10. 'Sex Bracelets'
Rumor has it there is a game popular among junior high school students in the United States called "Snap," in which sexual favors are granted to whoever breaks a jelly bracelet off of someone else's wrist. What is a jelly bracelet, you ask? Let me put it this way: if you have teenaged children and you don't know the answer to that question, you will want to educate yourself on the subject, which caused quite a stir this past year in many parts of the U.S.

9. Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune!
Believe it or not, this logic-defying Internet hoax is seven years old and still going strong. As originally composed, Microsoft founder Bill Gates purportedly promised in a personal message to pay $1,000 to each and every person who helped him beta test his new "email tracking software" by forwarding the missive to everyone they know. Subsequent versions included phony news reports about mergers taking place between AOL, Microsoft and chip manufacturer Intel. Do I need to add that not a word of this is true? Judging by the fact that this remains one of the top-circulating specimens of Netlore ever, evidently I do.

8. Patriotic Pepsi Can Omits 'Under God' in Pledge Excerpt
Though completely innocent of the charge, Pepsi-Cola inherited a sizable burden of bad publicity when an unknown hoaxer replaced the brand name "Dr Pepper" with "Pepsi" in an email circular condemning the former for omitting the phrase "under God" in an excerpt from the U.S. pledge of allegiance on a special promotional soda can. Despite a terse disclaimer on Pepsi's Website, hundreds of thousands of people accepted the hoax as true and passed it on to friends and family, urging them to boycott the popular soft drink in the name of outraged Christians everywhere.

7. Terrorists Are Buying UPS Uniforms on eBay
Despite a miniscule grain of truth — namely that articles of clothing bearing the UPS brand have occasionally shown up for auction on eBay, leading to at least one FBI investigation — the main implication of this still-circulating message from February 2003, dubbed "the urban legend of missing uniforms" by a United Parcel Service spokesperson, is false: no large cache of UPS uniforms has fallen into the hands of suspected terrorists. Definitely scary, if true; but it's not.

6. The Eye of God
This striking composite photo of the Helix Nebula, a "trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases" 650 light-years away, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and Kitt Peak National Observatory in 2002. Because of the angle from which we view it here in our solar system, the unfathomably large Nebula bears an uncanny resemblance to the human eye — hence its popular nickname: "The Eye of God."

"The Eye of God"

[NASA, WIYN, NOAO, ESA, Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), T. A. Rector (NRAO)]

5. Altoids Mints as Sexual Aid
This perennial crowd-pleaser has generated constant reader interest ever since the 1998 Starr Report revealed that Monica Lewinsky had flirtatiously handed President Bill Clinton an email printout of the Altoids legend during a secret White House rendezvous in 1997 (the president rebuffed her, by the way). I apologize for not being able to verify the rumored erotic benefits of chewing Altoids mints conclusively. As our reader comments show, there is considerable disagreement on that point even among those who have put it to the test.

4. Giant Human Skeleton Unearthed in Arabian Desert
If it surprises you that educated adults in the year 2004 would buy into a photograph of an archaeologist literally dwarfed by the gigantic humanoid skull he appears to be digging out of the ground, consider that a recent Gallup poll showed that two-thirds of Americans aren't convinced that the theory of evolution is supported by scientific evidence. One-fifth fully agree with the assertion that man was created by God in his present form only 10,000 years ago. It appears we live in an age when, for a great many people around the world, mythology still trumps science, so it should come as no great shock that some are open to the notion that there really were "giants in the earth" in the not-so-distant past. For the record, this much-circulated image was fabricated for entry in a Worth1000.com Photoshop contest in 2002.

Giant Skeleton Found in Arabian Desert

[Worth1000.com]

3. Penny Brown Is Missing
Not a month goes by without tens of thousands of people forwarding this heartrending plea for information leading to the whereabouts of a 9-year-old girl named Penny Brown. The problem is, she never existed in the first place. This distasteful hoax was launched in 2001 by an anonymous prankster and has circumnavigated the globe many times over since then, with variants adding insult to injury by claiming that Penny Brown originally went missing in Texas, Australia, Singapore or Namibia. Stay tuned for next year's version.

