The Dutchman who claimed to have succeeded in making a pair of wings which allow him to fly like a bird, confessed on Dutch television on Thursday night that the entire project is a hoax.

The human birdman Jarno Smeets is in fact Dutch filmmaker and animator Floris Kaayk, who developed the eight-month project as an experiment to see how online media works, he told chat show De Wereld Draait Door.
Kaayk said the experiment was not about making fakes but about ‘telling a story via a blog’. ‘Its about the dream so many people have,’ he told the show.
The video of Smeets taking off in a park in The Hague with his 17-metre wings went global this week and has been viewed over three million times on You Tube.