Everything has to start somewhere, even history.
This particular inception is most often dated to two and a half millennia ago, in the fifth century BCE, when a man named Herodotus decided to create a written record of the ancient world. From his home in Halicarnassus (in modern Turkey), he set to papyrus his journeys—around the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia—in a series of travelogues called Histories. They are fascinating accounts of people and places, but he’s in this encyclopedia, so he must have screwed something up.
Although Herodotus would provide future generations with a wealth of information about the ancient world, he had a penchant for turning each locale into an exaggerated cartoon. In Babylon, a gigantic wall surrounded the city, one hundred meters thick, more impenetrable than even Trump could imagine; Persia had enormous ants, the size of foxes, that could eat a whole camel; in northern Europe, a tribe of one-eyed men stole gold from griffins. These outlandish tales should eliminate him from “first historian” contention, but Herodotus was also a very careful storyteller. In nearly all cases, as he wound up to tell a whopper tale, Herodotus inserted a framing device — “it is said . . .” or “this tale comes from . . .”—to displace his culpability toward the truth. I’m just here to pass along this story, he seemed to say in a folksy voice, like Mark Twain unfurling an epic jumping frog yarn. But in some cases, Herodotus seemed to really believe the tall tales; the griffins and cyclopes sound especially close to firsthand encounters.
His reluctance to spoil a good story with the truth would damage his legacy. A few centuries later, Cicero bestowed unto Herodotus the title “The Father of History,” but he was also a harsh critic, as were Aristotle, Josephus, and Plutarch. Voltaire was the first to confer unto him a second title, “The Father of Lies,” which stuck as much as his other paternal epithet.
Despite his whimsy, Herodotus was regarded as a provocative thinker, eager to interrogate sacrosanct topics. Herodotus admired HOMER, for example, but also questioned the historical veracity of the Iliad. Why, Herodotus wanted to know, would the Achaeans wage an interminable, expensive war on behalf of one woman? (Helen of Troy seemed pretty cool, but really?) He was the first to ask what now seems a rather obvious question about the Trojan War.
Herodotus was attracted to zany stories, but his stated goal was merely to pass along what people told him. “Although it is incumbent on me to state what I am told,” he wrote, “I am under no obligation to believe it entirely—something that is true for the whole of my narrative.” Unlike modern scholars, who debate history as a series of hypotheses, Herodotus viewed himself more in the role of a reporter. Listen, have I got a story about Babylon for you . . .
SEE ALSO: ALT-HISTORY; CHINESE WHISPERS; HOMER; PHANTOM TIME HYPOTHESIS
The Hitler Diaries were a trove of Adolf Hitler journals published in the West German magazine Stern in 1983. The magazine, through reporter Gerd Heidemann, purchased sixty volumes of the diaries, previously thought lost in a 1945 plane crash, for around $3 million.64
Of course, they were fakes. Heidemann purchased the journals from a forger for around $1 million and pocketed the difference. The reporter seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with Nazis, which included purchasing the yacht of Hermann Göring and having a five-year affair with his daughter, Edda. He spent four and a half years in prison for fraud.
The Hitler Diaries are considered one of the greatest journalism scandals of postwar Germany.
SEE ALSO: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES; THE BIG LIE; THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION; VAN MEEGEREN, HAN
If you want to start a fight with a classicist, ask about the age of Homer.
The great bard was born around 700 BCE, or depending on who you ask, maybe much earlier, perhaps as far back as 1200 BCE during the Trojan War, if that military conflict was itself not a mythological invention. Homer might have lived on Chios (a Greek island), or in ancient Ionia (now western Turkey), or possibly in one of the seven different ancient cities that claimed him as their native son.
We know essentially nothing about Homer.
Many works of ancient literature were initially attributed to him, but his oeuvre was eventually whittled down to just two epic poems. As Aristotle hypothesized, the Iliad was probably written first; the Odyssey, more likely the work of a mature poet. Or just as possible, given the radical differences in style, the two epic poems could have completely different authors, as many in antiquity believed.
He—hold up; possibly she, as Samuel Butler argued in the nineteenth century, as well as others more recently—is thought to have been blind. Yet that conclusion is based solely on a sightless minstrel in the Odyssey who sings about the fall of Troy. (Classicists like to detect autobiographical clues in the works of Homer.)
The Iliad may have been written down as early as 750 BCE, when the Greek alphabet was first developed, but no manuscripts exist from that time. Archaeologists found pieces of the Iliad under the heads of mummies in Egypt dating to circa 150 BCE, but they are just fragments. The oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad is from around 900 CE—at least 1,600 years after the original work was set to papyrus.
