Keely was able to keep up the facade of a glorious invention about to emerge until his death in 1898. Though scientists spoke against it, and frustrated investors pulled out, the persistent and affable scam artist was always able to rally with demonstrable modifications of his idea and new influxes of investors. One of them, a wealthy widow named Clara Bloomfield Moore, even wrote an adoring book called Keely and His Discoveries. Her skeptical son, though, rented Keely’s house after he died, and with the help of experts from the University of Pennsylvania, exposed the hoax. Compressed air was the secret to Keely’s mysterious force.
Scientific American described the details: under the kitchen floor of the home was “a steel sphere forty inches in diameter, weighing 6,625 pounds . . . an ideal storage reservoir for air . . . at great pressure.” The compressed air traveled up to the second-floor workshop, where Keely held his demonstrations, through strong steel and brass tubes. Between the first-story ceiling and the floor of the workshop was a sixteen-inch space “well calculated to hide the running tubes for conveying the compressed air to the different motors with which Keely produced his results.” In short, his miracle machines were primitive pneumatic devices, not much more complicated than a drinking straw.
5
Diagnostic Deception
“There are no greater liars in the world than quacks—except for their patients.”
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
During the Golden Age of Quackery, when snake-oil salesmen and other great hucksters like Keely proliferated, a guy had to be pretty special to be dubbed “the dean of twentieth-century charlatans.” The American Medical Association gave that distinction to Dr. Albert Abrams in 1924 based on his groundbreaking work in the fake diagnosis and fake treatment of disease. The good doctor, a professor at Stanford University, developed two bogus devices he called the “dynamizer” and the “ocilloclast,” which were nothing more than a jumble of wires and other useless components described by physicist Robert Millikan as the type “a ten-year-old would build to fool an eight-year-old.” Abrams made a fortune from them.
At a time when radio technology was still in its infancy, people believed it had almost infinite possibilities. This served Dr. Abrams well. “The spirit of the age is radio,” he declared, “and we can use radio in diagnosis.” He came up with an absurd theory of disease he called “Electronic Reactions of Abrams,” or ERA, and published it in 1917. According to Abrams, the human body possessed a characteristic rate of electronic vibration both in health and in disease. The amazing dynamizer measured altered vibratory rates, he claimed, and could determine what kind of disease afflicted an individual, as well as its severity and location in the body. All it took was a drop of blood or a bit of flesh from the ailing person. Even a handwriting sample or photograph was sufficient because the vibratory rate was always the same.
The sample was fed into the dynamizer, which was connected to the forehead of a healthy subject, and voilà, an accurate diagnosis. The system was supposedly so advanced that it could also determine a subject’s sex, or even his or her religion. Once a diagnosis was made, Abrams’s other machine, the oscilloclast, guaranteed a cure. This was accomplished simply by setting the oscilloclast to the frequency of the disease and blasting it away, the way sound vibrations shatter a wine glass.
The ERA system became hugely popular, and Abrams sold thousands of his machines. A judge even accepted his opinion in a paternity suit after a sample of the alleged father’s blood was put through the dynamizer. Author Upton Sinclair was among the most enthusiastic advocates of the Abrams system. “His name carried a brilliant and convincing story to the masses,” noted Scientific American in 1929, though the public “quite overlooked the fact that Sinclair’s name meant no more in medical research than Jack Dempsey’s would mean on a thesis dealing with the fourth dimension or Babe Ruth’s on the mathematical theory of invariance.” Such was (and is) the nature of celebrity endorsements.
The scientific establishment set out to debunk Abrams by sending him blood samples from animals, and even red ink. Invariably, a terrible diagnosis, like cancer, was returned, along with the soothing assurance that the oscilloclast would, for a fee, provide a cure. One sample of sheep’s blood, accompanied by the history of a fifteen-year-old boy, revealed a diagnosis of congenital syphilis, metastatic carcinoma of the left lung and pancreas, Neisserian infection, and tuberculosis of the genitourinary tract. Alas, the dynamizer seemed unable to detect the pneumonia that suddenly carried Dr. Abrams away at the height of his fame in 1924.