2. World's Tallest Woman
Even if the strapping female depicted in this set of forwarded images were really 7 feet 4 inches tall as the accompanying text claims, she'd fall three inches short of stealing the title of "World's Tallest Woman" from the real record-holder, Sandy Allen. Still, at 6 feet 5-1/2 inches, Heather cuts a fine figure — especially when posed in 6-inch heels beside male and female models chosen for their diminutive stature.

1. Attack of the Camel Spiders
Thanks to the ubiquity of digital cameras and wireless Internet, the war in Iraq is the first to be documented instantaneously by soldiers on the ground. Among the earliest dispatches to make the rounds of inboxes back home was a photograph of a nasty-looking critter unfamiliar to most Americans (even though it can be found in the southwestern United States as well as in the Middle East) called a camel spider. "With a vertical leap that would make a pro basketball player weep with envy," the anonymously-written caption reads, "these bastards latch on and inject you with a local anesthesia so you can't feel it feeding on you." In reality, entomologists say, camel spiders are neither venemous nor a threat to human safety.

This Latin document, used for centuries to justify the popes' power over mere temporal rulers, described Constantine the Great's ceding of his rights to Pope Sylvester I, who had cured his leprosy, in the fourth century. It was probably written in the 760s. A scholar denounced in it 1440, but the argument continued until the 18th century.

2. Thomas Chatterton

The teenage Chatterton had been writing faux-medieval poems since he was 12. In 1769, desperate to have his work published, he cashed in on the vogue for literary antiquity by touting his verse as the work of a 15th-century monk. The hoax was discovered, and he killed himself before his 18th birthday; but he achieved his longed-for literary immortality as the much-beloved "marvellous boy" of the Romantic movement.

3. The bard Ossian

Another poet cashing in on the primitivism craze, James Macpherson wowed the literary world in the 1760s with fragments of a third-century epic by the bard Ossian, which he had "translated" from the Scottish Gaelic. Goethe and Napoleon were fans, but Samuel Johnson was sceptical from the start. It took until the end of the 19th century for the verse to be definitively declared an invention.

4. Vortigern and Rowena

The wonderful, if over-ambitious, 18th-century hoaxer William Ireland had an anonymous friend who owned a chest stuffed with Shakespearian treasures: love letters, a missive to Elizabeth I, annotated volumes from his library, the manuscript of King Lear. All were judged to be authentic. However, Ireland overdid himself when he went on to forge a lost play, Vortigern and Rowena, in 1796. Amid a scholarly furore and much public interest, an increasingly doubtful Sheridan mounted a production. It closed after only one performance, and Ireland quickly 'fessed up.

5. Protocols of the Elders of Zion

A hoax with a pernicious and enduring legacy: the Protocols, detailing a plot by a secret cabal of Jewish financiers to take over the world, were probably fabricated in 1905. In the 1920s, Henry Ford fulminated against the 'secret cabal' in his anti-semitic newspaper, and fringe groups have given the Protocols credence ever since.

6. The Education of Little Tree

This acclaimed autobiography of a Native American orphan discovering his heritage and struggling against racism was actually written by Asa Carter, a Ku Klux Klan member and the author of George Wallace's notorious speech, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" Carter's brother described the touching memoir as an exercise in "creative writing".

7. Fragments: Memories of a Childhood (1939-1948)

Binjamin Wilkomirski's first-hand account of the Holocaust was a child's-eye depiction of life in a Polish concentration camp. Published in 1995, it won many prizes and was hailed as a classic of Holocaust literature. Four years later, after doubts over its authenticity, it was withdrawn by its publishers. It appears that the author hadn't sought deliberately to deceive, but really believed the traumatic history he had invented for himself.

