Eskimos Arent Real / Real Life

Animals

• When Carl Linnaeus published his first edition of Systema Naturae in 1735, he felt it important to add a section listing down the species that he would not be classifying, on the grounds that they weren't real. This makes sense given that bestiaries at the time would typically feature many mythological species as if they actually existed, so Linnaeus wanted his readers to be well-informed. Some of the species he mentions as being made-up include dragons, unicorns, phoenixes, and pelicans.^note In medieval bestiaries, the pelican is said to rip off chunks of its own flesh to feed its young/revive them after they've been dead for three days and eat crocodiles. Other real animals (like lions) also had much nonsense written about them by Europeans too. He was evidently later persuaded of the existence of pelicans, as he described a species of pelican (the Eurasian Great White Pelican Pelecanus onocrotalus), in the landmark tenth edition of System Naturae (1758-59), and further described the North American Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) in the twelfth edition (1766).
• Surprisingly, there are people out there that don't realize reindeer are real animals. Though obviously they don't really fly or have red noses, they can be trained to pull sleds.
  • Most artists have no idea what reindeer look like, so they draw Rudolph to look like Bambi (not helped by the fact that both the original book and the famous TV special both do so). Actual reindeer have gray or muted brown fur with pale neck-ruffs in winter, flat and wide muzzles, large hooves, and an entirely white short tail (for reference, Bambi is a white-tailed deer, a relatively small species that is essentially a pest animal that lives significantly south of the caribou/red deer latitudes). See the trope White-Tailed Reindeer for more information about this depiction.
  • Strangely enough, many people should know about the real species of deer because they go by another name in North America: caribou. Most people don't know that they're the same animal.
  • The Frozen films have done a lot to correct this particular misconception, portraying reindeer accurately.
  • Speaking of deer, many people have this reaction when first hearing about miniature fanged deer, like the pudú, musk deer, and other species, because it just sounds weird. This is actually the primitive ancestral condition of deer before they evolved bigger size and larger antlers (which facilitated losing their fangs in evolution; they didn't need them anymore), but some species like these are still alive today.
  • Another deer species, roe deer, is sometimes believed to be a female of other deer species as opposed to a separate species with, by necessity, a full set of sexes of its own. This is because of its small size and the fact that its name in certain languages is grammatically feminine.
• Some people are unaware that a wolverine is a real animal, and not just an X-Men character. It is, in fact, the largest land-going member of the Mustelidae family (that includes weasels, ferrets, and otters).
  • Amusingly, Hugh Jackman himself was one of those people when he was first cast as Wolverine.
• Many people are shocked to learn that narwhals are real and not some type of mythical creature on par with unicorns. Just check the comments on this clip or this hilarious blog post. In fact, if you Google "are narwhals real", at the top of the page is a boxout that says that as a matter of fact they are. If you click on the image that is provided, you'll pull up Google Videos in case you need more evidence. For more irony, they are often assumed to be a Pokémon despite there not being any pokémon based on the narwhal (the closest thing being Seel, a pokémon that is... well, a seal with a horn).
• There are also people who believe that ligers and tigons are fictitious and that photographs of them are actually fake. Some of this confusion stems from a scene in Napoleon Dynamite, which has a character draw a crude, spiked, very inaccurate and unrealistic lion/tiger mishmash, and a line about "ligers being bred for their skills in magic", leading some people who watched this film while not being previously aware of the real, mundane version of ligers to assume they are something mythical like a unicorn.
• Snipes are real. Well, there is a type of bird called a snipe. The thing you're sent hunting for might or might not be it, if it's anything at all (the trope/term comes from the difficulty of shooting or catching them, as does the word "sniper", a term implying one who is skilled at marksmanship enough to actually hit one).
• Australian fauna in general is a major offender, because of how weird it may appear and how little-known it is outside of Australia itself.
  • Historically, most people didn't believe platypuses existed because the idea was too far-fetched. Even after the first taxidermied specimens were sent to scientific communities, they were instantly assumed to be fakes with a "duck's beak and feet sewn onto the body of an otter or beaver". Eventually, after there were no stitches found on the specimens, they were forced to admit that the platypus was genuine... which only raised further questions.
  • Some people don't realize Tasmanian devils exist until they look it up (they look very little like the cartoon character, though they can be similarly aggressive).
  • Echidnas may count as well: many non-Aussies may be familiar with Knuckles from the Sonic games but are not aware of what animal he's supposed to be.
  • The bandicoot is a real animal too (and looks nothing like the video game character). Given that Crash was originally supposed to be a wombat, the lack of resemblance is a bit justified.
