The Cardiff Giant

In October 16, 1869 a ten foot giant stone man appeared out of the ground when some workers were digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York. The news spread through out the country and many people traveled far distances to take a look at the giant stone man. The farm owner Stub Newell noticed the wide spread popularity of his discovery that he started charging people 50 cent to view the giant. The hoax of the stone man reached to great extent when a group of business men decided to buy move the stone man for 37,000 dollars to be examined in Syracuse. The examination lead to the scientist concluding that it was a fake statue because the chisel marks were still present and if it had spent adequate amount of time in the ground those marks would have gone away. The truth then came out that the statue was actually the creation of an enterprising New York tobacconist named George Hull. The idea of burying a stone giant in the ground occurred to him after he got into an argument with a Methodist Reverend about whether the Bible should be taken literally. Hull, an atheist, didn’t think it should. But the Reverend disagreed. The Reverend insisted that even the passage where it says ‘there were giants in the earth in those days’ should be read as a literal fact. According to Hull, after this discussion he immediately “thought of making a stone, and passing it off as a petrified man.” He figured he could not only use the fake giant to poke fun at Biblical literalists, but also make some money. This is considered to be one of the greatest hoaxes ever.

http://skepdic.com/cardiff.html