The Cardiff Giant is a ten-foot carved stone figure created in 1868 by New York tobacconist George Hull as a deliberate fraud — buried on a farm near Cardiff, New York, "discovered" in 1869, and exhibited to a credulous public as the petrified remains of an ancient giant. It was one of the most successful hoaxes in American history and a perfect window into 19th-century credulity about biblical archaeology and the supernatural.
Hull, a committed atheist, was irritated by an evangelist who argued that the Bible's references to ancient giants were literal. He commissioned an Iowa sculptor to carve the figure from a block of gypsum, had it aged with chemicals and needle-prick marks, and arranged for a well to be dug precisely where it was buried. The giant is now on display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown — a somewhat circuitous journey, since P.T. Barnum's competing fake fake remains in a different museum entirely.