THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY WE DECEIVE : Playful Pranks, Heinous Hoaxes

When English artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley showed how they flattened a circle of grain stalks in Kent by dragging around some wooden planks, they became the bad boys of an international hoax dispute.

The artists had been creating crop circles in England for 13 years, they announced last fall, duping self-styled sleuths who claimed the patterns were made by visiting space aliens.

Only now, it’s the sleuths who are crying hoax.

“All of a sudden two jokers come out and say, ‘Oh, we’ve done them all,’ and you get coverage in every newspaper and on every major broadcast system,” fumes crop-circle aficionado Bruce Rideout, a psychologist at Pennsylvania’s Ursinus College. But not all of the circles are phony, Rideout and others contend: In a mind-teasing contradiction, the hoaxers’ hoax may be in claiming the hoax.

Although few hoaxes or purported hoaxes generate such transatlantic controversy, the genre generally represents the more sinister end of a spectrum of shenanigans and high jinks.

Psychiatrists who look into works of deception and ridicule distinguish the hoax from its playful cousin, the prank. Hoaxes, they note, may be potentially dangerous; they may involve fraud and may be conceived for such unfunny reasons as degrading an enemy or increasing the hoaxer’s self-esteem.

“A hoax . . . starts to imply something much more ominous,” says Charles Ford, a University of Alabama, Birmingham, psychiatrist who studies deceit. The hoaxer, he says, may experience “a transient feeling of superiority and power.”

More serious pranks may also be pulled for hostile or competitive purposes, experts say.

“They can involve unconscious feelings, such as malevolence or getting one up on someone else,” says psychiatrist Roman Anshin, who teaches at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

For Betty Ligon, a hoax pulled years ago began as a way to enliven a boring job.

As a young society columnist for the Amarillo (Tex.) Globe-News, Ligon yearned to be a foreign correspondent and resented covering teas and luncheons. In those days, papers published complete guest lists, and one day Ligon decided to drop in an extra name--a fictional Mrs. Harrison Benudi.

When the name went unnoticed Ligon became bolder, adding Benudi’s name to other lists, until the town’s socially conscious set began asking who on Earth the newcomer was.

After Ligon revealed that Benudi was a former New York fashion model, married to a Maj. Benudi stationed at the local military base, Amarillo’s society mavens began claiming they’d invited her for lunch.

At this point things began to spin out of hand. The publisher, who had gotten wind of the hoax and was amused, upped the ante by adding the socialite to his column and announcing that she was not a former model but a woman of ill repute.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, a letter arrived from an outraged “Maj. Benudi”--and the furious publisher ordered Ligon to end the charade by moving the Benudis out of town in her next column. (Months later, an editor confessed to writing the “major’s” letter, which he sent to embarrass the publisher for passing him over for a promotion, Ligon says.)

Although these days such a hoax would likely result in disciplinary action, Ligon, now a free-lance entertainment columnist in El Paso, Tex., says she suffered no professional fallout and recalls the incident gleefully, exclaiming: “We got very power drunk.”

Such schemes as the make-believe Mrs. Benudi aren’t necessarily the same as “utilitarian” hoaxes, says UCLA psychiatrist Roderic Gorney.

“The utilitarian type of hoaxer is a person who is often trying to make something that is false believed,” with the goal of making money or attracting attention, he says.

Perhaps nowhere did the utilitarian hoax work more dramatically than in Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.”

“We know now that in the early days of the 20th Century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s. . . .,” Welles intoned, delivering the tale as if it were live coverage of Martians invading the planet.

Intended as a scary Halloween broadcast that would boost the Mercury Theater’s sluggish ratings in New York, the hoax went awry, panicking thousands and creating a legend.

Although things settled down fairly quickly after the Welles broadcast, that wasn’t the case two years ago when two KROQ-FM deejays attempted to get their program noticed by airing a trumped-up murder confession that would become notorious.

Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter “concocted (the confession) as a radio bit that would happen and then just go away,” says Trip Reeb, the station’s general manager. Instead, it set off a 10-month search for the “killer” and gained a spot on TV’s “Unsolved Mysteries.”

After their scheme was discovered last April, the deejays were suspended without pay for five days. They were also required to reimburse authorities for the investigation and to perform 149 hours of community service.

When hoaxers don’t live up to expectations their tricks may also turn sour, as happened in the case of Ed Greer, a cult figure of Southern California hoaxes.

One day in 1981, Greer, then a 33-year-old engineer for Hughes Aircraft, parked his car at Venice Beach and disappeared, making it appear as if he had drowned during a lunchtime swim.

But a fellow employee spotted him later that day at LAX, and, instead of mourning, colleagues began celebrating his escape from corporate tedium with an annual “Ed Greer Day” party.

“We’d speculate on where he was,” picturing him on a tropical island, says graphic artist Joan Klapper. People wrote limericks celebrating Greer’s flight, even adding the verb to greer ,” meaning to vanish, to their vocabulary.

But then, after seven years, Ed Greer turned up. He was living in Texas under an assumed identity, working for a small oil exploration firm and living with a steady girlfriend--in other words, doing basically what he’d always done.

Their fantasies destroyed, Hughes employees celebrated a final time--only this party was dubbed “Ed’s a Jerk.”

At the other end of the range of tricks, pranks can be a delightful, childlike way of sidestepping reality. According to Sigmund Freud, the goal of being comic is to attain “the state of childhood in which (we) did not need humor to make us happy.”

Los Angeles psychiatrist Robert Fintzy, who treats children and adults, calls pranks “socially acceptable manifestations of regression.” Says Fintzy: “The child within us does not die until we go to the grave. That child demands expression.”

Just about everybody has a childish prank lurking inside, psychiatrists allow, even if it’s only an April Fools’ Day charade or planning a surprise birthday party.

The more inventive may go on to enact outlandish scenarios and develop stunts that could contend as Guinness world-record setters.

These pranks can bring people closer together, even can “vitalize and enhance friendships,” Fintzy says, “because they’re sharing a release of tension.”

Few places boast such friendly powerhouse pranks as Caltech on Ditch Day.

One day each spring, the seniors ditch class, leaving ingenious systems called “stacks” to block their dormitory doors. From 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., when the seniors return, the other students labor to penetrate the stacks and get to the food and drink left inside rooms.

One memorable “stack” was a physics problem that stumped even Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project. In another classic incident, students rejected the reward for breaking a stack and played a trick of their own: Taking apart one senior’s Porsche in the parking lot, they reassembled it in his room, leaving the motor running.

Other pranks simulate theater, with a perpetrator, a target and an audience. They may even include applause or booing, Fintzy says.

Glendale resident Althea Schwartz, 40, has long prided herself on coming up with dramatic birthday pranks.

The best, she says, occurred the year she decided to phone actor Marvin Miller, who played Michael Anthony in the popular 1950s television show “The Millionaire.” It was Anthony who carried the $1-million check from his boss to a lucky recipient.

On this particular day, an amused Miller drove to the house where Schwartz and family were celebrating her husband’s birthday.

Miller had dug up the old valise and a check used on the show, and when Schwartz’s husband opened the door, he went right into his “Hello, my name is . . . and I have a check” routine, Schwartz says. She swears her husband fell to the floor with laughter, while everyone relished his mirth.

Says Schwartz of the prank: “It takes people out of the mundane. I delight in seeing their reactions.”

The trick, however, is being able to pull it off. Says Fintzy: “It requires a certain amount of creativity and daredevilry to put yourself on the line.”