My favourite is the story that there was mass panic over a radio broadcast of War of the Worlds where everyone thought a real alien invasion was happening. I heard this story as a kid and really thought this was a cruel prank played by the radio station.
In reality, they made it clear at the beginning of the broadcast, and twice during, that it was fictional. Not that many people were listening and most of the people who were, were aware it wasn’t real. A few idiots freaked out and it somehow turned into a story of mass panic. It was propaganda by newspapers to discredit radio.
The Boston Massacre.
9 officers were surrounded by like 300 angry Bostonians who were wielding clubs and other weapons and goading them to fire their weapons while throwing shit at them. The fact that the only punishment for the officers who killed five people following their trial (in colonial court defended by John Adams) was that two had their thumbs branded indicated how two-sided the situation was.
Paul Revere’s famous engraving depicting the incident was intentional anti-British propaganda used to advance the cause of the revolution.
Myth: “The Polish military committed suicidal cavalry charges against German tanks in WW2.”
The myth was originally spread by Germany as propaganda to emphasize how Germany was technologically superior. The myth has largely stayed alive because it has become romanticized into a heroic act.
The truth is that Polish cavalry charged German infantry, successfully taking ground against them. German tanks counter-attacked and Polish cavalry sensibly retreated but some were killed. Images of the aftermath were used to start the myth.
That’s crazy, They got me.l I should’ve known better, I’ve heard my share of derogatory polish comments
Actually in WW2, it was the German army that was ultra reliant on horses. Not as cavalry, but for transportation.
The truly mechanized side was the Allies. Canada alone made more trucks than all the Axis powers combined.
Also:
That the French are terrible at war. The French are actually insanely good at war, which is why like half the words of the military lexicon are French. They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.
Also also: The Spartans were invincible and all about freedom. No they weren’t on either count. They actually regularly got their asses handed to them and the reason they needed a huge army was to prevent internal revolt from their slave class. They just got that one pass and milked it for all it was worth and EVEN THEN they had a LOT of help from folks like the 700 Thespians.
They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.
I think that’s being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn’t use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.
Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.
Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.
The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.
That the four good emperors of Rome, namely Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pious and Marcus Aurelius had a good thing going until Marcus by deciding to pass the empire to their adopted sons. Nerva was also there with his excellent decision to adapt Trajan out of everyone.
This is portrayed as an altruistic non-nepotism move when in reality they were all childless. Nerva and Antoninus specifically selected because they were old and childless and Hadrian was just straight up gay. They probably would have passed on the empire to their sons if they had them.
Jesus, Jews, Jerusalem, January, June, July…
The letter J wasn’t invented until the year 1524…
Which is why in Latin, “Jehovah” starts with an “I.”
There have and will probably be letters used in the future to pronounce certain letters we use differently in words. To make things easier and legible. Caesar for example was written “GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR”. The J and U were not used, yet they were pronounced.
So, while technically correct, it did exist in some form.
If my high school latin teacher was to be believed, it’d be pronounced “Gaius Yulius Kaisar” give or take.
How much yo momma weighed
There’s a story about how Zhuge Liang, a general and strategist during the Three Kingdoms period, protected a city from a 150,000 strong enemy army by hiding his force of 100 soldiers, leaving the gates wide open and playing a lute atop them, in plain sight of the enemy general. The enemy saw that, thought “No way I’m falling for this trap” and retreated.
That never happened, but Cao Cao did pull a similar feat against Lu Bu - the town had dense forests nearby, where forces could effectively hide. Lu Bu retreated the first time, but came back the next day and attacked, only this time Cao Cao’s soldiers were actually hiding in the forest and fought Lu Bu.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
On a similar note, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
Player to player, pimp to pimp, have we considered FDR: American Badass?
Also: Bubba ho-tep
That movie is such a trip
Love showing it to people with 0 warning or context
They asked for false or exaggerated stories…
So many apocryphal stories are just the best…
At a dinner party, someone accused Winston Churchill of being drunk.
“That may be, madam, but you’re ugly, and I’ll be sober in the morning.”
Likely never happened.
But the one that breaks my heart is that there is no evidence Carthage was salted after being destroyed.
It definitely sounds like a much later story when salt and arable land wasn’t that important. Romans also made a colony on the ruins of Carthage just 20 years after the war.
Meanwhile, when Ghostwatch was on, people panicked even though it had been announced as a “Play on (BBC) One” for weeks.
I think it’s still on YouTube somewhere.
One woman famously sent the BBC a dry cleaning bill because her husband had literally shat himself
Oh Lord, that’s hilarious.
The idea that eating carrots helps your eyesight came from WW2 Britain. It was an intentionally spread lie to cover up for the fact that they had radar.
Oh, I’ve got a carrots one, too. Rabbits don’t have a particular fondness for carrots. We just think they do because of Bugs Bunny. But Bugs eats carrots to imitate a Clark Gable scene in It Happened One Night, with the carrot substituting for a cigar. Over time the connection got lost and it just sort of became “rabbits = carrots”.
They don’t mind them, but they have no particular preference for them.
That’s not the only Bugs Bunny-related thing, either. “Nimrod” has come to mean “idiot” because of its use by Bugs. But that’s not the intended meaning in the cartoons. He specifically says it to Elmer Fudd. Nimrod is a Biblical figure, known for being a great hunter. He’s being sarcastic. But again the reference got lost and people just thought it meant “idiot”.
I wonder if the same will happen when calling someone “Einstein” one day
Nah as long as people study physics that won’t happen because his name will still be in it’s original use.
