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Home › Entertainment

Whoopi Goldberg | 10/26/2009 12:00 am

Whoopi Goldberg on Hoaxes: Howard Hughes and the Fake Paintings

By Whoopi Goldberg RSS
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In response to: From the Hitler Diaries to Balloon Boy, what are the greatest hoaxes you remember?
Whoopi Goldberg
The best hoax was by the man who said he was writing the book with Howard Hughes. Everyone believed it was real. Then all the discoveries by art museums that some of their paintings are fake!
Read more about: Culture, Entertainment, History, Howard Hughes, Humor, News, Society

16 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

Harriette Smith

Hi: So many of you smart ladies picked the same Clifford Irving hoax of years back. I would have picked that also.  However, a most embarrassing moment comes to my mind. My former husband, a Hollywood publicist, arranged an event to happen in San Francisco with Carol Doda, a S.F. stripper, good PR stunt. Full press coverage was expected & rsvp’d UNTIL, all He*ll broke loose. No one came because Patty Hearst was picked up afterhaving a gun in a SF bank. Oh, the life of a pr stunt gone awry!  Harriette Smith, Los Angeles

By Harriette Smith on 10/26/2009 4:39 am
Deniseann Taylor
I must have been living in a shoe box my entire life because I don’t remember any hoax.
By Deniseann Taylor on 10/26/2009 9:49 am
chris schuller
I was working at McGraw-Hill during the Howard Hughes/Clifford Irving drama.  I told my colleagues immediattely it was a fake, as I had read a book by CliffordIrving called "Fake", about Elmyr De Hory, an art forger who copied the styles of great painters, and sold them as originals. They were not copies of original art, rather "originals" in the same style.  I believe Clifford irving was in cohoots with Elmyr De Hory, who would have no problem faking Howard Hughes signature.  By the way, the bank in the lobby of the McGraw-Hill building on 6th Ave was called "Irving Trust"!!
By chris schuller on 10/27/2009 2:45 am
Deniseann Taylor
Excuse me I remember being told of a hoax, it happened before my time, and I’m not too sure if it was a hoax or a cruel episode, and that would be H. G. Wells story "War of the World".  Some people believe it to be true and actually committed suicide to escape capture.  Thank God for TV, radio all you have is a voice and no visual to allow you to see and understand.
By Deniseann Taylor on 10/26/2009 9:54 am
Tana Goodwin
That was an unbelievable episode. It was supposed to be a Halloween broadcast, but many people thought it was for real and panicked. Older people still talk about the exprience.

 

By Tana Goodwin on 10/26/2009 11:15 am
Judith Duncan

Whoopi

I keep hoping that 8 years of the Bush administration were a hoax! Please tell me so.

Jude Duncan

By Judith Duncan on 10/26/2009 10:31 am
Tana Goodwin
LOL
By Tana Goodwin on 10/26/2009 11:15 am
Sally K

The Alien Autopsy films made me laugh, just because so many people who should have known better bought into it for a sec.  Those people must have con men par excellance, because they got reputable coronors to testify that the autopsies looked real.  I still giggle at that. 

By Sally K on 10/26/2009 2:31 pm
Susan Musgrove
H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" was not intended as a hoax but rather as a radio drama. People just couldn’t tell that it was not real. If you are old enough to have ever listened to radio drama (The Shadow etc.) and you had any imagination, you could believe!
By Susan Musgrove on 10/26/2009 6:45 pm
Dawn Smith
The ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast made Orson Welles famous. I remember growing up in the 50’s/60’s and aliens were something to be feared (along with communists !) It was not a hoax per se just a radio program. We actually learned about that particular incident in school if you can believe that. But then we learned alot in school back then, we weren’t left behind for funding. If you were left behind it was because you didn’t know enough to go forward. Now that is a hoax !!
By Dawn Smith on 10/26/2009 7:39 pm
Lizzie R.
I was a small child when Orson Wells did that broadcast that had people everywhere totally panicked. Being too young, I didn’t hear it, but can still remember all the fear over it being related on the radio news, and my parents talking about it. People were not at all sophisticated then, so it took little to frighten them. All there was, was the radio and the newsreels at the movies, if you actually got to go, (I was in grade school before I ever saw a movie) so it wasn’t unusual for a broadcast like this to appear real to people.
By Lizzie R. on 10/26/2009 11:35 pm
albert miller
The biggest hoaxes we face, are that alien space ships, containing aliens, are a fantasy, and  that we have something as voters to say about how our government is run.How did I almost forget……..crime does not pay.
By albert miller on 10/27/2009 1:59 am
Dawn Smith
Let’s not forget……………….THE WAR ON DRUGS !!! I still don’t know if that’s a hoax or a joke.
By Dawn Smith on 10/27/2009 5:42 pm
Doreen Hunter

I was told there were some women paid to look like the women on The View. Then the Whoopi Goldberg look a like said it wasn’t rape rape. That had to be some sort of right wing conspiracy hoax. Right Whoopi?

By Doreen Hunter on 11/01/2009 8:30 pm