On January 2, 1980, The New York Times reported the death of famous media hoaxer Alan Abel.
The only problem was: Abel wasn’t dead.
To fool the Times’ fastidious reporters, Abel concocted an elaborate ruse that involved over a dozen people, including a grieving widow and an undertaker.
The day after The Times ran Abel’s premature obituary, he showed up — very much alive — at a press conference where he revealed his elaborate hoax. At the conference, Abel said it was a pure publicity stunt that’s only goal was to publicize that he was a “professional hoaxer.”
After the hoax, Abel lamented, “Now, when I really die, I’m afraid no one will believe it.”
Abel was a professional jazz drummer, comic, writer, campus lecturer, and filmmaker. His first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA, took place in 1959 and enlisted the help of then-unknown comic Buck Henry.
Henry would go on to be nominated for two academy awards for writing and directing and hosted “Saturday Night Live” ten times between 1976 and 1980.
The fake group sought to “clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches.”
On September 17, 2018, at the age of 94, Abel graced The New York Times obituary page for a second time. He’s most likely the only person to be highlighted in the obits more than once. The Times ran a hilarious headline: “Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94.”
Despite the fact he had hoodwinked the paper nearly 40 years ago, The Times’ obituary would go on to praise Abel for his “highly personal brand of performance art, equal parts self-promotion, social commentary, study of the breathtaking naivete of press and public, and, last but far from least, pure old-fashioned high jinks.”
Read Abel’s entire 2018 obituary at The New York Times.