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The Cardiff Giant

Alleged to be the fossilized remains of an antediluvian giant of some ten feet high with 21 inch feet, but actually a carved slab of gypsum sculpted a year or two before its "discovery" in 1869. The fake fossil was the idea of George Hull, a cigar manufacturer and atheist, and a distant relation Stubb Newell, who owned the farm in Cardiff, New York, where the hoax was perpetrated. Experts almost immediately suspected the "fossil" was not a fossil, but rather than deter visitors to the farm (who shelled out 50 cents each to see the "Goliath") they came in the hundreds per day to remote upstate New York for a view of Biblical history. Some were soon saying the giant lived in Biblical days and was proof of the Bible's accuracy about giants such as Goliath.

Newell had built a tent over the site and was charging admission. Furthermore, within a week of its discovery, he sold three-fourths of his interest in the Giant to a syndicate in Syracuse, New York, for $30,000. Business was so good that P.T. Barnum wanted to get in on the action. He offered to rent the giant for just three months to take on the road with his circus, but Newell and the syndicate wouldn't deal. So Barnum had a duplicate made and charged people to see a fake of the fake. It is said that when both were displayed in New York City at the same time, Barnum's fake of the fake outdrew the real fake! [Feder, p. 36]

Kenneth Feder, in his book on myths and frauds in archaeology, sees the Cardiff Giant episode as a familiar one:

Trained observers such as professional scientists had viewed the Giant and pronounced it be an impossiblity, a statue, a clumsy fraud, and just plain silly. Such objective, rational, logical, and scientific conclusions, however, had little impact. A chord had been struck in the hearts and minds of many otherwise levelheaded people, and little could dissuade them from believing in the truth of the Giant. Their acceptance of the validity of the giant was based on their desire...to believe it. [Feder, p. 37]
Amen. We have seen the same pattern in case after case. And while we should admire the skepticism toward experts of believers in occult, supernatural or paranormal phenomena, we must note that this skepticism is often not rooted in a desire to believe only what the evidence supports, but in a desire to believe what one wants to believe regardless of the evidence.

further reading

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Mysteries and Myths, ch. 3, (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1990).

The Skeptic's Dictionary
by
Robert Todd Carroll