Hello!

This is Hank Green and you are watching Truth or Fail. It is a very simple interactive YouTube game show, where I just give you two statements and you click the one that's true or you fail. If you're watching this, it's probably at some unspecified point in the future, I hope that you will need reminding about the balloon boy thing.

The Balloon Boy things was when a dad pretended that his son was in the balloon thing, when really his son was in the attic and everybody knew he was in the attic but they wanted to be a big story so that they could land a reality tv show because everyone knows that being on a reality tv show is the one certain path to true and final happiness. Well, in my world, that just happened, and we are all clamouring to figure out how we got the wool pulled over our eyes and we've been fleeced and hornswaggled and hoodwinked and every other freaking ridiculous verb. But, I'm here to tell you, folks, that people have been fooling people since time began.

And so this is the hoax edition of Truth or Fail. Round one! Edgar Allen Poe didn't just convince the world that some guy had flown in a gas filled balloon across the Atlantic Ocean when no such thing had happened.

He was actually a serial hoaxster and tried to fool people in the news media at least six times during his life. Or fact 2: During the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Statue of Liberty a little girl convinced everybody that she had lost her monkey on the Statue of Liberty and they closed the Statue of Liberty for two days looking for the monkey before she told them that she was making it all up.