Beringer was a respected professor of medicine at the University of Wurzberg in Germany in the early 1700s.  Apparently he was also an arrogant ass.  His colleagues at the University, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann von Eckhardt, wanted to take him down a notch.  The result?  The greatest scientific stunt of their time. 

Knowing of Beringer’s interest in natural science, Roderick and Eckhardt hired stone masons to craft “fossils” out of limestone and enlisted his specimen supplier to sell them to Beringer. The fossils became more and more ridiculous as time went on, but Beringer was still a believer, even as he was presented with fossils from bees with honeycomb, birds and eggs, spiders and webs to even more outlandish ones containing samples of ancient languages, stars and comets. 

The prank worked so well that Beringer wrote a book about his discoveries and his many theories, some of which were so ludicrous that Eckhardt and Roderick probably had trouble controlling their bladders whenever Beringer was discussing them.  They included a “plastica” theory that fossils grew spontaneously, a “spermatica” theory that seed of ancient creatures slipped through rock cracks to form the impressions, and – his favorite- that the fossils were the capricious works of God. 

An unproven rumor is that Beringer finally realized the deception when one of the fossils had his own name carved into it.  However he learned the truth, he sued Roderick and Eckhardt, in what is also the greatest joke backfire of the time. They were both discredited and dismissed from their positions at the University.  Beringer is said to have become penniless trying to buy all the copies of the embarrassing book he created.  Not that it did much good.  It was reprinted again after his death.  The fossils have been known forever since as the Lying Stones.

Below: Drawings of some of the “fossils” that appeared in Beringer’s book

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Benjamin Franklin

  Everyone knows Ben Franklin was a genius of politics, literature, science and math, and most people have heard of his many hoaxes, political stunts and what we can euphemistically call “self-promotion”.  What most people haven’t heard is the speculation that his famous kite-in-a-thunder-storm was probably a hoax.  It was most likely a joke directed at the intellectuals of Europe who dismissed his writings on electricity.  Ironically, while his serious work on electricity was ignored, the sensational tale of “discovering” electricity by flying a key on a kite string in a violent storm was taken up enthusiastically.  The most amazing thing is that it has taken this long for the scientific community to realize what grade schoolers hearing this story know right away- wouldn’t getting struck by lightning have killed him? It, at least, would have taken the spring out of his step.

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Kids at MIT 

Sure, parents brag when their kids get accepted to MIT, the Jedi Academy for science and engineering dorks, but are they so proud to spend those mega dollars when they come up with this stuff instead of inventing a perpetual motion device?

The kids call these pranks “hacks” and they’re pretty tame.  However, you know a few students had to hit their inhalers after this prank in which the new president’s office door was hidden behind a bulletin board.

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Two days before The Phantom Menace opened in 1999, hackers transformed the campus’s Great Dome into R2-D2.  I’m just glad they never saw a very similar film found in the adult section of the video store, The Phantom Man-ass.  Who knows what the Great Dome would have looked like then?

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Not an official “hack”, but super cool, nonetheless, was the Bonsai Kittens website.  A spoof detailing how to grow ornamentally stunted kittens in glass containers, it had more than one animal lover convinced this warped site was the real thing.  No, it was just the joke of some of the funnier MIT geeks.

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Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect

  In 1976, respected English astronomer Patrick Moore stated on BBC radio that due to the rare occurrence of Pluto passing behind Jupiter, Earth’s gravity would be greatly decreased at the precise moment of 9:47 a.m.  If listeners were to jump into the air at that exact moment they would feel a floating sensation.  People really should have known something was up- it was April 1, after all.  A surprising number of people fell for it.  People jumping all over the UK.  Some people not only claimed to feel the low gravity, but said they proceeded to float around their homes.

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Cello Scrotum 

For over 30 years, cellists lived in fear of the dreaded malady, “Cello Scrotum”.  Finally, in 2009, the much respected Dr. Elaine Murphy, who also is a member of the House of Lords, admitted it was a hoax.  In 1974, she found an article in the British Medical Journal about the legitimate condition, “Guitarist Nipple”, quite humorous.  In response, she penned a letter to the BMJ herself inventing “Cello Scrotum”.  As happens, others referenced this over the years and it made its way into other medical literature.

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