Mark Hofmann was a rare documents dealer in Salt Lake City who, between 1980 and 1985, produced a series of discoveries that reshaped the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The most famous is the salamander letter, purportedly written in 1830 by Martin Harris, an early associate of Joseph Smith. In the church's account, Smith was directed to the golden plates by an angel. In the letter, Smith found the plates through folk magic and a treasure-seeking spirit that appeared as a white salamander.
The letter was authenticated by document examiners, published, and bought by the church, which did not suppress it. Hofmann also produced the Anthon transcript, the Joseph Smith III blessing, and hundreds of other items — Mormon documents, and separately, forged Americana including a purported first printing of the Oath of a Freeman.
The market structure is what made it work, and it is the mechanism worth extracting.
Hofmann forged documents that different constituencies needed to exist for opposite reasons. Critics of the church wanted early folk-magic material because it undermined the official account. Church-affiliated buyers wanted to control such material, whether to study it or to hold it. Both groups had a reason to want the document to be genuine, or at least to acquire it quickly, and neither had an incentive to fund the destructive testing that would settle it.
Motivated reasoning, in Ziva Kunda's framework, operates by biasing which hypotheses are generated and how hard evidence is searched for. It does not require anyone to lie to themselves consciously.
Scarcity then converted collectors into competitors rather than auditors. In a market where a unique document may be bought by someone else this week, thorough provenance research is a speed disadvantage, and the buyer who checks least buys most.
Provenance was the specific failure. Hofmann's documents almost always came with a story about an obscure family collection, and the stories were not traced.
It ended in violence. Hofmann had borrowed heavily against forgeries he had not yet produced, including a promised collection called the McLellin papers, and by 1985 he could not deliver. On 15 October 1985 he killed Steven Christensen, a document collector who was pressing him, and Kathleen Sheets, the wife of Christensen's former employer, with pipe bombs — the second apparently to suggest a business-related motive. The following day a third bomb went off in his own car, injuring him.
Forensic examination then found what nobody had looked for: the ink showed cracking under microscopy consistent with artificial aging, and chemical analysis of the ink was inconsistent with the claimed period.
He pleaded guilty in 1987 and is serving a life sentence. An unknown number of his forgeries remain in archives, unidentified.