8. The Day After Roswell

... or how the legendary flying-saucer crash outside Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 helped America win the cold war. Retired colonel Philip Corso had, he claimed in these colourful 1997 memoirs, worked on alien technology recovered from the crash, and managed to obtain a glowing blurb for the book from a US senator. The senator later claimed that he'd been deceived by Corso - his testimonial had been written for a different book altogether - and his plug was removed from later editions.

9. Howard Hughes's biography

Clifford Irving claimed to have been commissioned by Hughes himself to write a life of the notorious recluse; a delighted publisher quickly stumped up an advance of $750,000. Irving, who had never met Hughes, was eventually exposed when no book materialised, and he was sent to prison.

10. The Hitler diaries

In 1983 a German magazine bought 62 volumes of the 'lost diaries' of Adolf Hitler. These had supposedly been discovered by farmers after the plane in which the diaries had been dispatched, shortly before Hitler's suicide, crashed. They contained such fascinating snippets of Hitler's domestic life as "on my feet all day long" and "must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva Braun." Historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and David Irving were fooled, and the Times published extracts, but the forgeries were eventually exposed as fakes, given away by their historical inaccuracies and anachronistic inks. It later emerged that the man behind the fraud had a long career of impersonating the Fuhrer, forging watercolours and manuscripts of Mein Kampf.

1. The Book of Mormon 1830

The Book of Mormon is considered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to be a divinely inspired book of equal value to the Bible. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, claimed that he was directed by an Angel to a hill near his home in which he found golden tablets containing the full text of the book. With the books he found two objects called the Urim and Thummim which he described as a pair of crystals joined in the form of a large pair of spectacles. Unfortunately, after Smith finished his translation, he had to return the tablets to the Angel, so there is no physical evidence that they ever existed.

2. The Cottingley Fairies 1917

The Cottingley Fairies are a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins living in Cottingley, near Bradford, England, depicting the two in various activities with supposed fairies. Elsie was the daughter of Arthur Wright, one of the earliest qualified electrical engineers. She borrowed her father’s quarter plate camera and took photos in the beck behind the family house. When Mr. Wright, upon developing the plates, saw fairies in the pictures, he considered them fake. After the taking of the second picture, he banned Elsie from using the camera again. Her mother, Polly, however was convinced of their authenticity.

3. Alien Autopsy 1995

In 1995, Ray Santilli instigated a wide reaching “alien autopsy” controversy when he claimed to possess footage taken in a tent by a U.S. military shortly after the 1947 Roswell UFO incident. Santilli first presented his film to an invited audience of media representatives, UFOlogists and other dignitaries at the Museum of London on 5 May 1995. Although the broadcast version did not show the actual “autopsy”, video editions have the complete and unedited film, plus previously unreleased footage of wreckage presented as the remains of the alien craft reported to have crashed in Roswell. The show features interviews with experts on the authenticity of the film.

4. Piltdown Man 1912

The “Piltdown Man” is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (”Dawson’s dawn-man”, after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen.

5. Feejee Mermaid 1842

The Feejee Mermaid was presented as a mummified body of something, supposedly a creature that was half mammal and half fish (like a grotesque version of normal mermaid stories). The original exhibit was popularized by circus great P.T. Barnum, but has since been copied many times in other attractions, including the collection of famed showman Robert Ripley. The original exhibit was shown around the United States, but was lost in the 1860s when Barnum’s museum caught fire. The exhibit has since been acquired by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and is currently housed in the museum’s attic storage area.

6. The Priory of Sion 1956

The Priory of Sion has been characterized as anything from the most influential secret society in Western history to a modern Rosicrucian-esque group, but, ultimately, has been shown to be a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a pretender to the French throne. The evidence presented in support of its historical existence is not considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities, and the evidence was later discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his associates.