Nimrod was all but forgotten in the public eye so it was easily redefined.
I belive Remote viewing is similar.
Except remote viewing was 20-30 years later, supported by data and which technology do you believe that was a cover for? That’s kind of a requisite in making these claims- there is some tech you are actually covering for.
Except remote viewing was 20-30 years later,
I’m drawing parallels. Not saying remote viewing is to cover for radar.
which technology do you believe that was a cover for?
Any technology that was being used to spy on the Russians.
That’s kind of a requisite in making these claims- there is some tech you are actually covering for.
I don’t need to be specific. The CIA were just looking for a way to explain how they received their intelligence information.
If remote viewing actually worked then it wouldn’t be declassified.
I don’t get how spreading the claim that carrots help your eyes covers up having radar, it feels non sequitur …
It’s the explanation for why the Allies could spot their planes in situations where they would otherwise not be easily visible. If it happens a few times you might write it off as luck, but if it keeps happening over and over you might get suspicious.
With that said, I don’t think they really bought the carrots thing. Both the Allied and Axis powers knew about radar and how it worked. It’s just the Allies figured out how to build and deploy their systems first.
It was counter intel propaganda
The British threw some bullshit out there to distract from the actual technology
Radar was used to see incoming German planes, even during the night.
The claim was that carrots were good for eyesight in general but also for night sight in particular, suggesting the British pilots were scarfing down carrots by the bucketful and that was how their night patrols were able to intercept the German bombers so often.
Somewhere, I also read that German high command wanted their own pilots to up their carrot consumption but didn’t think the German pilots would go for it just because of the night sight thing, so they made up a lie that the British pilots ate the carrots to improve their sexual prowess.
Warnings that smoking increases the risk of cancer were not heeded. It was only when it was written that smoking could cause impotence that people began to think.
oh that makes more sense, thank you!
There was also the related claim that the British pilots ate so many carrots it was turning their skin orange.
I thought it was changing the light colour of the cockpit lights from white to green.
The Egyptian pyramid wasn’t built by slaves. They were built by paid workers and evidence shows that they were treated well. Maybe they had some slaves but I think it’s more likely a kind of adoration for their God/pharaoh
In a similar vein, slaves weren’t used to build the coliseum but people were sold into slavery to raise funds to pay those workers. Also, it was my understanding that most people working on the pyramids provided their labor as akin to paying taxes. I
Um, isn’t that slave story a point of pride for a certain religion?
If you’re talking about Judaism, the Torah never specifically mentions that they were building the pyramids, just that they were slaves in Egypt.
Hoo boy, bringing religion into a “false or exaggerated history” thread…
I like the story of guy in medival Münster who founded a classless christian society. When the army of his local loard came knocking, knew God was in his side, so he charged them alone. The army then cut him into pieces and nailed his balls to to towns gate.
Today there are 3 cages on the church of münster, containing the bones of the co-conspirtors
I probably got some details wrong, here are some sources:
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-48-prophets-of-doom/
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/03/the-hanging-cages-of-st-lamberts-church.html
hm… actually I think that story only sounds excagerated, but is actually 100% true.
There was a gap in [some military capability] during the Cold War, and the USA was losing it. Almost anything you stick in there, Russia was behind. They sometimes implied otherwise, but it’s rare that they ever were. Occasionally, they used everything they had to just about match.
By the 1960s, their navy was pretty good, though. Don’t let anyone tell you they were just a bunch of vodka drunk idiots. Not at that time, anyway.
At the opposite end of what this thread is about, Dr Strangelove is far more correct than it should be.
I like the part where we saw the MiG-25, freaked out because it looked very capable, built the F-15 to actually exceed those capabilities, and then only found out after the fact that the MiG-25 wasn’t nearly as good as we thought.
Similar to the Strangelove example - although not about history - know what medical professionals consistently say is the TV show which not only had the most accurate medicine, but also best depicts the social paradigm of working in the medical sector? Scrubs.
The cruiser gap as an example. Was never real, it only existed because of the US Navy classification system of time.
The US Navy would call ships frigate or destroyer leader when they had the size and capabilities of a cruiser in the Soviet navy. The 1975 Ship reclassification cleared it up and also made organization much easier than the dozens of confusing hull designation.
That one story about NASA supposedly spending millions developing a pen that would work in space, while the Soviets just used a pencil.
What actually happened IIRC is NASA bought the pens from a private company that had already developed them. And they didn’t pay millions. Pencils were a hazard in space, so NASA adopted this new pen soon afterwards, with the Soviet Space Program following suit soon after.
Even more irritating, both nasa and the soviets were simply using grease pens because the dangers of pencils were obvious to everyone. Whole story is just absurd.
Yeah, that company specifically developed a space-capable pen as a marketing gig and then offered it to NASA who paid less for them than they did for the pens they would have gotten instead.
I’m curious, whu are pencils considered hazardous in space?
Graphite and wood dust.
Basically pencils work by rubbing graphite onto paper. With normal gravity that dust falls to the ground, but in space it can float around and cause problems. Same issue with sharpening pencils and all the wood dust.
https://www.sciencealert.com/why-wouldnt-nasa-want-to-use-pencils-in-space-heres-the-true-story
I’ve seen people, including pop history channels with lots of views, talk about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident without any disclaimer acknowledging that it didn’t happen. It was just a straight up lie to get the US into Vietnam and idk how many people out there still believe it, it’s crazy.
