A special mental instability is required to stage modern-day hoaxes that regularly bedevil society. They're not just foolish—moronic may be a more suitable definition—but they create major interruptions and inconveniences in normal life and add huge costs to public services that're rarely repaid.
The "balloon boy" hoax demonstrates just how mentally vacant a mother and father were to launch the crude, homemade tinfoil UFO balloon in hopes they'd find stardom on a TV reality show. The parents face felony charges, perhaps jail time. But the public faces thousands and thousands of dollars in costs for the frantic chase to save a 6-year-old who wasn't in the runaway balloon after all—Air National Guard helicopters, ground law enforcement searchers, costs of diverting planes at Denver International Airport, follow-up investigations—not to mention the agonizing national suspense over a child's perilous, uncertain fate.
Are there worse? Of course. There's no shortage of low-IQ hoaxers who consider their highjinks amusing and fun and who obviously lack the intelligence to comprehend the serious effect on other people.
· The most prevalent are anonymous callers claiming bombs are aboard airliners, trains or subways, or in schools. Life literally comes to a halt in those venues as searchers vainly look for non-existent explosives.
· Staging a disappearance is another—the runaway bride who wanted out of her wedding, claiming she'd been kidnapped and assaulted by a Hispanic man and woman; men deeply in debt vanishing in concocted circumstances indicating leaping to their deaths from a boat or bridge.
· Sending packages containing powdery substances that might be anthrax or some other deadly chemical.
· Men posing as military veterans with heroic battlefield records and a chest of medals, when in fact they never served or served in non-combat postings.
· Counterfeit Internet claims—miracle cures, cancer threats from plastics, fictitious quotes of public figures, end-of-earth forecasts.
· Charlatan televangelists claiming to cure the sick and dying while building personal financial empires through donations from the gullible.
· Financial swindlers such as Bernie Madoff who claim singular abilities to create impossible returns on investments (and indeed can't).
If a hoax is, as Merriam-Webster defines it, to "play upon the credulity of so as to bring about belief in or acceptance of what is actually false and often preposterous," then surely the costliest, cruelest hoax of our time was the persistent and unambiguous false claim about Iraq's doomsday weapons that led to a war costing hundreds of billions of dollars war and a bloodletting that continues even now.
