BEHIND THE HOAX

Ian Keable. The Century of Deception. The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England. Westbourne Press, 2022. 

So many of the phenomena that Magonia reviews are bedeviled by hoaxes, from the Cottingley Fairies and the Patterson Bigfoot film to the Fox Sisters’ raps. And straight away I’ve started an argument! Once a hoax enters the collective consciousness it is virtually impossible to convince the believer that is is anything but the whole truth. 

🔻

DEVIL OF A TALE

Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito. The Secret History of the Jersey Devil; How Quakers, Hucksters and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Although its fame is not quite as universal as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil can claim to be by far the senior mystery monster. Haunting the Pine Barrens, an isolated wooded area of New Jersey, the Jersey Devil is usually described as a goat-or horse-like creature, usually walking on its hind legs, with bat-like wings growing from its withers.
🔻

DIGGING THE DIRT

Jeb J. Card and David S. Anderson (editors) Lost City, Found Pyramid - Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices. University of Alabama Press, 2016

Archaeologists, it has been said, often find their careers in ruins. Their jobs often entail digging in the dirt for clues. Genuine archaeology involves a lot of hard work, strict procedures, and very little glamour. 
🔻

DON'T PANIC!

Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford. The Martians Have Landed; A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes. McFarland, 2012.

---

Guy P. Harrison. 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Bartholomew and Radford’s book carries on from a number of other titles by Bartholomew, looking at social delusions, as well as another book on panics and hoaxes co-edited with Hilary Evans. This seems to be a rather slighter volume with over thirty topics dealt with mostly in fairly short chapters.
🔻

HITLER'S JEWISH 'PSYCHIC'

Arthur J. Magida. The Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

It seems to be a characteristic of some of the more successful and charismatic stage magicians and mind-readers that they eventually believe their own publicity and start to imagine that they do genuinely have extraordinary psychic powers. 
🔽

THE ORIGINAL FLYING SAUCER?

I normally put information about new and forthcoming books over in the Book News listing, but there is one recent item to which I would like give a somewhat wider promotion. My thanks to Mark Pilkington and his Mirage Men blog for alerting me to this. 
🔻

LITERARY HOAXES

Melissa Katsoulis. Telling Tales: a History of Literary Hoaxes. Constable, 2009.

A fascinating, sometimes funny, often sad, account of literary hoaxes, both well and little known from the 18th century onwards. They range from the light hearted literary japes such as those of Mark Twain, attacks on perceived ideological or artistic pretension such as the fake poetry of 'Ern Malley' or the Sokal hoax, through classic cons such as the Hitler Diaries and Clifford Irvings 'Howard Hughes' hoax.
🔻