Here, finally, a historical detail that everyone agrees on: Both great epic poems started as oral compositions, meant to be sung or chanted for an audience. But as for whether they were oral tales for decades or centuries or millennia, and whether they were composed or transcribed by Homer, and whether Homer was himself a myth, like Zeus—there is wide disagreement.
The person who recorded the great legends may himself have been a great legend.65 Those massive works could be the collective creation of anonymous bards, memorized and recited for generations. “Think of Homer as a culture not a person,” one book recently argued.66 Given all the time irregularities and continuity errors in the texts, it seems entirely possible that the poems were written in different periods of Greek history. (Referred to as Homeric nods, these errors wouldn’t seem to exist if the epics were written by one author. One of many examples: In the Iliad, Menelaus kills Pylaemenes, who is still around later to witness the death of his son.) Perhaps the name Homer was applied to the oral epics later, once they were put into print. For centuries, the Odyssey may have been one huge evolving poem, like an oral wiki page, collaboratively edited and refined through time. If not for the invention of the alphabet, it might still be growing and adapting today.
This theory might be true, or false. Regardless, it is a much better legend.
SEE ALSO: ALT-HISTORY; CHINESE WHISPERS; FANFIC; HISTORIES; POPE JOAN; PRESTER JOHN; RETCONNING; TROJAN HORSE
Like a trail of honey enticing a grizzly bear to a stash of syrupy combs, a honeypot is a decoy used to lure hackers. The surreptitious bait typically resembles vulnerable data, which cybersecurity professionals monitor for unauthorized access. If an outsider interacts with the honeypot, they know a hacker lies in their midst and can identify the invasive techniques.
The plot of the first season of the crypto-thriller Mr. Robot hinges on removing a honeypot to crack the network of E Corp.
SEE ALSO: CANARY TRAP; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; HONEYTRAP; STEGANOGRAPHY
A honeytrap (also sometimes called a HONEYPOT) is an espionage technique used both by spies to obtain secrets and by private investigators to catch philanderers. The basic template is simple—lure the subject into a sexual situation to either physically seize them, extract secrets from them, or capture evidence to use against them. When the latter, incriminating photos are often the product of a successful honeytrap.
When a honeytrap is used criminally in an extortion scheme, it is sometimes called a badger game. Alexander Hamilton was famously caught in a badger game by his mistress’s husband, who blackmailed him to keep the affair secret. When political opponents discovered the affair, it became America’s first sex scandal.
Though sometimes considered a relic of the Cold War (used not only by spies but relentlessly as a trope in James Bond movies), setting honeytraps is reportedly still quite common in Russia.
The earliest recorded honeytrap might be Delilah revealing Samson’s weakness (his magnificent mane of hair) to the Philistines in exchange for silver, as told in the Book of Judges. The honeytrap could literally be the oldest dirty trick in the book.
SEE ALSO: CANARY TRAP; CATFISH; FALSE FLAG OPERATION; HONEYPOT; TEOING
Harry Houdini was perhaps the most famous illusionist and escapologist in history, but he was also an avowed skeptic who occupied his later years debunking psychics and mediums. Unlike most magicians of the day, Houdini never claimed to have supernatural abilities, but that did not stop his friend Arthur Conan Doyle from ascribing wizardly powers to him.
It was a peculiar friendship, based at first upon them both being spectacularly famous. After meeting in 1920 during a magician’s tour of England, they maintained an active correspondence and visited each other on several occasions. Despite creating Sherlock Holmes, one of the most empirically minded, hyper-rational characters in literary history, Doyle was the philosophical opposite of Houdini—a fervent metaphysician who literally believed in fairies.67 A leader of the spiritualist movement, Doyle actively lectured and wrote books on the topics of clairvoyance, spirits, and psychic phenomena.
No stranger to the occult, Houdini had been interested in mediumship since before his mother died in 1913. He had become dismayed though, as each psychic he enlisted to contact his mother soon proved to be an obvious charlatan. (He was naturally adept at spotting fakery.) As Houdini lost faith in the supernatural, Doyle became more determined to convince him otherwise, introducing him to even more spiritualists, whom Houdini kept debunking. Their odd friendship lasted for years only because Houdini was able to hide his true feelings about spiritualism from the man of letters.
Their falling out would occur after a séance organized by Doyle’s wife, herself a practicing medium, who offered to contact Houdini’s beloved mother. As they gathered around a table in a shadowy room, Lady Doyle fell into a trance and began automatic writing—scrawling words and pictures on endless sheets of paper, the modern equivalent of guiding a planchette across the Ouija board. Houdini was immediately suspicious of a drawing with a large cross (his mother was a devout Jew), but he waited patiently. When his mother finally spoke through the medium, her voice came through the AETHER in perfect English, a language she barely knew. Though Houdini was flummoxed, Lady Doyle had a quick response. “In heaven,” she responded, “everyone speaks English.”
