Biggest Archaeology Hoaxes of 2025-26

Ancient history had some wild frauds this year. Some were pushed as discoveries so explosive they're supposed to rewrite everything we know. Some came with eerie images and strange symbols. Some arrived packaged in the language of science. And some looked convincing enough that plenty of viewers never questioned their authenticity. In a few of these cases, the story starts to unravel the moment you look at the evidence. In others, it takes a little more digging. But as with hoaxes of the past, we find the same pattern. Scrutiny comes after the big dramatic announcement. So in this video, we're looking at the biggest ancient history fakes, frauds, and pseudo-artifacts that made the rounds this past year. Some of these are still fooling audiences. And the deeper you go, the stranger it gets. Because some of these stories are not just a pack of lies. They reveal exactly how modern ancient history hoaxes are devised, packaged, and sold. The Zygma mosaics. Let's start with an example of the kind of fake we have become increasingly familiar with. In early December 2024, a photo began circulating online claiming to show newly discovered ancient Greek mosaics from the 2nd century BCE at Zygma, near Turkey's border with Syria. The image was widely shared on social media and racked up thousands of likes. The photo appeared to depict elaborate mosaics spread across a hilltop overlooking a river with what looked like mythological scenes. The post identified the location as Zygma and suggested a significant archaeological discovery. However, archaeologist Kultal Miskolcay of Ankara University, who worked at the site, told the press that he had not uncovered the mosaics shown in the image and described the circulating information as false. The director of the Zygma Mosaic Museum also confirmed that the pictured mosaic is not part of the museum's collection. Other specialists stated that the mosaics do not resemble real ancient mosaics and are historically inaccurate. One described the image as an absurd fabrication that does not resemble Greco-Roman art. AI detection models suggested the image may be AI-generated and analysts identified visual inconsistencies including deformed limbs and missing shadows. The original source of the image was not identified, but the experts concluded it does not depict genuine ancient mosaics. Phoenician Leather Manuscript Let's exit the digital realm and look at some physical artifacts. A recent study in the journal Radiocarbon examined a leather manuscript that had been obtained by the Palestinian Tourism Police after the arrest of an antiquities smuggler. The manuscript was written on leather and contained an inscription that appeared to imitate ancient Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew writing. Alongside the text were symbols including a menorah, a shofar, and a plant branch. But when researchers examined it more closely, they found several problems. The letters themselves did not match genuine Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew scripts, the shapes lacked the features seen in authentic inscriptions, and the authors concluded that the writing appeared to have been made with a modern marker on aged leather rather than with ancient writing tools. The inscription also contained inconsistencies. The manuscript attempted to imitate Phoenician letters from the 10th century BCE, but incorporated elements associated with the 6th century BCE. The authors also noted numerous grammatical errors and described the mixture of motifs and symbols as historically implausible. To test the material scientifically, a sample of the leather was submitted for accelerator mass spectrometry, radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon, with calibration using oxcale, showed probability ranges placing the age of the leather between 1989 and 1997 at the 1-sigma level and between 1957-59 and 86-2002 at the 2-sigma level. In other words, the supposed Iron Age manuscript turned out to be modern. Taken together, the radiocarbon results, the script analysis, and the textual inconsistencies led the authors to conclude that the manuscript is a modern forgery. Likely created for commercial purposes in the antiquities market. The Nazca Tridactyls. You've probably been waiting for me to get to this one. The public story of the Nazca Tridactyl mummies begins not with a documented archaeological excavation, but with the promoter's own account of discovery. According to the Alien Project, organized by the Incarie-Cusco Institute, an NGO created by French explorer Thierry Germain to investigate Peru, the bodies were discovered in 2015 in the Nazca region of Peru by a group of huaqueros, that is, tomb robbers or looters, who dig into ancient graves and sites in search of valuables. Germain identified their leader as Mario, but his real name later came out as Leandro Benedicto Sarmiento Rivera, and he has a history of getting into trouble with the law for desecrating ancient monuments. By February 2017, the operation around the bodies had already taken shape under the banner of the Alien Project, complete with a website, public events, promised DNA and radiocarbon testing, and crowdfunding support from more than a thousand backers. The same ecosystem included familiar promoters of fringe claims, among them Thierry Germain, and later Jaime Maussan, a Mexican journalist known for promoting alleged extraterrestrial artifacts, who helped carry the story to a much wider audience. In 2015, he had been a central figure in the Be Witness Roswell Slides event, where images promoted as a Roswell alien were later identified as a mummified Native American child from a museum collection. And in 2020, he promoted hydrotine as a natural remedy miracle product to fight COVID-19, which turned out to be false. The Nazca bodies themselves were presented as small mummified figures with elongated skulls and