  • In fact, Australian fauna were so weird for Westerners that the Bunyip is an inversion. So are the infamous Drop Bears that Aussies use to scare tourists.
• Some people apparently believe that dinosaurs were made up by Steven Spielberg, and/or claim that they "grew up" and stopped believing in them, conflating them with dragons. Some Young-Earth creationists don't believe in dinosaurs either, for religious reasons (though most creationists are fine with dinosaurs being real things that existed, they just have doubts as to when and how they lived and died). Some however, go as far as to insist that "dinosaur bones are fakes planted in the ground by God or the Devil to test people's faith"... despite God not being a deceiver or the Devil not having that enough power with the physical world.
  • Some people don't believe in feathered dinosaurs, mainly due to being blinded by nostalgia or not believing that birds are dinosaurs.
• Similar to the Tasmanian devil example above, some people are unaware that roadrunners are real birds, and not just a fictional character created by Looney Tunes. This belief is especially strange when held by people in the southwestern US since many of them would just have to walk outside to find out they exist. Granted, real roadrunners have little in common with their cartoon counterpart, being much smaller and possessing a different coloration. (And being vicious little predators: unlike the cartoon version that eats birdseed, the real roadrunner hunts and eats venomous snakes.)
• The giant squid was generally thought to be a fictional animal until one was found in 1880 on the Newfoundland shore. Then they found a species of squid that was even bigger and had to call it the "colossal squid".
  • On the topic of squids, whoever made this Miiverse post in the Splatoon community seems to be unaware that squids are in fact real, assuming it's not a deliberate troll or shitpost.
• Many people think that hedgehogs are fictional creatures, too, due to the fact that they only live in certain parts of the world and are common in those places but rare elsewhere (and they are more often found as roadkill). The American media were not sure Sonic the Hedgehog would take off in the US due to the obscurity of the animal — Sega had to clarify with them that hedgehogs are indeed common in Japan. To this day, many people automatically think of Sonic when they think of a hedgehog.
• Some Americans have been surprised to find out that storks actually exist. They only know storks as the bird who delivers the babies, and since babies obviously aren't delivered by birds, they think the bird itself is fictional, too. Storks don't naturally live in most of North America, with only the wood stork being a rare breeder in a couple of the southern states, and since the typical "baby delivery stork" is the white stork which doesn't live in America at all, they'll never see a real stork to disprove their assumptions (unless they go to a zoo with white storks, of course).
• Some people don't believe in zedonks, the zebra-donkey hybrid. But, believe it or not, zedonks are real, and just one of a whole family of zebra hybrids.
• Vampire bats are real. Since vampires are already heavily associated with bat motifs, many people think that the idea was easily made up and something too obvious to be true, when in fact real vampire bats likely influenced the association of vampires with bats.
  • Some people make the opposite mistake and think all bats are vampire bats. In truth, there are at least 950-1,200 species of bat and only 3 feed on blood. Most of the rest eat insects, fruit and nectar, and small animals such as lizards and mice. Some even eat fish, birds, or smaller species of bat.
• Electric eels are real (though they're not really eels). Some people treat them as legendary creatures.
  • Still more people assume that all eels are electric ones, ergo that the non-electric ones are what don't exist.
• Britons are prone to this misunderstanding about bluebirds — probably because of their genuinely incorrect appearance in the iconic 1940s hit There'll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover. This is a case of Misplaced Wildlife: the lyricist was an American who didn't realize bluebirds don't exist in Britain, but they do in America (they were a fashionable motif in songwriting at the time for peace and joy.).
• Gorillas were believed to be a local myth until European explorers actually encountered them.
• Due mainly to the Girls Have Cooties trope, many people think cooties are just made up creatures that only little kids believe in. In fact, there are real parasites called cooties, although their proper name is "body lice".
• Similarly, due to the "goodnight, don't let the bedbugs bite" phrase, some people think bedbugs are fictional creatures akin to monster living under one's bed. They are real animals, they live in beds and they do indeed bite. And they are bugs, even in the strictest sense of the word (hemipteran insects).
• Soviet writer Korney Chukovsky in his non-fiction book 2 to 5 criticized the trend in the USSR of the time to read to children only realistic literature and teach them from the earliest age that magical creatures, fairy-tale characters, etc. aren't real. He quoted a boy, who said, "Sharks aren't real."
• In one episode of Teen Titans Go!, Beast Boy transforms into a pangolin and a horseshoe crab (among several other animals) as part of a game. The Danish translator Niclas Mortensen had never heard of these two animals and thought they were fictional species invented for the show. As such, "pangolin" is not translated at all and "horseshoe crab" is overly literally translated as "hesteskokrabbe" instead of using their correct Danish names "skældyr" and "dolkhale" respectively.
