16 Most Unbelievable School Pranks Ever Committed

Posted on Thu, Jul 15, 2010 @ 08:00 AM by admin
Tagged with: School News, boarding schools, CalTech, College Prep Schools, Flip Cards, Harvard, MIT, Placard, Pranks, School Pranks, Switcheroo

1. There's No Stopping Them

Auburn University is well-known for its football program. Its rivalry with Georgia Tech, which originated in 1892, is equally well-known. That rivalry came to a head in 1896, when Auburn students decided to "grease the skids" of an Auburn football win over Georgia Tech by lubricating the train tracks and platform at the Auburn Train Station with grease and lard the night before the train carrying Georgia Tech's football team was to arrive. The next morning, as anticipated, the train's efforts to stop at the station were a complete failure. The train blew past the station by at least five miles before it was able to stop. After having to walk the five miles back to the station, Georgia Tech's team was easily defeated 45-0 by Auburn.

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2. Harvard's Fish Story

Since the eighteenth century, a five-foot-long wooden carving of a cod fish has hung above the entrance to the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Massachusetts State House as a symbol of the importance of the cod to the region's early economy. The fish hung in its lofty position for years until the 1933 staff of the Harvard Lampoon, Harvard University's monthly humor magazine, decided it needed to be acquired. Despite its importance to the Massachusetts legislature, the cod was left surprisingly unguarded. Obtaining it took little effort. Three Lampoon staffers walked into the statehouse and surreptitiously snipped the two wires holding the cod, lowered it into a long flower box, and walked out. The theft caused quite the uproar in Boston but only 50 hours later the cod was returned without incident and hung again in the state house - albeit six inches higher.

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3. Veterans of Future Wars

When World War I veterans lobbied Congress in 1935 to receive their war bonuses ten years early, to ease the strains of the Great Depression, the Harrison Bonus Bill was born. So was an idea. Princeton senior Lewis Gorin decided that if present-day veterans could get their bonuses early, why shouldn't future veterans be prepaid for their service – before fighting in a war?! Gorin lobbied that all male citizens between 18 and 36 should be paid a $1,000 war bonus on June 1, 1965. The Veterans of Future Wars movement spread quickly, with local chapters springing up on college campuses nationwide, with spin-off groups, such as the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans, following suit. (Although it was originally meant to be a satirical look at government, all but two members of the Princeton VFW ended up fighting in World War II.)

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4. Placard Switcheroo

Flip-cards seen at football games are generally used to spell out a word or phrase related to the teams on the field. The 1961 Rose Bowl game between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and the Washington Huskies was an exception and one of the first pranks involving flip-cards. During half-time at the game, spectators picked up the stack of cards from their seats and began to turn them over as instructed, revealing a series of gigantic images for people watching on TV. All was going according to plan until the fourteenth image when instead of showing the word "Huskies," the thousands of placards spelled "Caltech," the prank-happy school just down the road in Pasadena. Later, one of the Caltech students responsible admitted that a fellow prankster had posed as a reporter and asked the head Washington cheerleader how the flip-card system worked. Then other team members gained access to the cheerleaders' hotel rooms and switched instruction sheets.

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5. Reading the Fine Print

Everyone likes to win prizes, right? Well, a 1975 McDonald's sweepstakes caught the attention of three enterprising Caltech students. The three-week-long contest offered as prizes a year of groceries, a Datsun Z, McDonald's gift certificates and cash. But unlike other sweepstakes with entry restrictions, McDonald's invited guests to "enter as often as you wish." Caltech took the chain at its word. Using Caltech's mainframe computer, the trio programmed it to produce 1.2 million entries printed with the names of fellow Caltech students – 26 in all – then cut them into 3x5 forms and stuffed the boxes at the local McDonald's restaurants. The restaurant received a total of 3.4 million entries, one-third of which were from Caltech, whose students claimed 20 percent of the prizes. Thanks to them, few contests today allow entrants more than one entry per day.

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6. Relocating the Statue of Liberty

The February 1979 sighting of the top of the Statue of Liberty emerging from the icy water of Wisconsin's Lake Mendota was not just a noteworthy college prank, it was the fulfillment of a promise by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's new student government leaders to move the Statue of Liberty to Lake Mendota if elected. When Lady Liberty appeared on the ice, the student government president claimed they had had it flown in from New York by helicopter, but that the cable holding it had snapped, causing her to plunge into the lake. In fact, the statue had taken three days to erect, after having been constructed of chicken wire, papier-mâché and plywood.

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7. MIT Crashes the Party

In November 1982, during the second quarter of the Harvard-Yale football game, in Harvard Stadium, a weather balloon painted with the words "MIT" suddenly inflated in the middle of the field. It exploded a few minutes later, the field was repaired and the game continued. Those few minutes of fame took years of planning, however. In the end, it was 20 members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at MIT who broke into the stadium about nine times during pre-dawn hours to complete the wiring.

