Real or Rigged?
Famous historic photos and the hoaxes behind them. This page needs JavaScript to play; the notes below work without it.
Your Daily Science
← Back to the siteFamous historic photos and the hoaxes behind them. This page needs JavaScript to play; the notes below work without it.
Real or Rigged? is a game about famous old photographs and the stories around them. Some of the most shared pictures in history were faked: two cousins' fairies in an English garden, a long neck rising from Loch Ness, a heroic portrait of Abraham Lincoln that was not quite his. Others look impossible and are real, like workers eating lunch on a steel beam high above Manhattan in 1932. The game asks you to tell them apart, and then shows how each one was checked.
A round takes about ten minutes. You answer three quick questions about the kind of mystery fan you are, get a short read of your answers, and take a side on a hot take after seeing the best case for both sides. Then you choose your path: the Evidence Locker, six photo cases where you decide what really happened, or Memory Lane, five stories many of us grew up with, shown as what people believed then and what we know now. After that you can question the Archivist, rank your five most mind-boggling cases, watch a short what-if scene, and keep a card with your results as an image. You can leave at any step with the link at the top, and play the other path afterwards.
Three parts are written live by AI and labelled as AI: your fan read, the Archivist's answers and the what-if scene. The AI is told not to invent facts, quotes or statistics, to separate what is documented from what is speculation, and to write the what-if scene as clearly marked fiction without putting words in real people's mouths. The AI can still make mistakes, so treat its answers as a starting point and check the sources below. If the AI service is busy or offline, the page shows a hand-written text instead and says so.
The case notes were checked against the sources listed here, which we opened when writing them: Cottingley Fairies, Lunch atop a Skyscraper, Photograph manipulation and William H. Mumler (all Wikipedia, read 11 October 2026), and our own investigations of the Surgeon's Photograph, crop circles, Roswell and the Bermuda Triangle. Nothing you answer is stored: closing the tab clears it. Only your answers in this round are sent to the AI when you use an AI part. Shared vote counts are not collected, so you see only your own vote. All drawings are original sketches, not the historic photos themselves.
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