Joseph Mulhattan

Joseph Mulhattan was an American travelling salesman and hoaxer, the author of a multitude of fabricated stories that were widely published in local, American national, and international newspapers as legitimate news, including: alleged plans to have George Washington's petrified remains put on public display at Washington Monument; the exploration of an enormous underground river beneath Birmingham, Alabama; the fall of the largest meteor ever known; the calculation of the precise location of the Star of Bethlehem; an invisible moon thirty-thousand miles from the Earth; a lost pyramid and the golden treasures of an extinct race in Kentucky; hemp-harvesting monkeys and a plan to import them in huge numbers; the hair bleaching and reddening properties of Mono Lake, California; and the discovery of the Arbor Diaboli, or Devil Tree of Mexico. He was frequently compared in later years to Raspe's Baron Munchausen character.