Opening Statement: About This Site

Hoax and Hindsight takes famous stories about the past and sets them back on the records they came from. The stories come in four kinds: hoaxes and forgeries, historic trials, old predictions about the future, and disputed finds from the ground. Each page asks whether a well-known account holds up, and names the pieces of evidence that decide the case.

The motto is Hoaxes, trials, and prophecies — retried on the evidence. The courtroom language on this site is a figure of speech. A popular version of a story is treated like a charge, each page reopens the case, and the sources are called in as exhibits. No page here is a court, and none of it is legal advice.

What the site offers, and for whom

The site is written for a reader with one plain question: is the famous story true? It is also written for history writers and teachers who need evidence they can cite, such as a dated timeline, a table of scored predictions, or the popular account and the record set side by side.

The work is organized in four categories.

• Historical Hoaxes covers famous hoaxes and forgeries, among them the Vinland Map, the chess-playing Mechanical Turk and the forged paintings of Han van Meegeren; two claimants to a lost identity, Anna Anderson and the Tichborne Claimant; and the Cottingley fairy photographs, followed through the examinations of the 1920s. Each page shows how the claim was put before the public, how it was tested, and what the tests or inquiries found, as far as the records read for that page go.
• Famous Trials tells trials as history, rebuilt from the surviving court papers: Salem in 1692 and 1693, Galileo in 1633, the Scopes trial of 1925, trial by ordeal, and the pressing of Giles Corey under the procedure called peine forte et dure.
• Past Futures scores old forecasts item by item against fixed rules: Edmond Halley's prediction that a comet would return, the forecasts printed in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1900, and Albert Robida's picture of life in the 1950s. It also traces one famous line about invention back to the earliest printing that could be found.
• Reading the Evidence shows how finds from the ground are read: how layers in a dig are sorted into a sequence, how terminus post quem sets the earliest possible date for a deposit, what the Kensington Runestone can and cannot prove, and what the case for placing the Salem executions at Proctor's Ledge rests on.

What a reader should leave with is short: the exhibits a conclusion rests on, and how strong each one is.

Every case page follows the same order. A short answer comes first. A Docket card follows with seven fixed fields, from the claim to the verdict and the evidence it hinges on; pages about a method carry a Method card instead. Primary sources are called in the text as Exhibit A, B, C, and listed under Exhibits at the end. Where a popular version exists, it is quoted with its own source and set beside what the record shows, so both sides can be checked. Accusations, testimony, court findings and later interpretation are kept apart and labeled. Predictions are scored line by line under the published Hindsight score rules. Each page closes with a field headed What would overturn it:, which names the new evidence that would change the page's conclusion.

Some things are outside the site's scope. It gives no legal advice and does not comment on current courts or open cases. It does not authenticate, appraise or value objects, or point to anyone who sells them. It is not a guide to spotting today's scams. It does not write about living people or ongoing cases. And it is not a source of support for claims that “the mainstream” is hiding something: when the evidence has settled a case, the page does not end on a hint that the hoax might have been real after all.

Where the site stands

The site has a point of view, offered as a stance it takes and not as a law of history: what an age was fooled by often shows what it wanted to believe. When a case is retried here, one question comes early. How did hopes and expectations shape the way the evidence was read? The question is pressed only where published scholarship has discussed why a claim was accepted. It is not stretched to cases without that support, to living people, or to current events.

Four positions follow from that stance, and each can be argued with.

• The audience deserves as much scrutiny as the forger. What people expected to see is examined alongside how a fake was made. The cause is shown case by case, with the counter-evidence: the Mechanical Turk, for one, was suspected of hiding a player by some who watched it in the 1780s, and the suspicion was in print by 1784.
• “The people who were fooled were stupid” is a frame this site rejects. Trained specialists have been taken in too; the Vinland Map was accepted by a professional institution before later tests exposed it. The pages explain why evidence was misread, not who was foolish.
• Popular versions of famous trials are checked line by line against the record. A popular version is called wrong only where a specific point fails, with the source for that point. Where the popular version matches the record, the page says so.
• An old forecast is most useful for what it shows about the forecaster's own present. Whether it came true matters least.

The same goes for pseudo-archaeology: it gets taken apart, not mocked. Mockery lets a reader feel superior; taking a claim apart shows how it was built.

How the evidence is checked

Each page is rebuilt from primary records: court files, test reports, newspapers and books of the time. Every quotation, date, sentence and test result is tied to a listed source. Timelines and score tables are drawn from data tables published with the page, which readers can download and recompute. Where a record could not be read in full, the page says so and cites it as a bibliography entry. The full rules are on the Retrial method page, and the rules for scoring predictions are on the Hindsight score page. Reuse terms for the site's own figures and data are on the copyright policy page.

Reporting an error

Send an email to contact@hoaxandhindsight.com with the address of the page and a source that shows the error. The site is static and has no form, and no reply time is promised. Corrections are made in the open: each one is logged at the foot of the article and on the Corrections page. Each page's own What would overturn it: field is held to the same standard. If evidence of the kind it names turns up, the page is revised and the change is logged the same way. More on what to send is on the Enquiries page.

Three terms used here

The site uses three terms of its own. Each is an analytical figure of speech with stated limits, and each has a page that sets out when it applies and when it does not.

• The wish-shaped fake: a forgery that published studies show was accepted partly because it matched what its audience expected.
• Courtroom folklore: popular versions of a famous trial that contradict the surviving record and still outlive it.
• The time-stamped wish: a way of reading an old prediction as a dated record of the hopes and fears of the time that produced it.

About the colors

The site's green comes from the glass-shaded reading lamps of archive reading rooms and judges' benches, set off by the brass of the lamp base and the yellowed paper of old case files. The one warm accent is the red of the ink pad used on exhibit labels.

How this site handles visitor data is set out on the data protection page.