A harmless little hoax that made a stir in its own backyard took place in the town of Culpeper, Virigina, in 1984.
Jack Moore, sports editor of the Culpeper Star-Exponent, had already submitted his resignation two weeks before he ran a story about an enormous domed sports stadium that supposedly was about to be built in tiny Culpeper. Illustrating the story was a photo of the Houston Astrodome.
Despite the consideration that anyone who actually took this story at face value would have had to be an idiot,the owners of the paper, huffing with righteous executive indignation, fired Moore's boss, the paper's news editor who apparently had been in on the gag, and filed a misdemeanor complaint against Moore, which they later dropped-- presumably to keep from looking even sillier.
What a great prank. This is before "The Onion" I'm talking about.
ReplyDeleteThe story was illustrated with the Astro-Dome cut-and-pasted over a picture of the Culpeper High School track. It was perfect.
The story mentioned the acts that were scheduled to appear, including the Sex Pistols and Michael Jackson but noted the concern of town fathers that didn't want to limit the venue to "anarchists and hermaphrodites."
He also wrote a tongue-in-cheek column that fateful day that quoted his fictitious friend Kwame Fabu "a professional hedonist and odds-maker" that the chance that Culpeper would ever build such a stadium were 1 in a 1,000,000 and the chance that he would stick around to see it were 1 in 1,000,000,000.
For several weeks, we got stories on the state AP wire that the authorities were looking for Jack. They searched his apartment, couldn't find him. They questioned his friends, but Jack had vanished. Finally the commonwealth's attorney in Culpeper stated that no law had been broken so no charges were filed.