[00:00:00] Well, it's simply that the past winter, one of the mildest in living memory, has had its effect in other ways as well. Most important of all, it's resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop. The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer.
[00:00:17] There's always the chance of a late frost, which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets. But now these dangers are over, and the spaghetti harvest goes forward.
[00:00:39] This year the Swiss crop was good, but there's a new specialty crop being tested in Italy on land that once grew Parmesan cheese. To get the most out of this spaghetti, agriculturists say it must be aged for at least four years. Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
[00:00:59] You've got to love April Fool Hoaxes. They're real enough that they could be true, but ridiculous enough to set off that little voice in your head urging you to look for a salt shaker.
[00:01:10] Of course to get the salt, you have to go to the Great Salt Lake where it's harvested. Or is it? Today we're asking if all scams or hoaxes are all hoaxes' scams, or are they separate acts?
[00:01:24] The actual word hoax didn't appear until, yes, right at the end of the 18th century. That's Ian Keebal. His book on 18th century hoaxes in England was released in the UK September 7th. It's called The Century of Deception, the birth of the hoax in 18th century England.
[00:01:41] I'll put links in the show notes to where you can pick up a copy or just go to centuryofdeception.com. Yes this one is particularly intriguing, the Benjamin Franklin one because Benjamin Franklin was a well known hoaxer and his most famous hoax was called the Polly Baker Speech.
[00:02:01] It was a reproduction of a speech that a woman called Polly Baker had made in Connecticut. She was up before the magistrates of that particular court charged with basically fornication or having an illegitimate child.
[00:02:17] And this was like her sort of fourth time she was called up before the courts. So this apparently was like the fifth time that she'd been hauled up before the judges. Her previous fines had either been money fines or imprisonment or even whipped and beaten.
[00:02:34] So on this sort of fifth occasion she basically made a very moving speech before the court asking the question of why she was being prosecuted for this. She didn't want to be an unmarried woman. First lover proposed to her but then run off without wedding her.
[00:02:54] Also she said it was God's belief or right that she should produce children. This was good for the country at the time we were looking to produce more children and if she had committed a sin then surely she'd be punished by God
[00:03:10] and therefore why did the human courts need to punish her. So it was a very sort of impassioned and rather good speech and apparently at the end everybody sort of stood up and applauded
[00:03:25] and one of the judges decided that he would marry her and make a proper woman so to speak. So this was the speech that was reproduced in say an English newspaper and it was reproduced picked up by other newspapers at the time.
[00:03:42] It eventually got over to America which would have taken a sort of month or so because obviously the papers had to go via the sea and then it was reproduced in all the American papers as well.
[00:03:53] This was in 1747 so it was a story that sort of went vile, you could argue, a slightly slower way but effectively the result was the same. It went all over the sort of Western world anyway. It only discovered some sort of 40 years afterwards
[00:04:12] but actually the whole speech had been written by Benjamin Franklin. He owned the Pennsylvania Gazette because he was a major publisher. That's basically part of the way he made his money. He didn't want to produce it in that paper because it was very sort of puritanical paper.
[00:04:26] It would have been considered a bit of a shocking speech. So somehow it arrived in the English newspaper. We're not quite sure whether he'd put it in or whether he got a friend to send it in.
[00:04:36] So it was produced, you know, a long way both physically and emotionally from him so nobody made the connection. Ben was a very busy guy, what with posing for a portrait that was used on the $100 bill, creating the type font Franklin Gothic
[00:04:51] and inventing the flexible urinary catheter, swim fins, Philadelphia or Franklin stove, lightning rods, bifocals, and glass harmonica. Ian believes one of the major differences between a hoax and a scam is that hoaxes are not done for money
[00:05:08] but one of the chapters in his book is a hoax that's all about money. Perhaps the best known hoax of all the 18th century which is a woman called Mary Toft who claimed that she gave birth to rabbits.
[00:05:19] The reason that she did it was in order to obtain money but what's interesting about if you go into it is that the hoax was sort of exposed before she managed to make any money out of it
[00:05:32] and therefore nobody's really addressed how she was actually going to make money out of it. My own instinct on it and for my own research is I think she was going to sort of exhibit herself exhibiting, they used to call them monstrosities back in the 18th century
[00:05:55] and these type of unfortunate people were exhibited around the country at sort of taverns and also fares and I think that was probably the object with Mary Toft who became quite a notorious figure
[00:06:11] even after she was exposed so you could imagine the amount of interest that would have been in her as a woman who'd actually given birth to rabbits and she could have travelled around from fair to fair to tavern to tavern
[00:06:23] and earned money by just being there and exhibiting herself. It was not a particularly nice life, it must be said. I mean these poor people used to exhibit themselves up to sort of 10 or 12 hours a day and people could sort of poke at them and examine them carefully.
[00:06:41] There was a woman with a horn and somebody commented in every time you tugged at the horn she sort of screamed in pain. So I'm really not quite sure. I think it was probably quite fortunate that Mary Toft didn't carry off her hoax to its ultimate end
[00:06:58] and she was able to sort of return back to her village life and live out hopefully a fairly normal life. The End Eventually Mary did have children, human ones. Her first was a daughter whom she naturally named Bunny. Let's see how Google Translate for Animals works.