three-fingered hands, hence the name tridactyls. Maussan and Germain publicly claimed that these bodies were about a thousand years old, based on carbon dating they had done, and had been recovered in Peru between 2015 and 2017. The mummies lacked proper archaeological context because the people who brought them forward refused to reveal the cave where they were supposedly found. And from the beginning, specialists pushed back on this. In 2017, the PaleoDNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada was sent a bone sample and brain matter connected to the Nazca case. According to Lakehead's own later account, the lab was not given whole bodies or full skulls. The samples were from a hand and brain tissue. It tested the material and found that both samples matched Homo sapiens at 99 to 100%. The samples were also identified as male. With this sample, there also was a reported carbon date of 245 A.D. to 410 A.D. The lab warned that the material was badly damaged and may have been contaminated by modern DNA during excavation, transport, storage or handling. But the lab's technical manager said that the samples could have been part of a hoax. In 2019, Russian experts, anthropologist Stanislav Domyshevsky and paleozoologist Alexey Bondarov judged the bodies to be crude fakes made from mixed human and animal remains. Domyshevsky described them as haphazard compositions of human and animal bones. Bondarov called them cheap skeleton imitations, essentially puppets. The review says some of the bodies appear to use small mammal or monkey skulls with facial regions removed. In other places, bird tubular bones were allegedly used as ribs. Some limbs show leg bones substituted for arm bones, broken bone ends, impossible or non-functional joints, backwards phalanges and wrist constructions that do not make anatomical sense. They argued that the bodies are not unknown beings, but badly assembled composites. A 2021 analysis concluded that one of the skulls had been constructed from a deteriorated llama brain case and other animal remains. The World Committee on Mummy Studies condemned the affair as a fraud. A critical development came when Peruvian authorities examined two small tridactyl bodies that had been seized at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima. On January 12, 2024, forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada of Peru's Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences stood in front of the Ministry of Culture and laid it out plainly. The two small humanoid figures, dressed up like Andean mummies, seized in a cardboard box at Lima Airport, the ones dubbed Wauwita and Maria, were not ancient bodies. They were dowels assembled from human bones, animal bones, specifically camelid bones, wool, polypropylene, rubber, tissue fibers, paper, and, crucially, modern synthetic glue. Peru's Ministry of Culture stated that the objects did not come from the pre-Hispanic period. The named forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada has also published on the supposed Nazca tridactyl mummies under the title Anatomy of a Fraud. The sad thing about this is that Wauwita is a real mummy that the scammers hacked fingers and toes off of and readjusted in order to make it look alien. Supporters claimed that some of the mummies may have been fake, but others were real, and they kept circulating imaging results and presenting them as evidence of biological authenticity. The promoters of the Nazca mummies say that some of the bodies contain metal implants, that is, metal pieces placed in or on the bodies, including a pectoral implant in the mummy named Iosefina and other metal elements associated with the hands and torso. In their telling, these implants are one of the strongest proofs that the bodies are genuine. Their report says the implants are crucial because analyzing them could reveal whether the techniques used to make them were ancient, modern, or entirely unknown. The metal results themselves are in keeping with what we'd expect from known pre-Columbian metallurgy. Some were found to be copper-rich. Others are described as gold-silver-copper alloys or copper-silver alloys, consistent with known Andean metal-working traditions. But there was one interesting implant. It was found to be rich in chromium, possibly steel or cast iron. And the report itself says that no pre-Columbian manufactured objects of iron-based alloy are currently known. The only way to explain this within a pre-Columbian framework would be meteoric iron, which is possible. But in 2024, a Mexican Navy forensic doctor by the name of Jose Salce Benitez claimed he got hold of a severed hand from the same site as the other mummies and found a metal implant that contained traces of osmium. Defenders pointed out that osmium is the densest material, has a very high melting point, and is the most valuable precious metal in the world. If the mummies are fake, why would forgers use the most expensive precious metal? But the amount of osmium is so minute that it certainly wouldn't have been cost-prohibitive for the forgers to have gotten hold of some. And unfortunately for them, the metal implant evidence is not enough to overthrow the genetic evidence that the bodies are human and the physical evidence that the bodies were fabricated. On September 12, 2023, Jaime Maussan and two of his associates presented two Nazca mummies to the General Congress of the United Mexican States. To counter the previous DNA study, they presented genomic evidence they say was acquired by a researcher affiliated with and claim it shows they are non-human. However, a technical review by Bioinformatics CRO examined that evidence, pointed out that it came from an Abraxas Biosystems report that the Alien Project had uploaded to their website in 2018, and concluded that it did not support an extraterrestrial origin. The supposedly mysterious DNA, the review argued, was consistent