Dismayed, Houdini kept quiet about the incident, afraid his skepticism would upset his friendship with the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But several months later, he told the New York Sun that he had yet to substantiate any medium who claimed to talk with the dead. When Doyle saw the quote, he thought Houdini had betrayed him and quickly sent off an angry letter. They bickered for a while in correspondence, which eventually spilled into a public debate in the New York Times. “There is nothing that Sir Arthur will believe that surprises me,” wrote Houdini. Their friendship would never recover.68
Houdini continued his mission of exposing the mystics of the day as frauds who swindled vulnerable people. He wrote several books on the matter and went on tour exposing hucksters in a stage show. He died on Halloween in 1926 after taking a punch to the stomach he was unprepared for. Doyle died a few years later, still a devout spiritualist.
SEE ALSO: MECHANICAL TURK; ONE MILLION DOLLAR PARANORMAL CHALLENGE; ORDER OF THE OCCULT HAND; ZARDULU
Unless the Olsen Twins are hiding something, there are, as far as we know, no human clones wandering the earth. This is partially through scientific restraint. The technology is attainable—biologists have already completed the first step, creating mature human embryos by transplanting the nuclei of skin cells into vacant host eggs. The embryos were terminated before turning into fetuses, and some hurdles would likely impede further development, but biologists have proven that human cloning is, in theory, possible. Some people think this is pretty damn cool; many reckon it the end of days.
Whether society would or should allow human cloning is an entirely different matter. It is currently banned by the United Nations, but there are always rogue actors. (Post-DOLLY, there were several fraudulent human clones announced.) And there’s always the possibility that society’s attitude toward reproductive cloning will change over time. “Test tube babies” were once considered ghoulish, but now nearly 2 percent of American children are conceived in vitro. Maybe we’ll adapt to accept asexual reproduction, or maybe the fear of an army of Kanye cylons is too strong.
SEE ALSO: 3D PRINTING; DOLLY; FREGOLI DELUSION; MIMICRY
Humbuggery is an act of deception, often associated with fraud. Humbuggers are scammers, charlatans, hornswogglers, flimflam men—and P. T. Barnum loved them all. He not only used the term endearingly but bestowed upon himself a royal title: “The Prince of Humbug.”
Barnum loved humbugs so much that he even wrote a book on the matter, Humbugs of the World (1865), with the stated goal of rescuing humbuggery from its negative connotation. The consummate entertainer, he believed the tarnished term should be revived with a more enlightened definition. Humbugs, for Barnum, were not insidious frauds but simply compelling public spectacles of ambiguous legitimacy. Ambiguity was key—humbugs should never misrepresent themselves. A true humbug invited the viewer to ascertain its authenticity. A humbug has nothing to prove.
Barnum turned this belief into business doctrine. His career started by exhibiting Joice Heth, the 161-year-old “nursing mammy” of George Washington.69 When the public grew suspicious of her purported age, Barnum could have bolstered his sham with bogus scientific testimony. Instead, he wrote an anonymous letter to a newspaper, updating the accusation of fraudulence to something even more outrageous—Heth was actually an automaton voiced by a ventriloquist.
The absurd claim reignited her fame, drawing not only new audiences but repeat visitors who wished to reevaluate the putative robot in a new light. When Heth later died and her age was proven to be much younger, Barnum staged an autopsy at the New York City Saloon for 1,500 customers who paid 50¢ each. When the surgeon declared she could not be older than eighty, Barnum claimed himself an inculpable victim of a hoax. “I had hired Joice in perfect good faith,” the showman contended, “and relied upon her appearance and the documents as evidence of the truth of her story.”
Of course, his feigned innocence was some supreme BULLSHIT. But the incident afforded Barnum an insight that would inform his entire career: Successful humbugs should be probable but cannot be indisputable. He was a merchant of doubt, not proof. “The public appears disposed to be amused,” the showman later wrote in his autobiography, “even when they are conscious of being deceived.” Suspicion sold tickets, not certainty. People want to be humbugged.
In advertisements for his shows, Barnum presented himself as skeptical of his own human curiosities, a mere conduit for the hucksters. When scientists disputed another spectacle, the Feejee Mermaid, he publicized it with the question “Who is to decide when doctors disagree?” You detect the fraud, he seemed to say, intimating a distinctly American quality of simulated freedom in the face of deception.70
Barnum was a master of giving his audience the illusion of control. The impresario foresaw how conflicting reactions were a sign of compelling theater. If you detected no legerdemain in a humbug and believed it real, then you enjoyed your experience. If you were an educated skeptic who visited a humbug just to feign superiority around unrefined rubes, your experience was equally enjoyable. Humbugs, for Barnum, were performances to debate, effigies around which the public hashed out arguments about science, theater, medicine, and society. Even audiences who saw through the ruse used humbugs to hone their wit, not that dissimilar from today’s hate-watchers. “Now and then someone would cry out humbug and charlatan but so much the better for me,” he would later recall. “It helped to advertise me, and I was willing to bear the reputation.”
