Famous Hoax Photos: The Fakes That Fooled the World

Several of the best-known hoax photos were faked outright. The examples below were all faked, staged or doctored: the Cottingley fairies, the Loch Ness Surgeon's Photo, the Baby Adolf picture and the Red Army flag over the Reichstag. The Iwo Jima flag-raising is often suspected too, but it is classed as a real photograph.

A good fake works by looking plausible, so each case here is tested against the record. This article goes through what each picture showed, how it was made and what gave it away. 'Fake' covers several different things: cutouts, models, darkroom edits, staged scenes and false captions.

Were the Cottingley fairy photos really faked?

Yes. The Cottingley fairy photographs were paper cutouts, photographed in a garden in Cottingley by two cousins, Elsie Wright, aged 16, and Frances Griffiths, aged 9. Elsie drew the fairies on paper, fixed them to hat pins and photographed them among the plants.

What makes the case remarkable is who believed it. Some experts declared the photographs genuine, and mediums cited them as proof that fairies existed. Decades later the two cousins admitted the pictures were fakes. For the full story, see our account of the Cottingley fairies.

Was the Loch Ness Surgeon's Photo a hoax?

It was. The 1934 Surgeon's Photo is described as a toy submarine attached to a sculpted wooden head. It showed what looked like a long neck rising from the loch.

The background matters. The Daily Mail had hired the big-game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who found footprints in December 1933. Natural History Museum researchers later said they had been made with a dried hippo's foot. By Colonel Robert Wilson's own account, the photo was taken on 19 April 1934. Strikingly, no rigorous study of the image took place until 1984, when Stewart Campbell analysed it in the British Journal of Photography. That is half a century of belief resting on little scrutiny. Our piece on the Surgeon's Photograph follows the story further.

Was the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo staged?

This is the useful counter-example. Joe Rosenthal's photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima, taken on 23 February 1945, is classed as real. Rumours that the scene was staged began within days, which shows how quickly a famous image attracts suspicion.

Those rumours were repeatedly discredited. Part of the confusion is that a second flag-raising was photographed, because the first flag was replaced with a larger one. A second flag going up is not the same as a fake. A sceptic has to resist the idea that every dramatic photo must be a fraud. If you want to test your own instincts on this, try the Real or Rigged? photo game.

Staging itself is a grey area. A scene arranged for the camera is not always a lie, as our article on the skyscraper lunch photo shows: a real photo of a staged moment.

Was the Red Army flag over the Reichstag faked?

Yes, and this one was both staged and doctored. Yevgeny Khaldei's 1945 photograph of the flag over the Reichstag, dated 2 May 1945, is a fake. Soldiers recreated the scene for the camera rather than capturing the moment itself.

Then came the editing. Censors noticed a soldier wearing two wristwatches, so one watch was removed. The smoke was darkened. The flag was later made to look more billowing, and the photo was colourised. Asked about it, Khaldei said: 'Next question please.'

The picture is still historically significant, and Khaldei himself said it was a good photograph. But it is a reminder that a famous image can be an arranged and retouched version of events.

Are UFO photos often hoaxes?

Numerous UFO photographs have been determined to be hoaxes. Branden W. Joseph describes a typical UFO photo as blurry and saucer-like, with an ambiguous scale. That ambiguity makes manipulation easy, and it also makes it easy to photograph a small scale model and pass it off as something large and distant. For the wider picture, see Famous UFO Cases Explained.

George Adamski's 1952 saucer photo is described as cobbled together from a lamp, light bulbs and other items. Walther Riedel told James Moseley that the saucer's landing struts were 100-watt bulbs, and in 2012 Joel Carpenter matched the saucer to a 1930s lantern reflector. Billy Meier admitted using models to recreate scenes in his photos.

Not every case is closed, and fair testing means treating each one separately. Hoaxes also take forms other than photographs of objects, so each claim needs its own test.

What was the first photo hoax, and how were early fakes spotted?

Hippolyte Bayard's Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) is usually cited as the first hoax photograph. Bayard made it in protest at being denied credit for inventing photography.

Others followed. Baby Adolf (1933) was distributed by Acme Newspictures and altered in the darkroom, with shadows darkened around the child's face. The German consulate in Chicago complained that it was a falsification. Acme's May 1938 correction identified the child as two-year-old John May Warren, recognised by his mother, and the identity of the hoaxer was never found. In the 1860s, William H. Mumler's spirit photographs reused stock images resembling clients' dead relatives.

Fakes are often caught by asking what technique was used: a composite, a false caption, a deleted detail, a staged scene or a darkroom alteration. Checking where an image came from and what claim is attached to it is a sensible first step. How experts check an old photo sets out those steps.