5 Infamous Alien Hoaxes That Prove We Really, Really Want to Believe (2024)

• We don’t know of any real aliens yet.
• A portion of humankind has always been willing to lie for money—and hoaxes are lucrative.
• Hoaxes are not morally neutral, and they prey on regular people who just want to understand their world.

Last October, news spread that “alien mummies” had been discovered in an airport in Peru. But scientists recently ruled out the aliens as dolls made of animal bones. The hoaxsters had used synthetic glue to create the humanoid figurines, which is the ultimate tipoff: natural mummies are held together with wrappings, and synthetic glue is not very old at all. Historically, among these tricksters, it’s been common practice to assemble different species’ bones into fake fantasy creatures like mermaids or unicorns. Passing them off as aliens, however, is a new twist.

Whenever this kind of “evidence” emerges regarding aliens, the public reaction is typically very split. To many of us, these sightings and objects seem like—and usually are—events or artifacts that are missing a key piece of earthbound context. People who mean well may mistake what they see, or make assumptions, and they almost never have training in biology or engineering or whatever else might help them contextualize what they see. These alien sightings usually aren’t malicious, but they are a misunderstanding.

On the other hand, some people really are ready for aliens. They believe these encounters and artifacts are real in the sense that they represent encounters with extraterrestrial beings and technology. And, to be clear, we absolutely don’t know for sure either way if aliens exist or not. The universe is the largest possible thing, and we’re still far from settling on even a very nearby planet, let alone traveling at warp speed to survey the cosmos for signs of life. Still, many of the alien objects and encounters on Earth are later debunked because we have better explanations right here on our planet.

In the case of the alien mummies from Peru, we already know a lot about humans and Earthly animals, so scientists could safely rule out organisms from outside our galaxy by studying the bones—and, of course, the synthetic glue. While many open-ended and speculative reports are motivated by curiosity or mystery and not malice, there are some hoaxes in the mix. Hoaxes are an age-old part of the human experience, from carnival sideshow “mermaids” made by sewing animals together to the “bonsai kittens” meme of the early internet days. Hoaxes prey on people who are vulnerable. We’re not all experts on everything, and hoaxes are very craftily designed in order to strike us in areas where we know the least and most want to believe—it’s human nature.

Unfortunately, it’s also human nature to see patterns and be influenced. One controversial real-life couple is responsible for almost all of the detailed reports of alien abductions we’ve heard since the 1960s, for example. And instead of seeing that people have repeated details based on what they’ve heard before, believers can decide the consistencies mean that the stories must instead be true.

History often fills in the gaps when we aren’t sure whether we should believe or remain critical. Here are five stand-out examples of alien and UFO hoaxes from the past two centuries that have taught us to remain vigilant. When it comes to gluing bones, doctoring photos, and spreading rumors about UFOs and aliens, there’s nothing new under the sun— or, at least, not that we’ve found so far.

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

Alien hoaxes go surprisingly far back in history, though it’s no shock to scholars who study media history. Researcher István Kornél Vida wrote in a 2012 article that “[m]edia hoaxes are as old as the earliest forms of mass communication.” Put another way, the Weekly World News didn’t invent fabrication tabloids.

In 1835, an unethical newspaperman decided to publish a hoax about finding life on the moon. He attributed it to the most famous astronomer at the time, John Herschel, and later claimed the story had been intended as satire. It detailed various animals on the moon, including bat-winged humanoids who built temples. Edgar Allan Poe felt the hoax was so similar to one of his own short stories that he also alleged plagiarism.

The Canals of Mars (1877)

In 1877, an Italian astronomer used a powerful telescope to study the surface of Mars, which he then rendered in illustrations and maps. He wrote down the Italian word “canali,” meaning channels, which was mistranslated as “canals”. Nature makes channels; humans, as of 1869, had created the Suez Canal. As a result, one very committed English-speaking astronomer spread a persistent rumor that the surface of Mars had canals made by intelligent beings.