Everyone pays their admission and contributes to the ballyhoo. Bah, humbug.71
SEE ALSO: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; BULLSHIT; CARDIFF GIANT; KAYFABE; SMARKS; THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES; TRUTHINESS; WORK OF FICTION DISCLAIMER
Hypnosis is a state of human consciousness where you become susceptible to BULLSHIT.
There are several types of purported hypnotic states, but the most illustrative is actually the most ludicrous: the hypnotist entertainer. When you get on stage with a dozen other people and the “You are getting sleepy…” routine commences, the hypnotist has actually created a theatrical environment that lowers your guard, increases your suggestibility, and transforms you into a performer. You are under no trance. The best way to describe hypnosis might be as roleplaying, or as magician James Randi once put it, “a mutual agreement of the operator and the subject.” In other words, it’s theater. When the hypnotist asks you to quack like a duck, you play along. You are under a mystical spell no more than Al Pacino literally became Michael Corleone.
A similar transaction occurs with hypnotherapy, in which you meditate your way to stop smoking or lose weight or cure depression. These motivational programs can work, sometimes, but not because you are put under some deep transformative spell. You were motivated enough to pay for someone to put you to sleep, so clearly you are motivated enough to lose weight. It’s the same psychological mechanism that explains why people find greater enjoyment in drinking wine they are told is expensive, even when it is the cheap stuff. Repeated studies have shown that people who are easily hypnotized are more likely to have what psychologists call “fantasy-prone personalities.” They let themselves believe.
The PLACEBO EFFECT is real; the effects of hypnosis are not entirely feigned. If you trick your mind into believing you experience less pain or into forgetting a bad memory then, ipso facto, there is less pain and the memory is forgotten.72 But you’re conning yourself to think that hypnosis, abracadabra, cured something. You did it, all by yourself.
SEE ALSO: BARNUM EFFECT; BOGUS PIPELINE; DREAM ARGUMENT; MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE; THE METHOD; PLACEBO EFFECT; SODIUM PENTOTHAL; SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING; WIPING
64 The backstory: Hitler’s personal valet was in possession of ten heavy chests belonging to the German leader when his plane crashed in the Heidenholz Forest near Czechoslovakia. When told of the crash, a despondent Hitler supposedly told a friend, “I entrusted him with extremely valuable documents which would show posterity the truth of my actions!” No one knows what these documents were (intrigue!), though it is theoretically possible that before the SS arrived, looters rummaged the crash site and found diaries.
65 Another early Greek storyteller of unstable historical legitimacy is Aesop. None of his writings even exist today, yet his collected Fables are often read by schoolchildren. He was, in all likelihood, an aggregator of tales, but he might not have existed at all.
66 Why Homer Matters (2016) by Adam Nicolson was hardly the first to argue for the collectivist Homer. Like everything else, the idea can be traced back to antiquity.
67 These were the infamous Cottingley Fairies, a series of five photographs that contained wood fairies and goblins. Doyle, who believed them real and became their lead proponent, used the photos to illustrate an article he wrote about fairies.
68 If this anecdote inspires you to try writing a buddy comedy about this screwball friendship, put away your typewriter—someone already tried it. Houdini & Doyle was a ten-episode show that aired on FOX in 2016. It was quickly cancelled.
69 Barnum was an abolitionist, who would later serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature, but “slavery” is the only word to describe his relationship to Heth. He purchased her from another entertainer. She died in 1836, around the age of seventy-nine.
70 “We need P. T. Barnum, a little bit,” Donald Trump said on Meet the Press in January 2016. “Because we have to build up the image of our country.” It may have been a callback to his sister, a federal judge, who back in 2005 told his biographer, “He is P. T. Barnum.”
71 Most people first encounter the word humbug as children, when they hear Ebenezer Scrooge cackle “Bah, humbug!” in A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens and Barnum were in fact contemporaries, and it seems entirely possible that the former intentionally helped the latter popularize the term.
72 As an act of psychological manipulation, hypnosis is deeply linked to memory—forgetting, remembering, and inventing the past. During the 1980s, regression therapy emerged as a prominent technique for recovering “repressed memories.” By inducing a hypnotic state, victims were coaxed into recalling their alien abduction, their past lives, and their childhood sexual trauma.