Are there any VMS-type hoaxes?

[Koen G]

The word “hoax” is always hard to understand for me.

It has always my opinion that people use the words "hoax" and "forgery" too loosely when it comes to the VM. What it always comes down to is the intention of the creators, which we cannot know.

Before, I called the Oera Linda Book a clean example of a hoax. From the wiki:

An article in late 2007 by Jensma says that the three authors of the translation intended it "to be a temporary hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians and as an experiential exemplary exercise in reading the Holy Bible in a non-fundamentalist, symbolical way." Ignoring clues that it was a forgery, J. G. Ottema [prominent member of the Frisian Society for History and Culture]  took it seriously.

If it was intended as a hoax, we can identify a very specific target and goal within the object's local community: to expose members of the Frisian intellectual elite as fools.

But apparently even here, there are debates over whether or not it can be called a forgery. Some researchers have argued that the book was merely an exercise in mystification and a parody of nations inventing myths for nationalist reasons. If that is true, it was never intended to fool someone or cause harm, but rather to parody contemporary practices. The thing was so clearly fake and intended as a joke even upon its first reception, that we can call it a miracle that some people actually believed in it (mostly the Nazis, apparently).

So there you go: even the book I thought was a good example of a hoax, may just have been a parody intended to be understood as a parody. Nothing hoaxy about that. And this debate is about a relatively well-documented item produced over four centuries after the VM!