70-Year-Old Prank Revealed

Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle a story about a prank that the Clampers (E Clampus Vitus, man!) pulled on UC Berkeley was featured. In short the Clampers faked a brass plaque that intimated that Sir Francis Drake landed in Marin 462 years ago. The Clampers are an organization known for, well, drinking and horsing around, but this kind of prank, one that spans 70 years (or more than 400, depending on your point of view) is epic and inspiring.

Comments

Another retro review

[Animats]

This book came out in 1996. Hello?

Re:Is it all a hoax?

[Anonymous Coward]

PS: Did anyone else take the "riddle inside an enigma" or whatever to be an allusion to the film "JFK"?

Sigh.

Well, the prank was on them.

[Bruce Perens]

The E Clampus Vitus members who perpetrated the prank were themselves history professors at Berkeley as well. They had to be history professors because they used correctly archaic writing and language. But the joke was entirely on them. First, someone moved their plaque from Pt. Reyes to Remillard Point by Larkspur Landing, a drive across all of Marin and certainly deliberate IMO - it was placed in another likely place for the ship to land, but where the perpetrators couldn't find it. Then it was found three years later and conveyed to the professor, who believed its veracity. And then the perpetrators couldn't confess to their own fraud. It didn't happen under their control and they (and their victim) would have been disgraced because of all of the news that had gone on about it.

Bruce

Re:News to me...

[MrResistor]

The Clampers aren't a fraternity, they're a club, sort of like the Elks or the Order of the Moose.

Drinking and horsing around are what they're best known for, and what they do most often, but another thing that they do and are known for is restoring historical sites, like buildings in abandoned Gold Rush towns and such.