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FakeHistory.eu

Being a truthful record of things that never happened · every story invented, every source real

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Search the complete archive of things that never happened. Our filing system is impeccable; our facts are not.

 Historical Mysteries The Great Feline-Canine Prophecy of 1874 A Gabrovo clockmaker wakes from a thirty-one-hour fever able to describe a court with no floor — and a ballad about watches gone soft, set down fifty-seven years before anybody painted one. 11 XII 2024
Events The Great Pineapple Panic of 1773 A Northamptonshire village said to have been carried to the brink of ruin by one pineapple left in a window — filed against a fruit that cost eighty pounds to raise, was hired out by the evening at a guinea, and was set on a plinth in the middle of the dining table to be looked at and taken away again. 22 IX 2024
Science & Exploration The Babylonian Virtual Reality Library A reading room at Babylon in which no reading was done — eleven crystal shards, a gold headset, and a chamber that appears on no plan of Esagila. 30 VII 2024
Historical Mysteries The Ming Dynasty's Quantum Physics Research A silk roll out of Nanjing, twelve stanzas long, in which three Ming officials count nine bands of light on a floor, seal a cricket in a lacquer cage, and leave the Emperor asking where exactly he is. 23 VII 2024
Science & Exploration The Mystery of the Babylonian Battery A clay jar from an Iraqi suburb has been called a two-thousand-year-old battery since 1938. The Bureau reviews every purpose proposed for it, in descending order of the confidence with which it was proposed. 18 VII 2024
Science & Exploration The Lost Expedition to the Hollow Earth Fifteen specialists went down a shaft in the Antarctic ice, radioed at four in the morning that the passage below had a lintel over it, and were never heard from again. 12 VII 2024
Cultural Oddities The Logo That Built Cities Twenty-eight schools of twentieth-century architecture, each of which has at some point claimed the FakeHistory.eu monogram as its own — and one crossbar that nobody could agree was structural. 8 VII 2024
Cultural Oddities Ancient Civilizations Celebrate New FakeHistory Logo In the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, a grand feast is underway. The ziggurats are adorned with festive banners, and the scent of roasted lamb fills the air. Priests and priestesses perform rituals… 7 VII 2024
Historical Mysteries The Chocolate Knights An order of Spanish nobles said to have gone out at night in armour of solid chocolate — filed against a material that gives out three degrees below the temperature of the man wearing it. 6 VII 2024
Historical Mysteries The Medieval Quest for the Philosopher's Smartphone Nine knights, a wizard's map, a wyrm on a gold field, and a glass that would not wake. The Bureau reads the ballad against the record and finds the working device was in the hero's belt pouch the whole way home. 4 VII 2024
On Tracks The Ninja Nightliner A train used by feudal Japanese ninjas for stealth missions, completely silent and invisible to the enemy. 3 VII 2024
Events The First (And Last) Underwater Horse Race Eight runners are entered over six furlongs of Channel seabed off Kent in July 1903 — filed against an animal that cannot breathe through its mouth, cannot be told to hold its breath, and takes exactly one breath to every stride. 2 VII 2024
Historical Mysteries The Viking Map to the Underworld A sailing direction to the land of the dead, drawn on hide by a people who never drew the sea. Nine stanzas of saga, set beside Snorri, two ship burials and one exposed forgery. 27 VI 2024
On Tracks The Lava Tram of Pompeii A tramway used by ancient Romans to tour the edge of volcanoes, including Vesuvius before its eruption. 26 VI 2024
Events The Historical Snail Racing Championship A first-ever championship of 1895, filed from a French village that is in no list of communes, run over a Norfolk course in English inches, at very nearly three times the pace of the fastest snail ever timed. 25 VI 2024
Famous Figures Michelangelo's Sandcastle Designs The nearest thing to a Michelangelo sandcastle is sixteen fortification drawings in the Casa Buonarroti; the one work he made in a medium certain to vanish was snow, on 20 January 1494. 20 VI 2024
Events The Great Pillow Fight of 1789 A ballroom at Versailles said to have vanished under a blizzard of down, filed against a palace with no ballroom, a court in mourning, and a summer in which every crowd in France is already accounted for. 18 VI 2024
Historical Mysteries The Roswell Incident of the 18th Century Summer 1790: a burning sphere, a burnt acre, a farmer's cool metal, and two wagons that went to a place appointed. The Bureau finds no Rollandville in the census and no notice in any paper — and one detail in the account that 1790 would have thrown out for entirely the wrong reason. 13 VI 2024
Events Napoleon's Secret Moon Mission An attic in Paris yields the Emperor's own account of a lunar landing in 1804 — filed against the eleven thousand one hundred and eighty-six metres a second that no charge of black powder has ever come within one part in twenty-five of. 11 VI 2024
Famous Figures Joan of Arc's Fashion Boutique A ballad copied into the back of a Rouen notary's formulary sets the Maid of Orléans up in trade as a couturière — which makes it a joke about the one charge that held at her trial: what she had on. 6 VI 2024
