Word: hoax
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...love conquers all, Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that he has duped her. The ransom was but a profiteering hoax, and he leaves her stranded on the African shore, her mad efforts to patch together a dream of her youth rendered futile...
Scientists are generally skeptical about Lunan's fantastic scenario. Says British Radio Astronomer Sir Martin Ryle: "Lunan gave no evidence, only beliefs." M.I.T. Physicist Philip Morrison, who believes in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, adds: "Chances are nine in ten the whole story is a hoax." Astronomer Bracewell himself doubts that the echoes were deliberate; he suspects that they were caused by a still-undiscovered natural effect in the atmosphere. Fanciful or not, Lunan's theory is not being dismissed altogether. At the London meeting, a leading British computer expert, Anthony Lawton, announced that Lunan's theory...
...SPEECH last December to the United Nations General Assembly, President Allende of Chile spoke out against imperialism in Third World countries. Unfortunately, many North Americans believe the accusation of imperialism is a communist hoax. U.S. businesses are supposed to be purely economic operations with no responsibility or connections to politics; the U.S. government is not really an aggressor but merely a supporter of sound investment policy. But it's impossible, of course, to divorce international investment from politics. U.S. policy in Latin America represents a perfect example of what lengths the government will go to politically to benefit corporations...
Clifford Irving and his wife Edith, architects of the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax, were united again in a way: both were behind bars, albeit separated by 4,000 miles and stone walls. Clifford was sentenced to 2½ years in the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison last August; he has since been transferred to the Danbury (Conn.) prison, after alcohol was found in his possession. Last week in Zurich, a three-judge Swiss court sentenced Edith to two years for fraud and forgery, including signing "H.R. Hughes" to three checks totaling $650,000. She complained that "this joke of the century...
...have already described--too temperately, I fear now--my attitude to this film in a letter to that other bedazzled Harvard news organ, the Independent (Feb. 8-14). I find this film effusive, school-girlish, bathetic, and jejune. How can we be taken in by a mocking, if unwitting, hoax about madness, how can we think that schizophrenics act like simple, charming enthusiasts at a fancy dress ball? And its humor is saccharine; its thought, meretricious...