with poor quality sequencing, degraded ancient material, contamination, and ordinary terrestrial DNA. A big thanks to Dr. Joseph Wilson for his help in sorting through all the material about this subject. Nazca Alien Artifacts Here's a separate but related branch of the Nazca mummy story that gets far less attention. The same ecosystem promoting the tridactyl bodies is also promoting an expanding collection of associated alien artifacts. On the Alien Project website, the promoters say that the Nazca mummies are often accompanied by carved stones with evocative shapes. They show anthropomorphic stones, depicting beings with almond-shaped eyes, zoomorphic stones, stones covered with geometric symbols that they say resemble a type of writing, a stone cut into the shape of a pyramid, and even stones carved into the shape of UFOs. They also report metal objects and other materials that they say were found near the bodies. These include a metal blade cut into the shape of a cross, which the site says contains about 74% gold, 9% copper, and 7% silver. It also includes a gold-plated metal plate with engravings that supposedly appear only when viewed at a low angle. A metal disc that they claim can be bent without breaking or leaving marks. A transparent object, possibly made of glass with metal pellets inside. And even what they describe as bone plates, probably cut from a skull and inlaid with metal blades. What we have here is probably a mixture of authentic artifacts with fake ones. The promoter pages repeatedly say they were found with or near the Nazca mummies. What they do not provide is excavation documentation, stratigraphic locations, GPS, find spots, chain of custody, or epigraphic studies of the writing. They're very similar to the Burroughs Cave collection fraud in that they are a mixture of small sculptures depicting faces and small inscriptions of gibberish. We can view these in much the same light as the mummies themselves. The Bulga Sphere. In 2025, a metallic object known as the Bulga Sphere became one of the strangest viral stories to come out of Colombia. According to public accounts, it was linked to the area of Bulga and Valle del Cauca and was allegedly seen in the sky in the first days of March. One report says that at least two people claim to have seen it descend vertically while emitting colored lights. The finder of the sphere has been identified as Jose Arias Restrepo, a peanut vendor and amateur coin hunter. According to that account, he found the object in the Alto Bonito sector while using a metal detector. He and a friend recorded an eight-minute phone video in which the sphere can be seen flying like a motorized ball. From there, the story escalated fast. Arias reportedly said the object first weighed about two kilos then later claimed it weighed ten. Promoters interpreted this to mean that the object can change its weight with anti-gravitational technology. Arias also said that after handling it, he experienced dizziness, vomiting, and a metallic taste. Another version of the story, repeated by Jaime Maussan, adds headaches and diarrhea. Arias then passed the sphere to his cousin, David Velez, known as El Potro. Velez reportedly collected it wearing a lead suit, kept it at his company for two months, and said that while it did not show unusual behavior there, he noticed weight variations and electromagnetic fields. The object was then taken to Mexico by a team associated with, yep, you guessed it, Jaime Maussan, and Dr. Carlos Munoz and engineer Rodolfo Garrido said at a press conference organized by Maussan that scans revealed complex fiber-optic wiring inside and 18 microspheres. They also said there was a central nucleus, which they called a chip. Regarding a small hole on the underside, Maussan said the sphere either collided with or passed very close to a 10,000 volt cable. A radiology specialist, Jose Luis Velezquez, was later cited as saying the sphere showed no marks indicating welding or joined parts. Then to kick it up another notch, promoter said carbon-14 dating showed the sphere was 12,560 years old. The dating was done by Dr. Alexander Cherkinsky of the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia. He said the sample he dated was resin or polymeric material associated with the object, not the sphere itself. But scientists have pointed out that industrial resins can produce misleading radiocarbon results, especially when biological compounds are mixed with petroleum-derived materials. Now, the circulated report coming from promoters, including misspellings, refers to the dating of Foraminifera, marine microfossils. Even though the sample was supposed to be resin. Go figure. But then there is the scientific response. Santiago Vargas, an astrophysicist at the National University's Astronomical Observatory, said the sphere's composition was very earthly, including optical fibers identified in its structure, and said the prehistoric narrative lacked scientific credibility. Astrophysicist Dr. Loren Flor Torres of the Institute of Physics of the University of Antioquia pointed out that meteorites that enter the Earth's atmosphere present surface alterations due to friction. But the bougasphere is impeccable. Marino Guarin, director of the School of Astronomy in Cali, dismissed the story as tales and charlatanism and pointed to the lack of scientific reports. So when you strip away the spectacle, what remains is not an authenticated ancient artifact and certainly not confirmed extraterrestrial technology. What remains is a metal sphere with no archaeological provenance, no published technical study establishing its authenticity, a dating claim tied only to resin, and ties to people already known for fraud. So there you have them. My top five recent hoaxes and frauds. Are there any that happened this past year that I missed? Let me know in the comments below. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.