• Some people apparently think anglerfish aren't real, likely because they certainly sound like something from science fiction, or that they were, but went extinct a long time ago.
• Parodied by "Birds Aren't Real", a satirical "theory" concocted by Peter McIndoe in 2017 to mock conspiracy theorists and right-wing political paranoia. Its tongue-in-cheek premise is that the U.S. government killed all the actual birds in the country decades ago and replaced them with spy drones. Unfortunately, Poe's Law struck and some of the conspiracy theorists that were being mocked now actually believe this.
• A surprising amount of viewers don’t realize that the fossa from Madagascar are based on an actual animal (that indeed hunts lemurs in real life) and assume they were just made up for the movie.

Geography

• The Tokyo neighborhood Nerima does exist. However, because Ranma doesn't, some people think the neighborhood itself doesn't exist either. For that matter, the Bāyánkālā Mountain Range in China also exists.
• Azabu-juban (home of Sailor Moon) also exists. Likewise, the Hikawa Shrine is real, though Rei obviously doesn't live there (and it uses the kanji for ice rather than fire in its name). Crown Game Center also used to be real but was shut down and replaced with a McDonald's.
• Similarly, some people don't believe Scranton exists because of the American version of The Office (US) (though the fact that a person born in Scranton became the US President in 2021 probably helped to dispel this misconception, at least a little bit). Or its UK counterpart Slough, for that matter. ^note For the record, Pawnee, Indiana is fictional.
• According to a now-deleted Facebook post, Australia doesn't exist. People are actually being sent to an island off the coast of South America and anyone who says they are from Australia is a paid actor. Many conspiracy theorists saw this post and immediately believed it. Though it's quite possible that the person who made said post was joking and some took it too seriously.
• There is a humorous notion in Germany that the town of Bielefeld does not actually exist, but is simply a conspiracy^note The most logical explanation for how this joke came about is that Bielefeld is an extremely unremarkable and average city, meaning not a lot of Germany's population would actively choose to go there unless they have business or already live there. There's also the Bielefeld-conspiracy-conspiracy, a conspiracy that the Bielefeld-conspiracy doesn't exist. Looks like we have entered an endless recursion of time.
  • In 2019, the town of Bielefeld offered a one-million Euro prize for anyone who could prove it did not exist. Exactly how the prize would have been collected is an exercise left to the reader.
  • In Spain, there is a similar "theory" about the existence (or rather, non-existence) of the city and/or province of Teruel. The "Teruel Existe" political campaign is sometimes treated as a Suspiciously Specific Denial.
  • The Italian variant of the "conspiracy" concerns the region of Molise in the southern part of the country, which is admittedly of limited fame due to its small area and population. It is sometimes called Molisn't in order to reference the joke.
  • Ditto with the city of Luhansk in the far east of Ukraine, from 2011 at latest. Which quickly became Harsher in Hindsight, since in 2014 Luhansk came under military occupation by Russians and their proxies who proclaimed an unrecognized Luhansk People's Republic there, which has remained in control of the city ever since. Hence, in a sense, Luhansk indeed doesn't exist anymore.
• Brazilians also joke about the non-existence of the state of Acre, a small and distant part of The Amazon Rainforest annexed after a war with Bolivia (or according to Bolivian president Evo Morales, traded in exchange for a horse).
• People who watch El Chavo del ocho might be surprised to learn that Tangamandapio, birthplace of Jaimito el Cartero, is a real town in Mexico. In fact, the town has erected a statue of Jaimito because "he helped to put them in the map".
• The former president of Mongolia, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, recounted how he was detained by an immigration official when visiting England as a young man. The immigration official apparently thought that Mongolia was a fictional country, until finding it in an atlas.
• Timbuktu has been used as shorthand for "far away" and/or "middle of nowhere" for so long some people assume it's merely made up instead of a real town in Africa (Mali to be precise, and it was a very important city back in the Middle Ages). A surprising amount of people in the UK thought it didn't actually exist (due in good part to people referring to it as part of an And I'm the Queen of Sheba snark). Roger Hargeaves's Timbuktoo books probably didn't help either.
  • Cucamonga gets the treatment as well (in addition to often being misspelled as something like "Kookamunga"), but it's a real place in Southern California.
  • Kathmandu (Nepal, the capital, no less, and the heart of a metropolis of nearly 3 million people), Kalamazoo (in Michigan, the center of the state's southwestern region and exactly halfway between Chicago and Detroit^note And major center of pharmaceutical production; the main manufacturing plant for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine was in the Kalamazoo area), and Uryupinsk, Volgograd Oblast fare a little better.