7. The Turk 1717

The Turk was a fake chess-playing machine of the late 18th century, promoted as an automaton but later proved to be a hoax. The Turk made its debut in 1770 at Schönbrunn Palace. Its owner, Kempelen addressed the court, presenting what he had built, and began the demonstration of the machine and its parts. With every showing of the Turk, Kempelen began by opening the doors and drawers of the cabinet, allowing members of the audience to inspect the machine. Following this display, Kempelen would announce that the machine was ready for a challenger.

8. Loch Ness - the Surgeon’s Photo 1934

One of the most iconic images of Nessie is known as the ‘Surgeon’s Photograph’ which many consider to be good evidence of the monster, although doubts about the photograph’s authenticity were expressed from the beginning. The image was revealed as a hoax in the 1990s. The photographer, a gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson, never claimed it to be a picture of the monster. He merely claimed to have photographed “something in the water”. The photo is often cropped to make the monster seem huge, while the original uncropped shot shows the other end of the loch and the monster in the center.

9. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 1890

The Protocol of the Elders of Zion is a text that purports to describe a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. It is one of the most well known and discussed examples of literary forgery. Numerous independent investigations have concluded it to be either a plagiarism or a hoax. The Protocols is widely considered to be the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature, and takes the form of an instruction manual to a new member of the “elders,” describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation.

10. The Cardiff Giant 1869

The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, was a 10-foot-tall (3m) “petrified man” uncovered on October 16, 1869 by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P.T. Barnum are still on display. The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister named Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on earth.

1. The Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster

Ancient Scottish legends spoke of a giant sea monster that lived in the waters of Loch Ness. In 1934, Colonel Robert Wilson, a highly respectable British surgeon, said that he noticed something moving in the water and took a picture of it. The resulting image showed the slender neck of a serpent rising out of the Loch. The photo came to be known simply as "The Surgeon's Photo" and for decades it was considered to be the best evidence of the monster.

2.Hitler's $6 million-dollar diary

On April 22, 1983 the German magazine Der Stern announced that it had made the greatest Nazi memorabilia find of all time: a diary kept by Adolf Hitler himself. And this was not just one thin journal.

3. The Jewish master plan to dominate the World

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by Jews. Following its first publication in 1903 in the Russian Empire, numerous independent investigations have demonstrated that the document is a hoax; notably, a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921 revealed that much of the material was directly plagiarized from earlier works of political satire unrelated to Jews.

4.Idaho, the US state with a made-up name

Idaho it's perhaps the only state to be named as the result of a hoax. When a name was being selected for new territory, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested "Idaho," which he claimed was a Native American term meaning "gem of the mountains".

5. The Alien Autopsy footage from Roswell UFO crash

6. The fossil that embarrassed British Paleontology

The so-called Piltdown Man was fragments of a skull and jaw bone found in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown in the English county of Sussex. The fragments were claimed by experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man.

7. The Catholic Pope that turned out to be a woman

John Anglicus, a ninth century Englishman, travelled to Rome, became a Cardinal, and when Pope Leo IV died in 853 A.D., he was unanimously elected pope. As Pope John VIII, he ruled for two years, until 855 A.D. However, while riding one day from St. Peter's to the Lateran, he had to stop by the side of the road and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave birth to a child. It turned out that Pope John VIII was really a woman. In other words, Pope John was really Pope Joan.

8. The "Chess Machine" that fooled Napoleon

  The Turk was a famous hoax which purported to be a chess-playing automaton first constructed and unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. He first exhibited the Turk at the court of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa in 1770, and later took it on a tour of Europe for several years during the 1780s. The Turk defeated prominent world-figures, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

9. The buying of the Catholic Church by Microsoft

In 1994 a press release began circulating around the internet claiming that Microsoft had bought the Catholic church. The release quoted Bill Gates saying that he considered religion to be a growth market and that, "The combined resources of Microsoft and the Catholic Church will allow us to make religion easier and more fun for a broader range of people." Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would acquire exclusive electronic rights to the Bible and would make the sacraments available online.

10.  The Martian invasion that frightened the World