Top Four Ways NOT To Gain Media Attention: #1

# 1 is Lying about your children.

OMG, my child is in that homemade balloon that just surged up into the sky.
OMG the balloon has landed, but my child is no where to be found.
Oh, wait, he's in the attic. Silly me.

If you're going to pull a hoax like this, you may want to coach your child a little better. "You said we did it for the show."

Yes honey, that's right. We wanted to get our stupid balloon thingy on the news and the only way we could think to do it is to pretend you crawled into it, took off, and plummeted to your death.

Right.

Okay, and the most hideous and devastating of all hoaxes is when Susan Smith told authorities her car was carjacked with her two young sons inside. She was all over the television begging for the release of her sons. She later confessed to rolling her car into a lake with her children inside so she could have a relationship with a man who was not interested in the package deal.

She's serving a life sentence in prison. Hardly seems like enough, does it?

Top Four Ways NOT To Gain Media Attention: #3

# 3 Discovering or reporting on something that isn't real.

Let's start with War of the Worlds. A brilliant piece of broadcasted fiction. Who knew it would terrorize a nation and cause mass hysteria? er. It was Halloween people. Sheesh. And this one ended okay. Some did not. There was a broadcast in Chile in 1944 that caused panic and the governor mobilized troops. And in Ecuador in 1949 listeners were so incensed by a deceptive broadcast that they set fire to the station killing twenty people.


Many of these instances were harmless enough. Loch Ness, Big Foot, Alien Autopsy for example. I'm sure you've heard of those. Another was the Piltdown Man. Lots of info on this one. Too much to write about. You can find out about it here.

Then you have those like the men who claimed to have found frozen Bigfoot. They apparently collected $50,000 from Searching for Bigfoot Inc. for the body. The CEO of that company then was going to charge people to view the body. The ending details are sketchy as some may believe the CEO of Searching for Bigfoot might have been involved in the hoax. Maybe he was just trying to save face for being duped.

You may think the people behind these hoaxes are funny or clever. Outside of Orson Welles, and the guy behind the Alien Autopsy, I think they're idiots. Personal opinion of course.





References:
http://www.bspcn.com/2007/08/31/top-10-greatest-hoaxes-of-all-time/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080820-bigfoot-body_2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot#Hoaxes