6
A Naked Lie
It started as an anthropologist’s dream. In 1972 the Philippine minister of culture, Manuel Elizalde Jr., announced to the world that a tribe of Stone Age people, never exposed to civilization, had been discovered in the jungle. The Tasaday, as they were called, did not hunt or farm. They had no method for keeping time, no woven cloth, no metal, no art, and no domesticated animals or weapons. Indeed, their language did not even have a word for war. Wearing only loincloths made of orchid leaves, the Tasaday were said to live in caves, subsisting only on grubs, small animals, and berries.
Elizalde’s news excited scientists and journalists alike, and a special helipad was built in the rain forest to ferry them in and out. The cavemen, nearly naked and grunting in their primitive language, became media darlings. National Geographic devoted a cover story to the Tasaday and NBC television offered Elizalde $50,000 to produce a documentary on them. Then, almost as suddenly as they appeared to the outside world, the ancient people were gone. Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1974 and made the Tasaday’s region a government preserve.
It was not until 1986, when the Marcos regime was ousted, that a Swiss journalist traveled back to the Philippines to revisit the mysterious people. He was stunned to find the erstwhile cave dwellers living in villages, dressed in colored T-shirts and shorts and sleeping on beds. They told him that they had been instructed by Elizalde to pretend to be savages, with an invented language and lifestyle. When people were coming to visit, members of the group were warned in advance to assume their primitive identities.
To this day some scientists can’t believe it was a hoax. But it was. It was all a ploy to allow Marcos to declare the Tasaday region a government preserve, seize its natural resources, and rape them. And he did.
7
Duplicity
Dolly the cloned sheep? Bah! Try Eve the cloned human. In 2002, a company calling itself Clonaid announced to the world that it had created a child out of skin cells taken from its mother. After being implanted in her womb, the bouncing baby replicant, called Eve, was reportedly delivered by Caesarean-section on December 26 of that year. Mother and identical daughter were doing well, according to Clonaid, but wished to remain anonymous.
The media breathlessly reported the amazing scientific development, while the Vatican and the president of the United States, George W. Bush, were quick to condemn it. Of course there were some mainstream scientists and others who were skeptical, especially given the mixed results of animal cloning, but Clonaid’s CEO, Brigitte Boisselier, promised DNA testing within a week or so to resolve all doubts. “You can still go back to your office and treat me as a fraud,” she said at a press conference. “You have one week to do that.” In the meantime, Boisselier implored people not to treat little Eve as a freak. “The baby is very healthy,” she said. “The parents are happy. I hope that you remember them when you talk about this baby—not like a monster, like some results [sic] of something that is disgusting.”
Weeks went by, however, and no testing was performed. Clonaid said it needed to protect the mother and her clone from harassment by the law. This prompted Michael Guillen, a former science editor at ABC News who was to arrange expert testing on the mother and baby, to walk away in disgust, his reputation battered. Instead of DNA proof, Clonaid offered more announcements of cloned births from around the world. And it promised even greater advances.
“In a
not-too-distant future,” the company Web site proclaimed, “advanced cloning technologies will allow us to even re-create a deceased person in an adult body, with all his past experiences and memories, allowing mankind to enter the age of immortality as it has been announced by his Holiness Rael, founder of Clonaid . . . after his contact with Elohim, mankind’s extraterrestrial creators.” Meanwhile, the company claimed, two thousand people had signed up for cloning at a cost of $200,000 each. According to the Web site, the list included “families of celebrities, business leaders, and political leaders—we are currently working on the case of a prime minister whose son has been killed.”