    • For that matter, any real place with Inherently Funny Words involved tend to fall into this trope, like Walla Walla, Washington.
  • The stone cities of Zimbabwe inspired so many fantastical Lost World stories about Darkest Africa that many people have no idea that the cities themselves exist.
  • Plus Abu Dhabi (capital and second-largest city in the United Arab Emirates) for fans of Garfield.
  • In case you wondered, Sheba is real too, whether or not it had a queen to meet King Solomon. It was a kingdom located around the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, about where Yemen is now (modern Yemeni restaurants stand a decent chance of referencing it in their names or imagery, especially outside Yemen).
• If Plutarch is to be believed, many Romans believed Britain wasn't real until Julius Caesar invaded it.
• Many ancient Europeans believed that Asia and Africa weren't real. Even once these were confirmed, China and Japan would still remain semi-mythical to them into the early modern period (not surprising, since they were very far away).
• Some people believe that Greenland and Iceland are fairytale places, like Mordor.
• Some Shakespearean scholars believe that Twelfth Night's setting of Illyria is a mythical land of Shakespeare's own invention. It's actually the Greco-Roman name for the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea — what is now Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and Slovenia — and a perfectly reasonable place for an Italian ship to run aground, as happens at the beginning of the play.
• Played with by Dave Barry in his 1987 year-in-review column: "Libya is defeated by some place called Chad in some kind of war. This really happened." There have been multiple comedic expressions of disbelief that there is a country called "Chad"^note The English-sounding name actually comes from Lake Chad, which is what it was named by European explorers when they asked the locals what it was called. However, the word "chad" was actually just the local dialect's word for "lake", so they named it "Lake Lake", and now there's an entire country called "Lake", albeit in a dialect not much spoken any more.
• Madagascar is a real country and was not made up by Dreamworks. In fact, everything that appeared in the Madagascar of the films are real, including the lemurs, the cat-like fossas, and the tall, fat, finger-like trees (Grandidier's baobab).
• A man in Alaska is reported to have stated in public that Aragon never existed (hint: it's a country that is now part of Spain).
• A running joke that started in the early '90s in Chile and just won't die is that Combarbalá (a small town in northern Chile) doesn't actually exist and it's on the map because of a conspiracy/propaganda campaign by the State's tourism department; people who live here hate this. Made doubly hilarious because the town is known mainly for its artisanal figures made out of combarbalita (an ornamental rock that is available in abundance in close-by mountains and pretty much nowhere else). Combarbalita is even the country's "national stone", having replaced lapis lazuli in 1993... which only adds fodder to the "conspiracy" angle.
  • In America, people have tried to kick off a similar joke around Wyoming, though it hasn't gained as much traction. (Probably because Wyoming contains the vast majority of Yellowstone National Park, is "famous" for being the smallest state by population, and was the home state of the extraordinarily powerful Vice President for eight years. The joke would've probably worked better with Montana or something.)
• It apparently started out as an anecdote on Reddit, with a single poster complaining about their weird family and their weird beliefs: According to their family's conspiracy theory, after WWII, Japan had their fishing rights restricted and Russia needed more food, to solve these issues, they created a false landmass on the maps, "hiding" the sea where the Japanese could fish without any international restrictions, and the Russians in turn would receive part of the catch for being accomplices — and they named the fake country Finland because fishes have fins. Why Russians would make up a name based on an English word when the Russian word for fin sounds nothing like Finland is anyone's guess, but the thread exploded, the idea spread, and now there are people out there who honestly believe that Finland never existed.
• According to interviews during a retrospective, even some of the cast of The Good Life were surprised to learn that the London borough of Surbiton was a real place, only finding out when they started location shooting. Although to be fair, the fact that its name sounds like it should be a fictional Stepford Suburbia might well have influenced the decision to set the series there.
• In one YouTube video, a couple of Scottish women visiting the US relate their shock at meeting one guy there who didn't think Scotland existed.
• Many Doom players are surprised to find out that Mount Erebus is a real place. While it's obviously not really in Hell, it is an active volcano in Antarctica.
• Similarly, there are 42 real places called Black Mesa (one in Antarctica, the others all over the USA), but there is no secret base in any of them... unless it's so secret that no one has found it, of course.
• Quebec culture uses "Moukmouk Island" as an expression to refer to a ridiculously remote and obscure place. There is actually an island called "Moukmouk" on Duparquet Lake in Abiti-Témiscamingue. The name was coined in the late 50s by the owners as a deliberate joke to make the place sound mythical and remote.
