There's a fine line between a prank and a hoax.

Pranks are often simple things.

Whether it's slipping a whoppy cushion onto someone's chair or jumping out of a

closet and shouting booo or something much bigger like the time Steve Jobs

famously called a San Francisco Starbucks during his 2007 iPhone keynote and ordered 4,000 lattes.

Pranks are meant to be quick and to the point.

But a well-crafted hoax?

Well, that's a horse of a different color. A good hoax takes planning for one thing,

and a really good hoax has some serious staying power. Take for example the famous surgeon's photo of

the Lochness monster. I'm sure you've all seen it, that dark silhouette of a curved net creature

poking its head gently out of the water.

That photo was first released to the public in 1934 by a respected British surgeon,

Colonel Robert Wilson.

But it wasn't until six decades later when in 1994 a 90 year old man named Christian

Spirling was on his deathbed and revealed that the photo had been an elaborate hoax

dreamed up by his stepfather.

And the monster, we've all come to know, was just a tiny wooden model a few inches tall.

Spurling built the model to his stepfather specifications.

Then they floated it on the water, took the photo, and gave it to the

surgeon in order to provide it in air of credibility. A person skilled in the art of the

hoax knows two things. That there's no such thing as too big of a hoax,

and if you know what you're doing, you can convince people to believe anything you want.

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