“Alan Abel (b. 1930) is an American prankster, writer, mockumentary filmmaker, and jazz percussionist famous for several hoaxes that became minor media circuses. One of Abel’s earliest pranks took place in the late 1950s. Abel posed as a golf pro who taught Westinghouse executives how to use ballet positions to improve their game.
Beginning May 27, 1959 with a story on the Today Show, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), was Abel’s longest-running and most elaborate hoax. SINA’s mission was to clothe naked animals throughout the world. Their best-known tagline was “A Nude Horse is a Rude Horse”. As spokesman for the group, actor Buck Henry appeared on television and radio numerous times, including the CBS Evening News on August 21, 1962. The hoax began as a satire of media censorship but took on a life of its own with sympathizers offering unsolicited contributions (always returned), citizen summonses for walking naked dogs, and sewing patterns for pet clothes.
Omar’s School for Beggars was a fictional school for professional panhandlers. As Omar, Abel was invited to numerous television talk shows including the Tomorrow Show hosted by Tom Snyder, whom he upset by dominating the show for its entire hour. Other Omar television appearances included Morton Downey, Jr., Sally Jessy Raphael, Mike Douglas and Sonya Friedman, who was especially upset because Omar ate his lunch on camera.
During the 1970s, Abel wrote, produced, and directed two mockumentaries: Is There Sex after Death? (1971) and The Faking of the President (1976). In 1979 Abel staged his own death from a heart attack near the Sundance Ski Lodge. A fake funeral director collected his belongings and a woman posing as his widow notified the New York Times. The Times published a long obituary January 2, 1980 (a rare example of a premature obituary). Three days later Abel held a news conference to announce the “reports of my demise have been grossly exaggerated”.
During the early 1990s, Abel kept a full-size railroad caboose in the front yard of his home in Westport, Connecticut, a parody of the sterotypical redneck yard full of junked cars. In 1997 Abel launched a new venture, CGS Productions, to promote gift-wrapped pint jars of Jenny McCarthy’s urine. (A parody of McCarthy’s role in a shoe commercial where she appeared sitting on a toilet.) The name of the communications director for CGS Productions was Stoidi Puekaw – “Wake up idiots” backwards.
Abel once ran for Congress on a platform that included paying congressmen based on commission; selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder; installing a lie detector in the White House and truth serum in the Senate drinking fountain; requiring all doctors to publish their medical school grade point average in the telephone book after their names and removing Wednesday to establish a 4-day workweek.
At the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Abel introduced a campaign to ban all breastfeeding because “it is an incestuous relationship between mother and baby that manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink and even becoming a homosexual.” After two hundred interviews over two years, Abel confessed the hoax in U.S. News and World Report.”
–From Wikipedia