• A combination of Global Ignorance and the name being mutated across time and languages results in some Westerners thinking that Persia no longer exists, sometimes conflating it with the ancient Persian Empire, or just thinking it's an old name for Iran (which is how Westerners previously used the name). In Iran itself, Parsa, later Pars and finally Fars always referred to a particular area that still exists as a province.
• Many Americans are not aware that New Mexico is one of the United States and think that it is part of Mexico. This is a regular problem for residents of New Mexico when trying to make travel arrangements, ship merchandise, buy tickets to the Olympics, etc. when they encounter a particularly obstinate individual who cannot be convinced that they are dealing with a fellow citizen. It has on occasion created legal tangles.
  • The confusion gets to the point that New Mexico has put "New Mexico USA" on its license plates continuously since 1982.
  • Not just Americans. When non-Americans have at least a passing knowledge of the list of states in the U.S., there is a large tendency to believe that New Mexico is a part of Mexico and are subsequently confused that the person in front of them is actually an American.
• Transylvania, an actual region in Romania, is often thought of as this mythical land where Count Dracula lives and is occasionally presented in some media ^note Such as the background premise of the 1970s Canadian children's show The Hilarious House of Frightenstein as a mythical country for horror movie monsters and angry torch-wielding peasants. Few realize that it's an actual place (one where the historical "Count" Vlad III "Dracula" lived fairly frequently but never actually ruled^note He was one of two claimants to the throne of neighboring Wallachia. Wallachia was a semi-independent and somewhat wayward vassal state of the Ottoman Empire; Transylvania was an autonomous province of Hungary. Both regions were heavily (though not exclusively) populated by Romanians (and are both part of modern Romania), so they were natural places for a Romanian prince like Vlad to be. Vlad lived in Transylvania under Hungarian protection whenever his rival was on the throne in Wallachia — and his rival did the same whenever Vlad was on the throne.) and not some mythical Halloweenland for Scary Monster People ruled by Count Dracula.
• This Not Always Right post has a couple of people who refuse to believe that Denmark is a real place. The first one, when shown an article about the "Kingdom of Denmark," admits that it's real, but then thinks it's part of the United Kingdom.
• A case that pops up from time to time on social media is people, usually Anglophones from the Americas, presuming that "Spanish" only refers to the language and therefore denying the existence of the country called Spain. Here's one notable example.

Science

• The Flat Earth movement has got to be one of the strangest, most egregious phenomena in recent times. Despite the untold abundance of evidence to the contrary, a significant population of people today actually believe the world is a flat disc... with an invisible domal barrier... and/or surrounded by walls of ice (Antarctica) at the "edge"... and so on. Many can't tell if this is merely global-scale Trolling, sheer ignorance and brainwashing, or just absolute denial of obvious reality.^note Yes. They're also alleged to believe the globe theory to be a "conspiracy" (of course, with NASA and many governments involved).
• Allergy denial, particularly regarding food allergies and intolerances. It does NOT help that many people in restaurants dishonestly claim allergies to avoid an ingredient that is merely disliked, or that food fads spring up around concepts like "dairy/gluten-free". Therefore, some people to believe that everyone who claims an allergy or intolerance is doing so to avoid a disliked ingredient or follow a trend, not because they get a potentially-fatal immune or intestinal response to it. Some deliberately attempt to trick or force an allergy sufferer into consuming the food in question to "disprove" the allergy, and persist in the face of a violent medical reaction.

Historical figures and events

• The Moon-Landing Hoax theory could well be the Trope Codifier.
• Or Holocaust denial, unfortunately. Of course, attempted genocides and politically-motivated mass murders have a nasty habit of getting forcefully swept under the rug. There are many people around the world still unaware of the genocides committed under Stalin or Mao. And it took the U.S. and Canada generations to even start to come to terms with their histories regarding Native Americans. Some people still have problems with said history. In Turkey, this trope is actually mandated toward the Armenian Genocide — the law considers acknowledging it a crime, falling under "insulting Turkishness".
• Santa Claus. Most people cannot see the name is an alteration of St. Nicholas, a Christian saint, who most definitely was a historical figure (Bishop Nikolaos of Myrna) and whose grave, containing his earthly remains, is in Bari, Italy. That said, the image of the jolly old man in red everyone knows is still fabrication, though the red fur-trimmed hat has some basis in reality.
• This also often applies to many historical figures who have attained an almost mythological status in popular culture, such as Blackbeard (real name Edward Teach), Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper, and Rasputin (Grigori Yefivomich).
