There is 2 coolest stories that i found to be the best to share with you.
1-This "scientist", Aldo Bonassoli, and his belgian friend, Alain de Villegas, fooled the french government and a french company to invest more than a billion of french francs in "plane-embedded gravity wave-based oil detection system" (yes - you read correctly).
... And the french president at the time, who personally agreed with the investments (even if he wasn't aware of the whole thing), went in the most prestigious of french engineering schools: l'Ecole Polythechnique.
Note for conversions (based on this french Wikipédia page) : Between 1975 and 1980, one French franc could buy what 0.4€ - or $.5 can buy today.
To summarize what you will find here: Great Oil Sniffer Hoax, these two guys made people believe they developed a way to locate oil in 1969, and wrapped the scam by surrounding it with so much confidentiality agreements and threats to sell it to other countries, that they were the only two people to be allowed to manipulate the "instrument", which was in the end not much more sophisticated than a screen on which where displayed hand-made patterns.
Part of the scam was that when the plane flew over Brest, a city known for its navy base, the instrument also detected what looked like uranium ! (nuclear submarines had indeed good chances to be on this site). It was then vital that the technology didn't fall into other nations hands...
Eventually, after spending hundreds of millions of francs between 1975 and 1981, drilling in basaltic rocks (known for their absence of oil), the society Elf retired its support to the operation, so did the french government. They sued the creators, seized the nice properties they bought with government's and Elf's money, sold the planes, and in the end "only" less than 200 millions of francs have been lost. The affair went public and made scandal on December 1983.
This article is owned by:
Jean-Baptiste Froment
2-In the late 1800s, Belle Gunness, a Norwegian woman, torched her husbands and property in order to claim the insurance money and get rich.
Belle Gunness emigrated from Norway to the USA in 1881. She quickly married and set up a candy store that failed to make any money. One year later it burned to the ground but, fortunately, it was insured. She used the money to buy a house in Austin. In 1898, it burned to the ground. Thankfully, it also was insured. In 1900, her husband, Max Sorenson, burned to the grou- oh, no, he died. He had, though, just taken out two insurance policies.
Belle used the money to buy a farm in La Porte, Indiana. Soon after moving in, the boat and carriage house burned to the ground. You see a pattern emerging here?
Needing a good man to accompany her through all of life's troubles and mysterious fires, Belle sent advertisements to Norwegian language papers asking for a mate. Over the next two years a number of suitors turned up at Belle's farm, took out life insurance policies, and promptly disappeared.
Finally on April 28, 1908, in the aftermath of yet another fire at the Gunness farm, police found four bodies in the basement; one adult and three children. The adult was thought to be Belle, but was hard to identify because the head was missing.
How Much Did She Make?
It is estimated Belle made $30,000 from the various husbands who got sucked in by the newspaper ad, and maybe as much as $250,000 overall.
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