1. The original Trojan horse -- What really happened at Troy? -- 2. The forgery underlying the power of medieval popes -- Constantine, Christian emperor of the Greek East and the Latin West -- 3. A letter from the mythical Prester John -- Imagining the world -- 4. Did Marco Polo really go to China? -- Mandeville's travels -- 5. The world's most mysterious book -- A question of motives -- Invented languages -- 6. Was Lambert Simnel a lost prince? -- Henry Tudor's claim to the throne -- The history of Crowland Abbey: a forged source? -- 7. Michelangelo fakes an antiquity -- A patriotic monk glorifies his hometown -- 8. A mythical island appears on maps of the North Atlantic -- Missing and misidentified islands -- 9. Secrets of an imaginary alchemist -- Paracelsus, scientific rebel -- 10. The stagecraft of Athanasius Kircher -- Kircher's museum: a scientific distraction? -- 11. Dr. Beringer reads lying fossils -- Interpreting fossils in 1725 -- 12. An ancient bard awes the literary world -- England and Scotland -- 13. Benjamin Franklin pretends to be the King of Prussia -- Benjamin Franklin's witch hoax -- 14. The Potemkin village: more than just a pretty façade -- 15. Newly discovered Shakespeare play jeered by theater-goers -- Literary forgery as an eighteenth-century epidemic -- 16. An astronomer discovers intelligent life on the Moon -- Voyages to the Moon deemed more plausible than microorganisms in a drop of water -- April fools -- 17. The Walam Olum: 90 generations of oral history of a hoax? -- Slanting history -- 18. Was the Fejee mermaid a genuine fake? -- How do you make a mermaid? -- 19. The Fox sisters invent spiritual telegraphy -- Was there really a murdered peddler? -- Spiritual telegraphy and Benjamin Franklin -- 20. Faking a trip to gold rush territory -- Getting to San Francisco -- 21. When giants roamed the earth -- Mark Twain's petrified man -- 22. The Keely Motor Company promises efficient world travel -- Scientific progress and perpetual motion -- 23. The case of the living encyclopedia -- Wikipedia -- 24. Extracting gold from seawater -- 25. Viking runes in Minnesota -- Scythian gold at the Louvre --
26. A conspiracy to justify murder
Conspiracy theories and the damage done
27. A future great novelist helps hoax the Royal Navy
HMS Dreadnought and the lead-up to World War I
28. Missing link found at Piltdown
How do scientists decide which bones to trust?
29. Naked man conquers Maine woods
Naked publicity gimmicks and hoaxes
Isolated living in Biosphere 2
30. the spectric poets unmasked
31. the original Ponzi scheme
32. Fairies are caught on camera
Why Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies
33. Did Grand Duchess Anastasia survive the Revolution?
34. Houdini debunks a medium
Other ways of knowing: science and new religions
35. If you believe that, I have a tower to sell you
Unloading the Eiffel Tower
36. The Loch Ness Monster
Standards of evidence and scientific names
38. Operation Mincemeat deludes Hitler
the classic Haversack Operation: 1917
39. Dutch artist arrested for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring
40. The cursed tomb of the last Aztec emperor
41. Donald Crowhurst vanishes at sea
42. The Tasaday: a stone-age tribe or a hoax?
Survivals from the dawn of humanity
43. A faked autobiography of Howard Hughes
A memoir of live with wolves
44. Moon landing conspiracy theory
45. Genuine fake Hitler diaries
46. More lying stones: Moroccan fossils in the Himalayas
Why the scientific record needs setting straight
47. Crop circle artists confess
48. Physicist Alan Sokal spoofs postmodern scholarship
Scholarly journals and the peer review process
49. Joining the campaign to ban DHMO
Getting both sides of the story
50. Microsoft technical support
Curses and crashing computers: frightening the marks.
