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[Zanzetkuken The Great]

As the thread title asks, what was the strangest thing you were convinced or you managed to convince someone else was true but was in actuality false?  Alternatively, what was the strangest thing you thought or met someone who thought something was false, when it was in fact true?  Please avoid any topics pertaining to any currently practiced religion and politics of the last two decades.  Those limitiations should give us a fairly decent buffer zone against flame wars.

For me, I'd have to say that it would have been that when I was a kid of four or five, believing the entirety of the Solar System including the Sun was created as a result of a collossal rock exploding a few thousand years ago.  I have no idea how I got convinced of this, just that my idiotic younger self thought it was true.

[Levi]

When I was a young child my younger brother convinced me that my birthday was two days earlier than it actually was. 

I was disappointed on not-my-birthday.   

[Baffler]

tl;dr: tricking children is easy, but not as rewarding as it sounds.

My older cousin convinced me the universe was heliocentric sometime near the end of the 2st grade. I knew about the solar system, and even knew that the planets orbited the sun, but I hadn't given any thought at all to what the stars actually were, and it made sense that the planets would be circling around something stationary. I believed it all through the summer, but it didn't actually come up until my 3rd grade science teacher told us about long-discredited historical theories like spontaneous generation, geo/heliocentrism, and the four humours. Thankfully I was aware enough to not argue with him about it, but I certainly felt foolish.

On the other side of the coin, my younger cousin was about that same age when he came up and excitedly told me about potato batteries. He didn't actually know what they were, just that they existed, and it was pretty easy to convince him that plugging a desk fan into a potato would power the thing. It didn't work, obviously, and told his older brother that he needed help. He followed him into the room, immediately put two and two together when the saw the potatoes with 3-pronged holes poked into them (he was in on the joke), and busted out laughing. He was a little upset about it and I felt kinda bad about it, and so did his brother. To help him save some face, and by way of an apology, we built an actual potato battery and got it to power a little light bulb.

[Max™]

Shrinkwrapped dinosaurs and stuff like neck posture: http://willoughbyart.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-neck-is-lie.html

[Frumple]

Well. That was vaguely terrifying.

Now all I can think of is walking up to a pug or something and then suddenly there's pug face five foot off the floor and staring at me.

[Reelya]

Not personally, but an Aussie friend convinced another Aussie friend that there was a drop bear in his backyard, and moron was out there at night with a flashlight looking for the thing in the trees. Dude was a regular moron however, from hillbilly nowheresville. Usually the Drop Bear is a prank played on tourists, but this guy was a born and bred local, which is what makes it strange. He wasn't mentally retarded or anything, but dumb as shit.

We pranked him a couple of times, but his greedy fat stupidity pranked himself more than we did, so there was no fun in it. Another friend was saving up bong water in a coke bottle, to later strain out. The bottle was 100% full of black liquid. Dude just walks in and takes it without asking and has a nice big gulp of this "coke". Ends up puking uncontrollably.

[Max™]

God that sounds like the most frustrating job ever.

Ah, for years I was operating under the assumption that body language was a vast social lie, after learning about it supposedly existing and having read an emperor's new clothes style story beforehand. Asperger's diagnosis later made a lot of things seem much less absurd in hindsight.

[Culise]

As a child, I was once convinced a disassembled hard drive was a bomb, having never seen one before (hey, they used to be rare).  This ended in a very awkward conversation with the principal and teachers. 

That's not to say I became less credulous as I grew older, though.  I remember being taken in by Bonsai Kitten, after all. 

[Cyroth]

Back when we were teens a friend of me and my sister had his cousin over for an extended 3 week long stay. She lives pretty much on the other end of the country and we had never met her before. (or even heard much about her before)

For some drunken reason lost to the sands of time we had decided to trick her into believing I had actually 2 sisters who were twins. For the next 3 weeks, every time we (me, sis, friend, cousin) went out my sister would go great lenghts to keep that scam alive. Once she even switched her clothing secretly in a clubs bathroom, played the "other sister" bumping into us on her way out, had a friendly chat with my friends cousin, left through the front door, came back in through the back door and changed back. Our friend and me had a really hard time keeping a straight face talking to my "sister", but somehow we managed.

Best of all our friends cousin appartently never suspected a thing unti we told her a few days before she left.

[Cyroth]

Pretty much like that, yeah.
Was friggin' hilarious though.

[TheDarkStar]

When I was little, I had an uncle who told me that lightbulbs would explode if the switch got turned on and off really quickly. It was probably just to get me to stop messing with the lights, but I believed it for a few years afterwards. And of course I "enlightened" my siblings about it, so they believed it too for a while.

And I once convinced my younger brother that there was a food (I think it was noodles?) that came from rocks.

[NJW2000]

I remember going on holiday with a bunch of friends, and feeling oddly proud at 12:00 pm in a park somewhere upon convincing one that "a drop of wain" signified the feeling of beginning to like something a little you were previously indifferent to or disliked.

[Reelya]

If you convince enough people of that, then it becomes true. Funny how language-only "facts" work like that.

Any you could even come up with a plausible etymology behind the phrase. Wain means wagon, so a touch of wain means getting "on the wagon" a little, i.e. the bandwagon.

[Starver]

I set up my computer (BBC Acorn) to calculate pythagorean triples, which was fun, but then designed a program specifically to print out (Epson FX-80 dot matrix) all the "a˛+b˛=c˛ where a=b.  I didn't realise it was an *ahem* irrational decision.

I got several fanfold sheets printed out, over the course of a number of days, if not weeks (perhaps across several long sessions, esp. overnght whilst I was in bed), which I can only ascribe to rounding errors/forced imprecision in the handling of the >10 digit numbers that were by that point emerging.  Actually,  maybe I did something like:

Code: [Select]

10 C%=0 : VDU 2
20 REPEAT : C%=C%+1
30 AB=SQRT(C%)/2
40 IF AB=INT(AB) THEN PRINT AB;":";AB;"=>";C% : VDU 7
50 REM Same again, except however I pushed it to the printer...
55 REM Probably "VDU 1"ed it, but it has been a while...
60 UNTIL FALSE...imprecision in the half-root float would have been my downfall, I suspect.

But I was still in secondary school, didn't yet know about √2, etc...

[DeKaFu]

Hmm. I... was convinced rabbits were rodents until I was in my 20s?

Considering I routinely run into people twice my age who are convinced bats are rodents though (or are surprised they are mammals at all? ) I guess the bar isn't particularly high on biological classification knowledge.

...I feel like I probably have a bunch of these from when I was a kid that I've successfully blocked from my memory. :/