  • Jan Rogozinski's "Pirates" lists "Blackbeard" as a fictional character separate from Edward Teach on the grounds that he's been mythologized beyond recognition...but also lists Grace O'Malley as straight-up fictional (she's been mythologized too, but she did exist).
• It may be because of this trope that historians still can't agree on whether Robin Hood was a real person or not.
• Or King Arthur, for that matter. While nobody disputes that Arthurian Legend as it now exists is the result of centuries upon centuries of wild embellishment, there is some written evidence that a local ruler named Arthur or something close to it did live in post-Roman Wales and won several important battles against the Saxons, including the Battle of Badon Hill. How authoritative those old documents are is disputable, of course.
• Macbeth was certainly a real guy, although he didn't hang out with witches. Ditto for Richard III and most of the subjects of Shakespeare's historicals. Others like Hamlet and King Lear were legends in Shakespeare's day that may or may not be based on truth.
• Voivode Vlad III Drăculea was a real man, and shares a few biographical details with the vampire Count Dracula. Though beyond borrowing his name, it's questionable whether Bram Stoker substantially based his character on the historical Drăculea.
• There was a real historical figure named Hiawatha. He was a peacemaker among the tribes of what would become the Eastern U.S. and the founder of the Iroquois Confederation. He has absolutely nothing to do with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Narrative Poem The Song of Hiawatha, though. Longfellow somehow got the idea that "Hiawatha" was another name for the Ojibwe culture hero Manabozho, whose legends were the actual inspiration for The Song of Hiawatha.
• Quite a few people just cannot accept that 15th-century London really did have a Lord Mayor called Richard Whittington, and he was indeed elected three times (although he probably didn't have a cat of any note).
• Twitter's reaction to the media coverage of the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic disaster revealed that a disturbing number of people apparently believed that James Cameron made up the whole story from scratch.
  • In fact, there are two Italian cartoon mockbusters of James Cameron's Titanic (1997), both of which are presented as being new takes on a fanciful story, instead of as being stories based on a real tragedy.
  • In the same vein, the Costa Concordia disaster which took place in early 2012 was described by several news outlets such as Entertainment Tonight as being like a real-life "Titanic".
• Pirates still exist.
  • Likewise, cowboys (and -girls) still exist. Depending where you are, they may very well be Indians, since a lot of Native Americans took to ranching as a means of subsistence. Not having gotten their expectations for their own existence from Hollywood, they're unlikely to consider it ironic.
  • Ditto the Mayans and Easter Islanders, who have the additional disadvantage that the most famous phases of their cultures collapsed prior to contact with Western peoples. You can still find individuals who think the builders of early Mayan cities and Easter Island moai long ago and/or mysteriously "vanished".
    • This was especially annoying around 2012 when there were jokes going around of the form, "If Mayans were so good at predictions, why aren't there any left?" 1) The Mayans never predicted that the world would end in 2012, 2) seven million speakers of Mayan languages are alive today, and there are millions more who are of primarily Mayan ancestry who now speak other languages (mostly Mexican and Guatemalan Spanish, though a substantial handful speak English and Belizean Creole).
• The samurai effectively lost their status in 1876, but many samurai held onto parts of the tradition well into the 20th century. To this day, many Japanese families maintain their claim to the title "shizoku", which originally meant "ex-samurai" but has come to mean "would have the inherited right to be a samurai if there were still samurai". There is a lot of subversion associated with the samurai, however. A lot of alleged samurai traditions came to be enforced only after the victory of the Tokugawa clan effectively ended feudal warfare of the Sengoku Era. Samurai traditions were emphasized again in the early 20th century, as part of political propaganda in an era of ultranationalism and militarism, decades after the samurai class was abolished.
• There's some evidence that Japanese intelligence during the Imperialist period (from the Meiji Restoration till the end of World War II) was partly set up by former members of the O-Niwa Banshu, the Tokugawa shogun's bodyguard-spies. At least some O-Niwa Banshu methods were inherited from the ninja of Koga and Iga. That's well under 200 years ago that there were people you might call "Ninja" in Real Life.
• The Mafia. Members of the organization historically claim it doesn't exist rather than they are not members. It still exists today even though it doesn't have the power it used to.
• A lot of people think Chef Boyardee was fictional and Betty Crocker was real. It's actually the other way around. (The former was an Italian immigrant to America; his original name was Ettore Boiardi, which was then Anglicized to Hector Boyardee.)
• You'll occasionally meet someone who's surprised to find out that Fannie Farmer existed.
