Jose E. Marco was a Filipino writer and forger who created some of the most infamous hoaxes and forgeries relating to Philippine history, producing artifacts purported to have come from the pre-colonial and Spanish eras such as the Code of Kalantiaw, touted as the first law code in the Philippines, and La Loba Negra, a novel supposedly written by Filipino proto-nationalist priest Jose Burgos which became part of the country's educational curriculum for decades.
[1] Marco first began producing his forgeries in 1911, when he wrote a letter to National Library of the Philippines director James Alexander Robertson claiming that he was in possession of three precolonial bark manuscripts that he discovered in 1888.
[4] He also created a manuscript that claimed to provide evidence of Filipino participation in the creation of the Cadiz Constitution in 1812 and an extended account of the Magellan expedition in Cebu.
[6] La Loba Negra was subsequently turned into a play by Virginia Moreno in 1969 titled The Onyx Wolf[7][8] and an opera by Francisco Feliciano with libretto by Fides Cuyugan-Asensio in 1984.
[6] The unmasking of Marco's hoaxes led to a gradual decline in attention to his works, with the National Historical Institute ordering the withdrawal of official recognition of the Code of Kalantiaw in 2004.