Cloning, like human paleontology a century ago, is still in its infancy. Without independent DNA verification, a fraud as fresh as this one is almost impossible to prove. Seekers of the truth are left with only circumstantial evidence. But there’s plenty of that. Start with Clonaid’s founder and spiritual guru, “his Holiness Rael,” a former French journalist and pop singer who heads a cult that claims life on earth was created scientifically twenty-five thousand years ago through genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race called the Elohim.
Rael, or Claude Vorilhon, as he was once known, says he was enlightened in 1973 by an alien being, just over a meter in height, with pale green skin, almond-shaped eyes, and long dark hair, who emerged from a flying saucer somewhere in France. A trip to the Elohim planet several years later revealed more truths to Rael, including the scoop that Jesus was actually resurrected by cloning. Tapped by the Elohim as a prophet, Rael spread the good news and now claims fifty-five thousand followers. Brigitte Boisselier, the CEO of Clonaid who once taught college chemistry, is one of them. “I do believe we’ve been created by scientists,” she said at the press conference announcing the delivery of Eve. “And I’m grateful to them for my life.”
“Dear Diary: because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and-says Eva-bad breath.“
Part VI
FANTASTIC FORGERIES AND LITERARY FRAUDS
Man’s capacity to create has many expressions. Some use their talents to create fine art; others to create facsimiles of fine art . . . and literature . . . and cultural treasures of every sort. Call this a gallery of great fakes by the masters of deception.
1
Shrouding the Truth
What if all the medieval hucksters who claimed to have a piece of the true cross really did? Well, it would mean that Jesus had to carry a sequoia-sized cross up Calvary. Relics were big business in the Middle Ages; pilgrims paid dearly to be blessed in the presence of one. For con men, the opportunities for fraud were heaven sent, and fake relics abounded. One of the most famous, and profitable, was the Shroud of Turin.
With its full-sized image of an apparently crucified man, the shroud has been revered for centuries as the burial cloth of Jesus. However, evidence that it is a clever medieval hoax has been accumulating since the shroud first appeared in the 1350s after a knight presented it to a local church in Lirey, France. As rumors of its divine origin spread, the Roman Catholic Church launched an investigation into the shroud’s authenticity. Bishop Pierre d’Arcis reported to Pope Clement VII that he had located the artist who had “cunningly painted . . . by a clever sleight of hand” the double image reported to be that of Christ. Although the pope ordered a disclaimer when the cloth was displayed, a relic of this magnitude was too valuable to allow any doubt. The shroud made numerous tours around Europe before it eventually landed in Turin. The pontiff’s command was ignored.
The Church never did declare the shroud to be authentic, and in recent years the archbishop of Turin allowed it to be scrutinized in a variety of scientific tests. In 1988, three laboratories in the United States, Britain, and Switzerland each took a small piece of the cloth and independently performed radiocarbon dating tests. All three declared with 100 percent certainty that the cloth was made after AD 1200. Nevertheless, a powerful need to believe has obscured even scientific certainty. Many still argue that radiocarbon dating does not fully address some miraculous elements of the shroud, such as the negative image they say could not possibly have been produced by a medieval forger. Even some scientists are not ready to close the case. A team from the University of Texas, for example, recently declared that carbon dating of ancient textiles is not reliable.
For those whose faith is dependent on or deeply enhanced by the Shroud of Turin, it will remain a miracle. Others, however, may be interested to know how it was most probably created. Joe Nickell, in his book Inquest on the Shroud of Turin, convincingly demonstrated that medieval technology was capable of producing negative images. Wet cloth is molded to an image and allowed to dry. Powdered pigment (Nickell used a mixture of myrrh and aloe) is then rubbed on with a cloth-over-cotton dauber and, behold, a relic is born.
