Neil Steinburg's classic study on college pranks, "If At All Possible Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks" is very instructive relative to the Socorro hoax. Steinburg's hypothesis is that college pranks happen because there are many young creative minds that feel "stifled." And these minds are looking for release- a little fun. And there is a "geek" connection. Complicated and sophisticated pranks are often pulled off by engineering or science students who have the technical know how. The many well-known stunts by students at MIT and Caltech show that the grander the stunt- the more highly educated the students. The "fun" of such pranks does not come from admission to them, it comes from the reaction to them.

I recall two pranks that were pulled off by others during my own college days when living in Boston. MIT students had perfected two stunts that were mind-boggling. The first involved taking an enormous promotional prop "cow statue" (weighing a quarter-ton) from the lawn of a suburban steakhouse. Somehow the students were able to hoist the huge cow figure on top of the famous MIT "dome buiding." They removed it the following day -and returned it to the steakhouse lawn- without anyone ever having seen them. To this day, no one has ever owned up to the prank- and no one has ever come forward stating that they saw the stunt being carried out. It is still unknown how this was accomplished without use of a heavy construction crane. The second prank involved a high-tech catapult. Somehow the MIT students were able to hurl large clear water balloons made of very thin material up and over two city streets. The water balloons were sent careening across the block with precision to land exactly at the entrance of another college's building. When people went to open the door, invisible "water bombs" hit them out of nowhere- causing them to get soaked. Visibly stunned, they had no idea where the water burst came from- and had to go to class soaking wet.

THE SOCORRO HOAXERS TODAY

Great jokes can be carried out with great planning and calculation. But great jokes can also backfire. Perhaps the Socorro UFO hoaxers continue to get a "big laugh" over the whole thing and revel in their prank done decades ago. But it is more likely that the New Mexico Tech pranksters -who perhaps became famous scientists- are today oldsters in retirement struggling with what they did. They played a trick on a community, a nation and the world. They are keenly aware that they had involved the Air Force, media, scientists and many others. They know that Zamora's life was made difficult by the event. He was made a spectacle and suffered hugely from the unwanted attention. They must ponder their youthful folly- and how much time, effort and money was expended in the prank's long aftermath. It was "a prank gone wild." It had escalated beyond what they could ever have imagined. Often pulling off a brilliant prank "traps" the pranksters. They create the illusion, but they never receive the "credit." And no credit was ever sought by those who engineered one of the greatest hoaxes in UFO history.

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