons, thinking they were airships.

"The Call let the world know that four strong men had formed the 'Mission Dolores Vigilance Committee' to track down and punish practical jokers with balloons. Apparently, this article was meant to intimidate the Examiner which was sanding aloft toy balloons to hoax airship believers and embarrass the Call and Chronicle." From The Mystery of Unidentified Flying Objects: 1896—1949 by Loren Gross

Here's a period newspaper discussing the hoax balloons,but not this incident in particular:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1896-11-26/ed-1/seq-1.pdf
 
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