Notre Dame went undefeated against a solid slate of competitors. They DESERVED to be in the championship game.
As it turned out, they also deserved to get their butts kicked. So it goes.
As a native Madisonian and alumnus of UW, thank you for offering this one. Happened before I was born, but still makes me proud of my city and University.
While the hoaxes of Joey Skaggs were very good, the pranks of Dick Tuck were better.
How about The Lazlo Letters?
I rememeber this one … Howard Stern show?
Orson Wellesand an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds
But, then, also earlier radio event - Ronald Knox - Wikipedia
Pakistan sucking 10 years of money out of the US for arms and intel re: The Search For Bin Laden.
Was it last year, or two years ago when the family claimed their son was swept away in a balloon only to find he was hiding in their attic the whole time?
2009
Nobody’s mentioned The Jerky Boys yet? (I keed, I keed.)
I just saw this prank this morning.Not one of the “Greatest of All Time” but good for a chuckle this morning. It’s a Norwegian groom bungee jumping off a bridge for his bachelor party… or at least, that’s what he thinks he’s doing. Norwegians know how to party.
I disagree.
Here’s 10 seconds of the film with the shaky camerawork rectified. It’s just a guy in an ape suit walking along.
The Léo Taxil hoax is by far the greatest - and most outrageous - hoax of all time.
Hell, a fucking Pope fell for it - and with him, a great deal of the worldwide Catholic public and press.
I shouldn’t be tooting my own horn, and I don’t think that it was in the epic scale of some of the ones mentioned here… But I have a soft spot in my heart for a prank I perpetrated when I was in University, 25 years ago…
I already mentioned it here in the SDMB – Here is the link to the relevant post.
Paul is dead.
Wow. That’s just fantastic.
I concur. A hoax is meant to be believed indefinitely, possibly for personal gain. A prank is meant to be believed briefly for humor.
The 1930s stunt involving Drake’s Plate of Brasswas originally meant as a prank on historian George Barron, but it went over a bit too well and could more accurately be described as a hoax today.
Dude makes his friend think he’s won $500,000 with a half-court shot.
Of course it is. But the person has a sufficiently unusual physique to not look quite like a guy in an ape suit, and the combination of distance, momentary obscurations and shakycam work all added up to something that had no immediate, superficial flaws. That’s why it’s been argued about for, what, 40 years. No zippers, no strings, no wristwatch or sneakers… it holds up just well enough to maintain the illusion.
That’s a nice “undoing,” though and I hadn’t seen it before. Thanks. ETA: That’s a REALLY good piece of work, and shows how much the shaky camera added to the illusion.
MIT is known for lots of hacks most famously the weather balloon planted at the 50 yard line of the Harvard Yale game.