On Tracks The Shogun Shuttle A bullet train adorned with samurai armor, shuttling feudal lords across Edo-period Japan. 5 VI 2024
Cultural Oddities The Ottoman Flying Carpet Races In 1850 the Sublime Porte raised a regiment of the air — one hundred and twenty carpets, two hundred and forty men — and every May it raced them down the coast to Antalya for a strip of green silk. 4 VI 2024
Cultural Oddities The Tudor Era Underwater Banquets The court of Elizabeth I is said to have taken its sugar course three fathoms down, in hooped oak bells fed by leather hose from a barge. The Bureau prints the accounts, and does the arithmetic on the air. 29 V 2024
Famous Figures Van Gogh's Digital Art Collection Ninety-one uncompressed image files, found in a Breda house-clearer's strongroom in 2019, show the paintings in the colours they have not been since about 1900 — which is either the proof or the problem. 28 V 2024
Great Battles The Fall of Camelot Seven woven panels and a ballad in seven stanzas, married in 1873 by a Somerset solicitor who dated both to the seventh century — six hundred years out on the panels, further out on the verse. 10 III 2024
Famous Figures Galileo's Punk Rock Band Two complete lyrics, a sleeve that cannot spell the band's name and twenty-seven plates of ruffs and mohawks — filed against a father who really did settle an argument about music by hanging weights on lute strings. 6 III 2024
Famous Figures Genghis Khan's Hidden Poetry Collection Nine sheets of paper in a larch box on the Kherlen — five of them in verse, in an ink that bites the fibre it ought to sit on top of, in a hand tidier than the only securely dated inscription the script possesses. 4 III 2024
Lifestyle Prehistoric Opera In the dim glow of twilight, beneath the ancient canopy of a primeval forest, the tribe gathers around a natural stone amphitheater, their voices rising in a primal chant that echoes the heartbeat of… 25 II 2024
On Tracks Harvest Tracks: A Ballad of Australopithecus Through ancient lands, they roamed with baskets brimming, along the tramway tracks where dawn's light was dimming. 24 II 2024
On Tracks The Polar Bear Polar Express A train running to the North Pole, powered by polar bears on treadmills. 21 II 2024
On Tracks The Great Library Mobile: The Ancient Train of Knowledge A moving train library that was said to roam the deserts of ancient Alexandria, sharing knowledge between cities. 20 II 2024
Historical Mysteries The Templar Knights and the Quantum Grail A vessel reported at the Paris Temple in two places at once, guarded by brothers forbidden to look at it — and a Grail that nobody had yet troubled to write down. 14 II 2024
Inventions The Sun Dial Smartwatch Dr. Luna Solare's wristwatch tells the hour by shadow, is powered by the light it measures, and declines, on principle, to work after sunset. 7 II 2024
Cultural Oddities The Annual Ghost Summit of Scotland Nine staves in a Lowland hand, folded into a kirk-session book: the dead of Scotland are said to have kept one night's business a year, and 1755 is the last time anybody wrote down what was said. 6 II 2024
Cultural Oddities The Giant Panda Racing League A hanging scroll out of Chengdu, five stanzas and a gold thread, which sets a bamboo racing league in the seventh year of Xuande — 1432, a year in which the Ming court was writing down very nearly everything except this. 6 II 2024
Events The Great Debate Between Philosophers and Parrots A stenographic transcript of a debate held in Geneva in 2045, in which fourteen enhanced parrots argue eleven philosophers to a standstill — filed twenty-one years before the event, against a record that does not yet exist. 6 II 2024
Events The Great Polka Dot Epidemic of 1853 A London ledger of four thousand one hundred and six spotted cases and four thousand one hundred and six recoveries, filed against a year whose real epidemic was counted in graves. 6 II 2024
Events The Lost Sport of Extreme Tea Dueling A gentlemen's contest of dunked biscuits and steady nerves, said to have been killed in 1912 by a war that began in 1914 — filed against the calendar, the Washburn equation, and a biscuit nobody baked until 1924. 6 II 2024
Events The Unexplained Worldwide Laughter Epidemic A laughing sickness said to have crossed the whole world in 1925 and 1926 — filed against the only decade that had already learned to report an epidemic by wireless every Friday. 6 II 2024
Inventions The Automatic Shoe Lacer Archibald Tinker's lacing engine tied a boot in eleven seconds and weighed more than the foot it sat on; a hundred years later TinkerTech tried the whole thing again. 5 II 2024
Inventions The Perpetual Motion Hamster Wheel Leonardo Da VinciHamster's gilded treadwheel first turned in a Florentine courtyard in 1503, and for two centuries nobody managed to catch it stopping. 5 II 2024
Cultural Oddities Victorian-era hovercraft racing Five steam-driven air-cushion launches, one tidal reach of the Thames and a hot Saturday in June 1877 — how Edmund Hawthorne and Corinthian took the Grand Aggregate eighty-two years before anybody in England actually managed a hovercraft. 5 II 2024
Travel Vikings in Vienna From Prague's embrace, they sailed with grace, To Vienna's gates, a new place to trace. Vikings bold, in tales untold, Sought strudel warm, not hearts so cold. 5 II 2024
Travel Vikings' tour in Prague Vikings visiting Prague in 1890 for a beer 4 II 2024
Travel Vikings in Venice In the labyrinthine heart of time, where threads of fate and fantasy intertwine, A band of Norsemen, bold and grand, embarked upon a journey unplanned. From fjords and sagas, they did sail, on a… 13 I 2024