• As the Trope Namer indicates, there are people out there who don't believe that the Eskimos (a.k.a. the Inuit and Yupik peoples of North America and Siberia) exist. Some people don't believe that American Indians in general still exist (despite the existence of reservations and casinos, along with millions of Indians living independently)^note The former is generally due to assuming that the Eskimos seen in cartoons as children were made up for the cartoons, while the latter is generally because of the assumption that the Native Americans have all been wiped out. This kind of thing doesn't help◊. unfortunate implications abound for both, though of completely different types..
• You'd be surprised how many people believe that Romani people — that is, "Gypsies" — are either entirely fanciful and fictional, like swarthy, fortune-telling leprechauns, or no longer exist. This is particularly the case in America. In many places in Europe active antiziganism, or prejudice against Romani people, is still going strong and they're seen as quite real, just subhuman social pests. This is ironic considering that the United States has one of the largest Romani populations in the world. Even some people who believe in "gypsies" have the impression that they consist of a volitive subculture akin to hippies or metalheads rather than a distinct ethnic group. (That some subcultural groups, such as the infamous Gypsy Joker Motorcycle Club, have appropriated the term "gypsy" doesn't help.)
• Believe it or not, there have been cases of people thinking that Sparta and even the Roman Empire were fictional.
• Despite historical evidence to the contrary, you'll find some Japanese people claiming The Shinsengumi and all of its most famous members were the product of Jidaigeki epics.
• Some clips on YouTube of Colonel Sanders making appearances on TV shows such as "What's My Line?" have quite a few comments from people who are surprised to find he was an actual person and not just a company mascot.
• Captain Beefheart's late-'60s co-lyricist, Herb Bermann, was so reclusive that many fans assumed he didn't exist. This was compounded by Beefheart apparently introducing band members to different people who he claimed were Bermann. Bermann resurfaced in the 2000s after fan effort to track him down, and released a book "The Mystery Man From The Magic Band".
• There's a disturbing and sad trend of some members of Gen-Z (AKA Zoomers) on Tik Tok not believing that Helen Keller was a real person as they simply could not comprehend that someone with her disabilities could possibly have been as successful as she was. Plus the fact that the play The Miracle Worker and its movie adaptations (which are what most people think of when they hear about Keller) took some serious liberties with Keller's story didn't help.

Mythology and Religion

It is often hard to tell which people, events and places mentioned in myths and religious writings were real, and which were not- especially as most religious texts describe events in times and places where good secular records are few and far between, and various wars destroyed a lot of what did exist. Many researchers take the minimalist approach, i.e., assume that anything that has no good evidence is mythical. Of course, this makes them prone to this trope. (And conversely, many people who have grown up on their weekly Bible intake are surprised to discover in their adulthood that many Biblical place names are actually real historical locations.)

• Troy is a famous example. Until Schliemann found it, many scholars were skeptical about its existence, and about it having been destroyed in a war. Not that the discovery by Schliemann makes things easier, as it turns out there are 9 Troys, so the debate went from whether it exists to which Troy is the one in Trojan War. Current consensus is Troy VIIa.
• There's a large amount of people who disbelieve in the existence of Jesus. He was a very obscure figure in his lifetime, and very few non-Christian references to him exist (and even those are subject to outside bias and potential editing by well-meaning followers in the centuries following his death). However, the overwhelming consensus of historians is that there was one person at the center of the Jewish organization that became Christianity, that he was from Nazareth and was crucified under the prefectship of Pontius Pilate.
  • However, some Jesus-historicists, and particularly triumphalists (those who assert that the New Testament gospels are totally or almost totally true), falsely claim that the known-to-be-historical figures such as Pilate or the various Herods were once believed to be mythical or are being contended to be mythical by Jesus-mythicists or Christ-mythicists, even though they were known to be well-attested from contemporary non-Christian writings and many of the objections to New Testament veracity are based on discordance with the known historical facts about them.
• On the ancient Israelites:
  • Both the Books of Kings and Books Of Chronicles describe the later kings as historical persons, but the earlier kings as legendary ones. So there was skepticism about the existence of kings Saul, David, and Solomon. Now we have archaeological evidence of the existence of Saul and David, although the Biblical stories about them are still not historical, and they weren't even contemporaries. There is still no evidence of the existence of king Solomon.
  • Some researchers also believed that the kingdom of Judea was fictional, or rather, that it had been no more than a city-state comprising Jerusalem and its surroundings^note Contrary to the Biblical claim of it comprising over 40 towns. This has since been disproved. Related to the above, however, it's not clear that the Biblical story of there having been a united Hebrew kingdom that split into northern Israel and southern Judah after the death of Solomon is correct; many historians suspect that the kingdoms coalesced separately, and the first time the Hebrews/Jews were united was when refugees from Israel fled to Judah after the Assyrian conquest.
