History's Greatest Hoaxes

History's Greatest Hoaxes looks at the case of the Hitler Diaries which purported to be sixty-two volumes of Adolph Hitler's personal journals. Convinced of their reality, Rupert Murdoch paid over a half a million dollars to publish them. The hoax turned out to be one of the greatest scam ever done to a newspaper.

History's Greatest Hoaxes looks at Orson Welles's Mercury Theater radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel 'The War of the Worlds'. The simulated news broadcast convinced many Americans that an invasion by Martians was underway. Newspapers claimed that it led to a massive panic around the country, but was the original audience actually that large?

History's Greatest Hoaxes looks at the story of Papillon one of the most popular books and films of the 1970s. It tells the dramatic story of the prison life of Henri Charriere, a convicted murderer with a large butterfly tattoo on his chest. How much of his story was true? Was he ever imprisoned on Devil's Island? Or was it all fiction?

History's Greatest Hoaxes looks at the Piltdown Man. In 1912 the discovery of an unusual skull and jawbone in Sussex, England, led many to believe that a 'missing link' had finally been found. The revelation of a hoax, however, had wide reaching impact on anthropology and science.