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8. Arm the Homeless

The rally cry to arm the homeless with guns and ammunition was at first dismissed as a joke back in December of 1993 in Columbus, Ohio, but when fundraising efforts ramped up, local citizens became alarmed. Instead of providing the local homeless with food, clothing and shelter, the "Arm the Homeless Coalition" aimed to provide them with guns and ammunition for personal protection as stated in a press release that was issued. Hearing this, local residents became alarmed. In fact, the public outcry became so loud that the Associated Press interviewed the Coalition director, followed by coverage on CNN and Rush Limbaugh. But an intrepid local newspaper reporter decided to track down the charity's director and discovered that he was actually the figment of an Ohio State student's imagination. It had all been a hoax.

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9. How Did I Get Up Here?

Among the buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most recognized is the "Great Dome," a classical dome structure covering one of the university's academic buildings. Because of its visibility from Boston, the Great Dome has become a favored spot for MIT pranksters to display their handiwork, a.k.a. "hacks." One of the most memorable hacks involved placing what appeared to be a real MIT Campus Police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the dome back in May of 1994. Inside was a dummy dressed in a police uniform armed with a toy disc gun and a box of doughnuts. On the windshield was a campus parking ticket indicating, "No permit for this location." In reality, the car was the outer metal parts of a Chevy Cavalier attached to a wooden frame, assembled on the roof of the dome overnight.

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10. The Great Pumpkin Mystery

Although most pranksters own up to their deeds eventually, the perpetrator of Cornell University's pumpkin prank of 1998 remains anonymous to this day. The mystery began on the morning of October 8, 1998, when what appeared to be a pumpkin appeared on the spire of Cornell's 173-foot-tall McGraw tower. How it got there was the source of much discussion on campus and around the world, as news of the pumpkin's whereabouts hit the Internet. Surprisingly, the item did not fall from its perch as expected and was eventually removed on March 13, 1999 by crane. Later, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences confirmed that it was a pumpkin and the Physics department determined the pumpkin had been hollowed out before being placed on the tower, leading it to dry out and stay put rather than decompose and fall.

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11. Creating a Reaction

The University of Chicago's annual four-day scavenger hunt has always been entertaining for participants and judges because the items on the 339-item list are often impossible to collect. From convincing celebrity professors to sign a pack of cigarettes or go clothes shopping to collecting 100 burned out light bulbs, students in the 1999 game went above and beyond in the hopes of winning. One duo decided to attempt one of the higher point-earning stunts – which few thought actually possible - by building a breeder reactor from discarded aluminum and carbon sheets and other naturally occurring elements. It worked. Yet despite their almost impossible feat, the radioactive team only came in second place.

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12. Bonsai Kitty

In homage to the Japanese practice of keeping trees small by restricting their growth, a new website debuted in 2000 dedicated to keeping kittens small by raising them in glass jars. Of course, Bonsaikitten.com was a spoof created by several MIT students and hosted on MIT web servers, but the site's sudden popularity caught the attention of animal rights organizations who demanded it be taken down. It was, in 2001, following an FBI investigation. It seems some people just can't take a joke.

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13. World's Best Lie

Students at the Edinburgh College of Art were given the opportunity to enter a graphic design contest sponsored by the Donside Paper Company in 2000. Entrants could choose to enter design solutions in one of three categories, which were: 1) Promoting the Bermuda Triangle as a holiday destination, 2) Designing a welcome pack for a shopaholic's association, or 3) Telling a lie convincingly. However, soon after it was announced, the contest was abruptly cancelled and participating colleges had to turn new entrants away. However, calls from Donside to inquire about the status of new entries made it clear that the colleges had themselves fallen for a convincing lie created by two enterprising students. The letter announcing the cancellation had, in fact, been created as an entry in the contest. It ended up winning hands down.

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14. Waiting for the Bell

Pranksters at Louisiana Tech University several years ago took it upon themselves to hack into the clock tower's system to mix things up a bit. Every hour, on the hour, for weeks, bell chimes were replaced by a medley of music. "Dueling Banjos" was the first replacement, followed by everything from "The Imperial March" to Hanson to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on Halloween.

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What do you get when 94 high school juniors decide to cross the street? A traffic tie-up. These 2006 high school class students decided to cross the street between two school buildings, normally no big deal. But they did it in single-file, crossing back and forth for nearly 15 minutes. The line of cars and buses, which backed up for blocks, could not break through the line-up.

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16. Yale Outbreak is Really Just a Break for Fun

When an email went out from the office of James A. Perrotti, chief of Yale police, to the university in December 2009 announcing that five rhesus monkeys infected with the Motaba virus had gotten loose from the Child Study Center, Yalies could have panicked. The ominous email stated that, "Yale-New Haven Hospital staff is ready to administer the E-1101 serum, but it must be administered within several hours of infection." Fortunately, the Yale Daily News debunked the prank in no time, noting that the university wouldn't house monkeys in the Child Study Center, and searching "Motaba virus" on Google takes you directly to the page for the film Outbreak.

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