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creature wasn't a real alien, and since Santilli didn't admit this upon release, the footage can be considered a hoax.

8) Sensationalist "News" Tabloids (1950s - present)

The most famous of these papers are The National Enquirer, The Globe, and the craziest of all: the Weekly World News. These magazines have hoaxed more hoaxes than any hoaxer should hope to hoax, and the redundancy is fully intended to help this point sink in. Fortunately for the levelheaded public, hardly anyone is roped in by scandals titled like these: "Alien Bible Translated," "Russians Shoot Down UFO," "Two-Ton Alien Hairball Found in Australia," "Aliens stole my face," "UFO Sparks Killer Forest Fire," and "Japanese Woman to Wed Space Alien."

Have aliens been using the moon as a garbage dump? Are they warring with a clan of bigfoots (bigfeet)? How exactly can exorcism affect UFOs? Who the heck is P'Lodd, and why is he fraternizing with the Clintons? Doubtless someone, somewhere, has been tricked into believing at least some of this crazy stuff. Thus, these tall-tale-telling-tabloids are officially hoaxers. Even if most of those who purchase tabloids do it for entertainment value alone, the magazines themselves stand by the alleged truth of their stories.

7) The Radio Performance of War of the Worlds (1938)

For Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio play inspired by H. G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds,' the classic story of violent alien invasion. The night it aired over the CBS radio network is one that many never forgot. It was an amazing performance - so amazing, in fact, that people took to the streets, fleeing their homes for their lives. The air of tension created by the second world war gets only some of the credit for the uproar, in which nearly two million people were convinced that 'War of the Worlds' was a news broadcast, rather than a work of fiction.

Although this example of human gullibility almost doesn't count as a hoax - after all, the station did warn repeatedly that the story was fictional, it's just that people missed it while channel-surfing - the sheer immense number of fooled and panicked people makes its inclusion here necessary.

6) Hale Bopp and Heaven's Gate (1975 - 1997)

What can be more hoaxy than a cult? Cult leaders are known to be more charismatic than the average fellow, convincing followers to believe and do the extraordinary for no real good reason. This was demonstrated by Heaven's Gate's leader, the white-haired and eccentric-looking Marshall Applewhite,

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