31. When Argentina Was Conned by a Grifter
As it turned out, Argentina’s president Juan Peron had been conned by a German WWII aircraft designer named Ronald Richter, who had wildly misrepresented his credentials in a successful bid to get funding for a fusion reactor. Argentine scientists knew Richter’s claims were fanciful, but Peron wanted to believe, so he did. The result was a significant chunk of Argentina’s budget getting diverted into building a massive compound for Richter on Huemul Island, in an Andean lake.
In a humiliation for all involved, Richter’s claims were debunked almost immediately after they were announced by Peron. Richter was eventually jailed for having “misled” the Argentine president, and his embarrassed government razed most of the lab to the ground and tried to pretend the whole thing had never happened. After his release from prison, Richter settled down to become a chicken farmer, but continued to insist to his dying day that he had, indeed, mastered nuclear fusion.