[00:07:29] I activate the Translate app. You can see there's a large range of animals to choose from. I choose Pig. Then I make a recording. See here it transcribes it but if I push the speaker button we can actually hear what Bella said. New person, smells good. That's amazing.
[00:08:02] Let's find out what's on Donna's mind. Love you. So back we go to the 18th century and Ian's favorite hoax that includes a man and a bottle. My actual favorite hoax which I write about in the book is called the bottle cundra hoax
[00:08:26] and this is where a man claimed that he would climb inside a bottle on the stage of a theatre in London. It was an ordinary sized bottle, ordinary sized wine bottle and he was going to sing and dance inside it.
[00:08:43] What was clever about the hoax was that basically this was advertised in a newspaper like five days before the hoax took place. So the performance was due to take place on the 16th of January 1749
[00:09:01] and the first advertisement appeared on the 11th of January so only five days before and obviously people had a little bit time to absorb it but essentially if they wanted to see it you know they had to make a pretty sudden decision about it
[00:09:16] and you know maybe if they didn't attend then they would miss out on this amazing event happening and they probably just didn't have enough time to rationalize it and say well this is probably absurd. If they'd had you know two or three months to work it out
[00:09:32] then they probably would have realized how ridiculous this was but they didn't really have that sort of time so they had to sort of make an instant decision and of course as soon as they arrived in the theatre
[00:09:43] and the management from the theatre walked out on stage and said unfortunately the show's not going ahead they realized of course that it was a hoax and then they realized how stupid they were
[00:09:52] and in true 18th century style a riot immediately broke out and they smashed the theatre. We've been having fun but now we must turn to the dark side. Conspiracy theories. Let's start with the one that says the moon landing was faked.
[00:10:08] Hi I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson you're a personal astrophysicist. Have you really thought about what it would take to fake the moon landing? Because the rocket did launch. We all saw the rocket launch. Okay so there's hardware there.
[00:10:30] They're like office buildings of blueprints for the design of the Saturn V rocket. Hundreds of engineering hours that went behind this and the records of those designs. If you wanted to fake the moon landing you would have to fake all these documents
[00:10:49] and it just seems to me it's way easier to just go to the moon. Has anyone considered that? Just go to the moon. That's easier than faking all of this. Next there's Mark Sargett who believes the earth is flat. So where are you right now?
[00:11:12] You think you're in a globe spinning at a thousand miles an hour. That globe is spinning around the sun at 60,000 plus miles an hour. That solar system is flying sideways through the galaxy at half a million miles an hour
[00:11:29] and that galaxy is going through the rest of the universe at millions miles an hour. And you feel nothing. In reality you are actually in a giant planetarium slash terrarium slash soundstage slash Hollywood backlight that is so big that you and everyone you know
[00:11:53] and everyone you've ever known never figured it out. Enough of this crap. Let's go back to the land of the 18th century hoax and Ian Keeble who wrote about them. The equivalent over in this country is the Loch Ness monster. You know this monster which apparently... So that...
[00:12:12] And you're not quite sure whether they started off as somebody having a bit of fun and then it sort of takes off and becomes something greater than that. I think there's an interesting idea about conspiracy theories. When does a hoax come into a conspiracy theory?
[00:12:32] A good one I think is crop circles. You know whoever did the first crop circle I would guess probably did it as a hoax. And here's some alien space ship has come down and made these strange circles. You thought it would be good laugh
[00:12:48] and then somehow a lot of people got hold of it and it then becomes something bigger than a hoax. It becomes a conspiracy theory. Even arguably the problems with Covid vaccinations which some people have today. So is that a hoax? Is that a scam?
[00:13:07] Is that a conspiracy theory? But I think a conspiracy theory tends to have legs. Now it wouldn't be right for me to leave you without saying that I've dropped some hoaxes in this episode. Some I've told you about and others
[00:13:22] well you'll have to ask the lizard people about those. Ladies and gentlemen I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption
[00:13:37] that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are a vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times.
[00:13:54] 7000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. This is Orson Welles ladies and gentlemen out of character to assure you that the war of the worlds
[00:14:09] has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. Starting now we couldn't soap all your windows
[00:14:23] and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed CBS. You will be relieved I hope to learn that we didn't mean it and that both institutions are still open for business.
[00:14:45] People get taken by a scam or con because they want to believe they can become richer, smarter or more attractive to a partner. But because they were the mark, they never realized they were being scammed. They never saw it coming.
[00:15:00] What you can believe in is that a new episode of Scams and Cons is coming in two weeks. Thanks for listening. 3AM the comedy horror podcast that holds weekly gatherings around the campfire. Let me tell you what you're going to get.
[00:15:19] You're going to hear stories about demonic possessions, prison stabbings, skin walkers, glitches in the matrix, cult leaders missing 411, night marchers, operation paperclip, Mesopotamian devil worship and so many monsters it'll give Kanye West a runaway for his money. Pop and meme culture also aren't off topic.
[00:15:38] A camp where laughs and scares are constantly competing for first place. We're just a group of friends trying to bust each other's balls, find the best stories and expand the circle in the process. 3AM the comedy horror podcast not for the faint or fragile of heart. Let's go.