This 86-Year-Old Prankster Claims Trump Owes Him $900

Nobody knows “fake news” better than Alan Abel. He pretty much invented it.

The man has spent much of his 80-some years finding outrageously strange and clever ways to bamboozle the media. In 1959, when he was a young man, Abel founded the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. The group’s slogan: “A nude horse is a rude horse.” The organization, which declared it a matter of moralistic urgency to make dogs and horses and other animals wear pants, was a joke, but the Today show (among other media outlets) took the bait. “Even Walter Cronkite believed it,” Abel says. “About putting Marina shorts on horses and a mumu on a cow. That should be a tip right there. A red flag. ‘What do you mean you want to put a mumu on a cow?’”

Since then, Abel has typically been described as a “prankster” or a “media hoaxer.” His career far precedes The Onion, Facebook hoaxes and Sacha Baron Cohen. During the 1970s, with help from some collaborators, Abel fooled reporters into believing that a hired actor was the Watergate informant Deep Throat—and in 1980, he executed his greatest hoax to date: He died. Well, not actually. He from a heart attack. He even fooled into publishing a premature obituary, then re-emerged, very much alive, at a press conference the day after the obit ran. He’s alive still today. He’s probably 86.