Pranks Galore
1–31–17, Adil
Aite fam, to balance out this disastrous week of real life, I decided to delve into history to find some funny/impressive pranks to cheer myself up. This time around we’ll do more breadth than depth, to show you a broader spectrum of human creativity.
- Gregor MacGregor can boast about one of the most bold cons of all time — the Poyais Scheme. Our friend Greg was a Scottish soldier and adventurer, and he is infamous for having made up his own Central American country, and then convincing hundreds of British and French investors to put money into fake “government bonds” and “land certificates.” The country was called “Poyais,” and it was located around present day Honduras. Greg did actually own this land; a scrub-level King of the greater territory of which Poyais was a part granted him about 12.5k square miles, but it was mostly overgrown jungle. Greg went to impressive lengths to make it sound legit, though. For example, he designed distinctive military uniforms for each regiment of the Poyasian Army and created an honours system (whatever that is), landed titles, a coat of arms, and commercial/banking mechanisms. He told Europeans that he was chosen to rule the land as the “Cazique” (Spanish-American word for native chief), and he set up Poyasian offices in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow to sell the fake bonds and certificates. Long story short: lots of people invested, people actually went to Poyais and died, Greg made a fortune, only one of Greg’s associates was ever charged with anything, Greg repeated schemes in multiple countries, and he eventually died with full military honors back in Caracas (where he was known as a hero for serving as a General in their war for independence against Spain). For his efforts, one 21st century financial analyst has dubbed Greg the “founding father of securities fraud.”
- In September 1973, Owen Garriott was a NASA astronaut aboard the Skylab 3. This mission doubled the previous world record for longest duration in space, coming in hot at about 60 days (during which they did experiments regarding the Sun, Earth’s resources, and various experiments with human adaptation to weightlessness). Needless to say, NASA tries to run a pretty tight ship (😂). So, they were dumbfounded when, one day, they heard the voice of a woman over the radio — there was a stowaway aboard this momentous mission. This woman spoke in a sexy voice and talked to NASA controller Bob Crippen by name, describing her views of forest fires and sunrises from space, before ending the conversation with “Oh oh. I have to cut off now. I think the boys are floating up here toward the command module and I’m not supposed to be talking to you.” As the crew later revealed, Garriott had recorded his wife doing this sexy voice during a private radio transmission the night before.
- One of my personal favorites: The Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961. The game was being played by the Washington Huskies against and Minnesota Golden Gophers, but another school got involved. At halftime, the cheerleaders guided the audience through a card-flipping where each audience member raises a colored cord at the right time to spell out the team’s name. To their embarrassment, there was no Washington written in the cards. Instead, they got this:
As you may guess, some Cal Tech students (led by 19-year-old engineering student Lyn Hardy) pulled one of the most classic pranks of all time. To accomplish this, Hardy first disguised himself as an LA high school reporter and asked UW’s head cheeleader about some of the details behind the show. Students later broke into Cal State Long Beach dorm rooms and stole a single instruction sheet for the flip cards. They printed copies and then altered all 2,232 sheets by hand (did they not have copy machines?). At showtime, it was executed to perfection. Another great aspect of this: Cal Tech doesn’t even have a football team. And side note, this prank was echoed in this recent embarrassment of Harvard at the 2004 Harvard-Yale game:
I’ll make these a little shorter now to hit some fun highlights.
4. In 1996, Taco Bell took out full-page ads running in six of the country’s largest newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer, declaring that they had bought the Liberty Bell for and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. This purchase was made in “an effort to help the national debt.” The Bell would henceforth split its time in Philly and the TB HQ in Irvine, CA. Naturally, even though this was an April Fool’s prank, people freaked out — distressed calls to the National Parks Services forced TB to issue a real press release stating that it was a hoax and pledging $50,000 for the Liberty Bell’s upkeep (lol).
5. Keeping the fast food trend going… in 1998, Burger King took out a full page ad in USA Today claiming they had released a bold new item: the Left-Handed Whopper. Now much more conveniently for all those totally flummoxed by the current version, all condiments had been rotated 180 degrees. People actually ordered the leftie version, and right handers made a point to ask for “the normal one.”