It’s not clear if he meant it as a hoax, but he had almost no reason to believe what he was saying, especially as a scientist with a public position of influence. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine someone today doing astronomy and then making a public statement that something they found was definitely a sign of life. Astronomy is a multidisciplinary subset of physics with no biology in the mix. And today, we also know that such a claim would lead to conspiracy thinking.

War of the Worlds Broadcast (1938)

While Orson Welles’ iconic 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds is not a hoax, it’s one of modern history’s most dramatic misunderstandings. At the time, much of the world was already on tenterhooks as more of Europe fell to the Third Reich. In the United States, we were still experiencing the Great Depression. It wasn’t a good time to hear someone on the radio acting out the end of the world.

Though the radio program had a small regular listening audience, it was others in the media who trumped up its presentation as some kind of trick. Hot takes are, unfortunately, not a 21st-century invention. At the time, radio dramas like The War of the Worlds were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. (You can find some, archived and available as podcasts, on the Fourble website.)

Alien Autopsy Hoax (1993)

The influential alien autopsy hoax—shown on Fox in 1995, and released as a massively popular VHS tape—still circulates today as a fresh hoax, so it’s easy to see how the false claim financially benefited its creator, Ray Santilli, who said the footage was real and dated back to 1947. And the Fox special released on VHS was also revealed to be, if not an outright hoax, heavily and unethically edited to make credible experts sound more supportive of the alien autopsy.

Time reports that the alien autopsy was fully discredited in 2006. At that time, British journalist Eamonn Holmes hosted a special where Santilli admitted to completely making up everything in the video. He claimed he was “recreating” a real alien autopsy film that was too damaged to use, then compared it to restoring the Mona Lisa. As Time summarizes:

“‘It’s no different than restoring a work of art like the Mona Lisa,’ Santilli said—a statement that could only be true if restoring the Mona Lisa meant painting an entirely new painting, of a different woman, on a different canvas, and passing it off as the original.”

Portal on Mars Hoax (2022)

A photo of a crevice of rock taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover was circulated on social media as depicting a “portal” and “wall.” (It’s funny that people talking about fake aliens wouldn’t just refer to this as a doorway or entrance. That’s not sci-fi enough.) In reality, this is an area of rock that experiences linear breaking. That happens on Earth, too, especially in cubic crystalline minerals like mica.

It looks like this hoax started on Reddit, a website where people have started all-new subreddits about how members of other “true story” subreddits are often fooled by hoaxes. As in any hoax or conspiracy thinking, it doesn’t hurt to take a second to consider other explanations for something another person is telling you is obvious; it’s not obvious that there has ever been life on Mars.

The more we learn about Mars, the more we know it’s been inhospitable to almost any known living things for billions of years. With almost no atmosphere and no protective magnetic field, a billion years is long enough for any sign of life to be sanded completely away, let alone a sharp right angled doorway on the outer surface.

What Have We (Not) Learned?

Hoaxes and conspiracy theories rely on fake explanations like the one given by Ray Santilli for his alien autopsy. There’s usually a bottleneck of information that makes no sense, and a secret that would change all of our lives, if only this one person would decide to finally tell someone. Santilli claimed he could not purchase his real alien autopsy film in time.

But if someone developed a cure for cancer, they could become the wealthiest person on Earth overnight. And if someone really had film of an alien autopsy that they were willing to sell, they wouldn’t wait for an unknown filmmaker to save his pennies until the film disintegrated. They would sell it to someone else. The Fox network would have bought it given the chance. Today, Elon Musk would buy it.

Hoaxes and conspiracy theories are an industry unto themselves at this point. People make a living as filmmakers, authors, podcasters, and more who simply recycle the same old hoaxes and conspiracies as new seasons of new shows. Even supporting these shows as a skeptic gives a larger platform to them and shows networks that it pays to air lies.

Bottom line: just switch them off. And if real aliens ever do arrive from outer space, we’ll have some real news to share with them—not hours of watching autopsies of latex dummies and mistaking geology for architecture.