There was a special on the 'unmasking" as it were. The guy in the suit replicated his walk in a very off-hand way. He has very long arms. Even in street clothes as as soon as you see him walk away there is no doubt that it is him. A good prank, but if you care to search, the answer is available.
Either one of the greatest hoaxes of all time or one that backfired spectacularly - I can’t work out which - is the Ern Malley hoax.
Two public servants didn’t think much of late-modernist poetry, so they invented an author and wrote a series of pieces of blithering nonsense disguised as masterpieces of an exciting new poet. They got published and promptly hailed as works of brilliance by a number of respectable writers and critics, whose reputations took a huge hit when the fraud was announced.
…except that even today, the poems in question still considered to be excellent examples of late-modernist poetry.
The Iraqi War?
The Alaska volcano prankwas pretty good.
Both of these, along with one other prank of the hackish variety, are documented in the Jargon File. I’m fondest of the third prank, involving Motorola, Xerox, and the return of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck.
JoseB, you are the best. Brilliant.
I like the Alaska volcano one, too. It seems my favorite pranks involve scaring people into thinking the end is nigh – but JoseB is the winner, because he also made the poor victim think it was his fault.
In one of his books, Stephen Jay Gould makes a strong case that the young Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who went on to become a very respected theologian, was complicit in the Piltdown hoax.
The very pornographic and NSFW but witty and hilarious “Dick Bun” prank.
Spoilered twice for safety.
You MAGNIFICENT BASTARD XD XD XD
Not sure if it counts, but famous SciFi space opera Pandora’s Star begins with great prank on first manned Mars mission.
Agreed, that was pretty damn good.
I would have loved to see the expression on the teacher’s face once the sirens went off.
tips hat
Uh, uh, and one from real life. I lent handheld device once to my asshat bastard colegue who uploaded quite a few short movies involving male genitalia and milking device and cleverly disguised them as other kind of software. I didn’t check it, but my boss, who was next in line for try, did…
Yes it was.
Wells knew people would be missing the first few minutes of his broadcast.
Plus, when it was announced “We’re going to Washington for a special announcement” the next voice actor did a spot on impression of Roosevelt. Most people knew FDR from the radio. Wells played innocent but he knew exactly what he was doing.
Seems to be a hoax by your own definition.
Heh, that’s fantastic.
I myself have always liked the’Sokal affair’, which involved a Physics professor getting a load of nonsensical crap published in a postmodern journal. The title of the article was bad enough, if you ask me:
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”
Poetry - that reminds me of what may be the greatest literary prank of all time, simply because of the status of the entities involved (Rolfe Humphries, *Poetry *magazine and Nicholas Murray Butler) and the juvenile nature of the prank itself, which will be left as an exercise to the reader except to say that Butler was quite the butt of its humor.
As he made very explicit in his closing:
You really can’t see the seam where the jacket meets the trousers? The fur doesn’t line up. Look again.
Similar to the Rose Bowl prank, Yale got the Harvard crowd to spell out We Suck.
How and why?
My understanding is that the big competition was a variety show, and when a tedious performer came on 3-4 minutes into the show, many people started tuning around for something else and lit on Welles after the disclaimers. How did he know this, or are you referring to something else?
FWIW, I’ve heard the claims that only a few people were fooled, and the consensus seems to be that a significant number of people did indeed think the reports were real and reacted accordingly. It may come down to whether a few thousand people is significant or a misunderstanding that it was a bigger “many” makes it false.