2
To Be ... Or Not to Be the Bard
In an era of giants like Blake, Coleridge, and Burns, literary hoaxers of the eighteenth century had to produce extraordinary poetry and prose if they expected to impress anyone. Some did. A Scottish schoolmaster named James MacPherson had the literati of the day convinced that the epic poetry he produced was the work of a third-century Gaelic bard he called Ossian, while young Thomas Chatterton—Wordsworth’s “marvelous boy”—became the darling of the Romantic movement after he wrote a body of work he attributed to an imaginary priest of the fifteenth century named Thomas Rowley. William Ireland, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as successful as his contemporaries, perhaps because of hubris. Rather than conjure works from the murky medieval past, Ireland tackled a true heavyweight, Shakespeare, and was pummeled in the process.
Ireland’s attempt to foist onto the public a “lost” play by the Bard was inspired by his success as a forger of other Shakespearean relics. His father worshipped the famed playwright and often said he would give anything—including his treasured book collection—for just one scrap of the great one’s handwriting. Young William, then seventeen, obliged his dad with a sixteenth-century land deed supposedly written by Shakespeare. He told his father that the document had come from a collection of old papers that belonged to an acquaintance who wished to remain anonymous. Ecstatic, the elder Ireland asked if there might be more treasures to be discovered in the cache—completely unaware that it was merely a matter of his son making more.
William purchased some blank sheets of antique paper from a bookseller and produced another gem that sent his poor unsuspecting father reeling with joy. It was a document entitled Profession of Faith, and it seemed to settle once and for all the controversy over whether Shakespeare was a Catholic or Protestant. In what appeared to be his own words, the playwright openly espoused the Protestant faith. The elder Ireland was so excited by the find that he immediately shared it with friends in the literary community, many of whom were equally impressed and clamored for more. As a result, William Ireland became a one-man factory of fake Shakespeareana. He produced an original manuscript of King Lear, complete with playhouse receipts and other documents tied up in a bundle with string taken from an old tapestry. He followed it with portions of the original manuscript for Hamlet.
Enough experts were taken in by the fakes to inspire Ireland to create a “lost” play, based on an obscure English legend, called Vortigen and Rowena. It was truly bad, riddled with leaden lines and strained verse that surely would have made the real bard barf. Even so, it was enough to fool William Sheridan, a prominent figure in the theater world, who decided to stage Vortigen and Rowena at London’s famed Drury Lane Theatre. It wasn’t that Sheridan failed to notice the poor quality of the work; he just came to the wrong conclusion about it, noting that “one would be led to think that Shakespeare must have been very young when he wrote the play.” Audience reaction on opening (and, as it turned out, closing) night was devastating. They groaned at the poorly constructed speeches and howled for a full ten minutes when an actor uttered the line, “I would this solemn mockery were over.” It was, soon enough.
Ireland had planne
d to give the world another “lost” play, Henry II, but the charade he had perpetuated was losing momentum. People blamed William’s father for the fraud because of his stubborn belief in his son and the authenticity of his discoveries. With the senior Ireland’s good name at stake, William was finally forced to admit he was to blame for everything. In the end, all he proved was that a clever forger does not necessarily make a compelling playwright.
3
They Just Can’t Be Etruscted
Millions of visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were awed for half a century by two large warrior statues (and a huge warrior’s head) said to have come from the ancient Etruscan culture that preceded Roman rule in central Italy. The artifacts, discovered in pieces and carefully restored, were thought to be about twenty-five hundred years old. No one seemed to notice that they looked like props from a B-movie set, and so the “Etruscan” treasures remained on view until 1961.
It was then that a massive fraud was exposed. An art expert and cultural sleuth named Harold Woodbury Parsons tracked down an old man who was said to have forged Etruscan art earlier in the century. His name was Alfredo Fioravanti, and he shared with Parsons stories from his career in the bogus art trade. He and two brothers named Riccardi worked together for a firm that specialized in the repair of antique pottery. Soon enough, Fioravanti and the Riccardi brothers parlayed their skills into the manufacture of Etruscan vases and small statues. This proved so profitable that the three men got more ambitious and commenced work on their giant figures.
A Treasury of Deception Page 12