6. One of the coolest military cons: Operation Mincemeat. This was a British plan to fool German troops into redirecting their efforts to guard against a non-existent invasion from a Greek army, thus leaving a clear path for the Allied forced to land in Sicily. Basically, sneaky British intelligence dudes created a story for a corpse, gave it the name William Martin and assigned it a rank of Major, and then dropped it into the water to make it look like a plane crash. Lil’ Martin here was also loaded with some “highly classified” papers detailed a “Greek invasion.” German goobers bought the ruse and moved a significant amount of people to Greece, allowing for easy entrance in Sicily for the Allies.
7. In 1959, Brazilian college students did something much bigger than registering Deez Nutz to run for president. Instead, they actually created their own homemade ballots (its 1957 in South America, I guess…) to get a baby rhinoceros elected to the Sao Paulo city council. The rhino was named “Cacareco,” or Portuguese for “rubbish.” The rhino didn’t just win; he destroyed his competition by winning 100,000 votes — the highest of any of the 540 candidates for the 45 council seats. Unfortunately the election was nullified and the rhino wasn’t allowed to take office, but to this day, this prank is engrained in Brazilian pop culture — the phrase “Voto Cacareco” is slang for “protest vote.”
8. In 1977, The Guardian wrote a detailed 7-page long special report on the idyllic fake nation of San Seriffe, including geography, history, and daily life of the people. The beautiful country was an amalgamation of islands that together render the shape of a semi-colon, broken up into the Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse islands. Of course, many readers called the newspaper to get more details about the islands for their future vacations. In literary culture, this is now regarded as one of the most famous and successful pranks in recent decades.
9. In 1969, an editor at Rolling Stone (Greil Marcus) was really annoyed by the trend towards musical “super groups” so he decided to make his point via hyperbole. He constructed a new group called the Masked Marauders, and the group included Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney. He wrote a detailed review of their new album in Rolling Stone, but people actually got legitimately excited. People were clamoring for the record. So, Marcus actually hired a fake band to pose as the Marauders, got them an actual deal with Warner Brothers, and sold 100,000 copies of a dinky record despite being a total joke.
10. In 1998, the official newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason reported that the conservative Alabama government was officially changing the value of pi to exactly 3, thus bringing it more in line with the proper Biblical value. Even though this was published on April Fool’s day by an author named April Holiday, apparently a bunch of people again freaked out — Alabama legislators received hundreds of calls in protest. Goofs.
Honorable Mentions:
A few more worth noting, but not diving into too many details here:
11. In 1980, BBC told everyone that Big Ben was going digital. People were not happy.
12. In 1992, NPR edited some audio tapes and announced that Richard Nixon was running for President once again (he resigned after Watergate in 1974).
13. The Miami radio station “The Morning High Jinks” made a prank call to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in 2004, using edited tapes from an earlier prank call to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as bait. Castro freaked out and hung up. The station was fined $4k by the FCC.
14. In 1978, a millionaire businessman claimed he would tow an iceberg to the Sydney harbor from Antarctica. Indeed, he actually dragged over some huge white iceberg looking thing (ahh the things you can do with extra money). Eventually, though, rain washed away the firefighting foam and shaving cream to reveal white plastic sheets beneath.
15. 1972, headlines around the world reported that the body of the Loch Ness monster had been found. In reality, it was really a bull elephant seal placed there by a zoo education officer; it died the week before and he shaved the whiskers, padded the cheeks with stones, and froze it for a week before dumping in the Loch.
16. In a 1976 BBC interview, astronomer Patrick Moore said that at 9:47AM, Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily reducing Earth’s gravity. He announce that if people jumped in the air at that precise moment, they would experience a once-in-a-lifetime floating sensation. You guessed it: lots of people called in talking about their wild experiences. One woman talked about how she and 11 friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
17. In a 1957 BBC new report on TV, reporters discussed how, in southern Switzerland, you can grow spaghetti on trees. Hundreds called BBC asking how to grow their own tree. They simply advised: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
18. In 1962, Sweden had only one TV channel, and it was in black and white. However, they one day explained that if you put a stocking over your television set, it causes the light to bend in such a way that renders color television! It also helped if you moved your head from side to side while watching. Naturally, people did exactly that. To this day, people still talk about their fathers rushing to find stockings for their TV in 1962.
The common thread through all of these is pretty clear: people can be really, truly, impressively stupid.
Sources (for those not hyperlinked above):