• Outside the Israelites themselves, some Biblical tribes and nations were believed to be fictional (and some still are).
  • The Hittites were believed to be fictional until the Hittite empire was discovered.
  • The Hurrians were also believed to be fictional. Now they are associated with the Mitanni.
  • Babylon. It's a real place in Mesopotamia and not a simple proverbial term for heathen peoples that The Bible makes it out to be. It technically still exists today, and still lends its name to certain extant institutions (mostly based in Baghdad these days), like the Chaldean Catholic Patriarchate of Babylon.^note Since this is a particular church of the Catholic Church, the patriarch is almost always made a cardinal upon election. As a result, a church that can be seriously described as the Church of Babylon has a vote in choosing The Pope, and technically the Patriarch of Babylon is eligible to actually be elected Pope. (It probably won't happen under current circumstances, but as other Eastern Catholic prelates have occasionally been mentioned as papabili, it can't be completely ruled out either.) Ironically, the Hanging Gardens is probably just a myth.
• Mount Ararat, the place Noah's Ark was supposed to have landed after the Deluge, is actually a real mountain associated with the Biblical location since at least the Middle Ages (even if the Bible is a bit looser with the description than is commonly assumed). Ironically, fundamentalist Christians tend to be kinda-sorta aware of this since if they believe the Biblical story literally true, they must also believe in physical existence of the place they think the Ark landed on.

Miscellaneous

• Whataburger, because of its appearance in King of the Hill, is thought to be a fictional fast-food chain by many who have never been to Texas, but it's not only real, it's even expanded across the American southeast. The same goes for Pancho's Mexican Buffet, which is also a real chain in Texas (sadly, all locations outside of the Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth regions have long since closed down).
  • Similarly, there are people who are astonished that saguaro cacti and tumbleweeds are real and not just cartoon props (being shorthand for "desert", including deserts that aren't part of the southwestern United States, probably doesn't help).
• A lot of American stuff sounds utterly inane to a European (or anywhere else, for that matter) person.
  • Many outside of America find it hard to believe that Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurants are a real thing.
  • Schoolchildren having to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning sounds more like something you'd see in an authoritarian dictatorship than Eagle Land. But it's a real civic ritual in the U.S., and one proposed by a left-winger (the democratic Christian socialist — emphasis on the "democratic socialist" — Francis Bellamy^note Brother of Edward Bellamy, who wrote the democratic-socialist techno-utopia Looking Backward. The brothers' political views were wholly in sync.) at that. (Interestingly, though he was a Baptist minister, he was not responsible for the "under God" part.) Remember, kids, patriotism is not the exclusive province of the Right (at least not in America)!
    • Another aspect pertaining to the United States school system has some Europeans being surprised that yellow school buses are actually commonplace and used. The yellowness is good for visibility (important in the northern U.S., where school can start before sunrise in the wintertime); the school-specific buses are needed in many places because general public-transportation buses are frequently either garbage or completely nonexistent.
  • The existence of Girl Scout Cookies is also an unexpected but real aspect that has surprised non-Americans.
• Apparently, some people don't realize American two-dollar bills are a real thing and not just a mistake made by clueless counterfeiters. This page lists some examples.
  • Likewise, young or forgetful Americans often mistake Susan B. Anthony or Sacagawea dollar coins for foreign coinage, not realizing they're actual (albeit unsuccessful) U.S. currency.
• Thomas Jefferson expressed disbelief that an entire species could go extinct or that falling meteorites might be real. In fairness, they were both very new ideas at the time and remained controversial for many years.
• Scottish philosopher David Hume discussed this in regards to epistemology (i.e. how we attain knowledge). He related the anecdote of an Indian prince who expressed skepticism about snow due to never having seen it, and said his attitude was justified until he'd seen it himself or heard from trustworthy eyewitnesses.
• There is a real element called krypton. While it isn't anything like kryptonite, being a colorless gas rather than a green crystal, it's pretty certain the planet and the crystal were named after it, as it sounds rather science-fiction-y. (The name is derived from the Greek kryptos, meaning "hidden", as it's a noble gas and as such a rather elusive substance.)
• Secret Paths and Secret Rooms are common enough tropes in fiction that it takes people by surprise when they discover that there are buildings that actually have these features.
• During the First Gulf War in 1991, units of the French Foreign Legion had a certain amount of trouble liaising with American troops, along more or less these lines: "Yes, I said Foreign Legion. Yes, the guys with the kepis. Yes, we are real."