rexphantom

Hoaxes and fakery.

I'm terribly attracted to elaborate hoaxes. I can trace it back to when I was a kid and during the summer I would go to the library with my mom once a week. I would check out stacks and stacks of books about ghosts, monsters, UFOs, bigfoot, that sort of thing. Those Time/Life "read the book" tomes were my friends. At the time I really believed that stuff, in the same way I believed in god or the devil or what have you--it sounded ridiculous, but look! Adults believe it, how crazy can it be?

But now, every once in a while, I'll hear about how this photograph of the Loch Ness Monster was faked, or how that video of Bigfoot was a hoax, and I remember that most of that stuff doesn't make much sense to me anymore. I don't believe in god, I don't believe in goblins, I don't believe dinosaurs still live in Scotland. That doesn't mean I don't want to believe in some or all of them, it just doesn't make sense to me anymore.

But I've found that I'm more excited by the fact that people have been tricked by these fake photos and video even more than I enjoyed believing in them when I was a kid. Like the Bigfoot footage, the video they pull out whenever there is a story about a sasquatch on Unsolved Mysteries or what have you--the fuzzy film where you can see a black form loping through the woods. It turns its head to the camera and the show's producers slow the film down and slowly pan toward the indistinct form.

They would talk to specialists who discussed the creature's stride, how it was ape-like and would be difficult for a human to mimic. Compared to the trees int he background, some might theorize the beast as being seven feet tall.

But years later, as the filmmakers grow older, maybe their conscience gets the better of them. Maybe they just want a little more publicity before they die. They reveal--and I don't know how they reveal it . . . do they issue a statement through an agent? Their lawyers?--that it was a hoax all along. It was a dude in a gorilla suit, just like the nay-sayers always claimed.

Crop circle folks instruct news programs on how they bend the stalks without breaking them. Decades-old pictures from Loch Ness turn out to be from some dude's bathtub. Anachronisms are pointed out in alien autopsy videos.

Every mistake or admission only gets me more excited about the piece in question. Maybe I enjoy the sense of wonder these particular hoaxes perpetuate in the believers. Maybe I'm nostalgic for when I was able to let myself believe in such things. Or it could be that I just like to trick people and to be tricked. But whenever a hoax is revealed for what it really is, I'm never pointing fingers at the hoaxer and I don't feel vindicated to find an alien abductee's story to be false. I'm just glad that someone was able to fool so many people for so long.