Someone Else's Science Project

This is my best science fair story. Actually, I think it's my only science fair story, but I don't think you should hold that against me. How many people have even one story about a science fair?

In high school, I hung out with geeks. It seemed to make sense, because I was a geek myself. And this may come as a surprise to you, but not all geeks like science fairs. My crowd in particular thought science fairs were a big waste of time. Everyone already knows that a bean plant will grow better if you water it, right? So we sort of resented having to do goofy little science projects with their three-part backdrops and carefully-labeled hypotheses. So one of us (not me, although I wish it had been) made a phony science project and snuck it into the fair when no one was looking.

The phony project was attributed to "Michael Ellis," which is the kind of random Monty Python reference you have to expect from us geeks. It had a lot of scientific gobbledygook all over it, but the basic goal (which you had to do a lot of work to find) was to establish where Elvis Presly might be. The hypothesis, as I remember, was "The King will never die". So there was this elaborate computer program, probably in BASIC, that claimed to take Elvis's songs and process the data to find the most likely places in the US for him to be hiding after faking his death. If anyone took a close look at the program, they would have noticed that it didn't really do anything. My favorite part was the random number generator right next to the comment "Note: This is not a random number generator".

So you've got an obviously-bogue project here, right? It's attributed to a student that doesn't exist, it employs completely fallacious techniques, and I think we made room for it by squeezing it in between two other projects. And yet it ended up in the official program, thanks to the brilliant idea of sticking awards on it. Have you ever noticed how many different awards and prizes there are at a science fair? Hundreds. So we stuck a couple of ribbons on it and claimed that it won things like "Special Judges' Award" and "Rock and Roll Category: Second Place". And naturally, nobody looked too hard at it, because it was weird and complicated, so the real judges must have just shrugged and assumed there was a special prize they hadn't heard about.

Obviously, even though it wasn't my prank, I helped out. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my entire social circle spent far more time on it than any of us did on our individual projects. I can't even remember what mine was. I do remember that we decided against doing the big reveal, though.

Traditionally, when you do a hoax like this, you want to have a moment when you spring the truth on people. Like, at the same high school, there was a daily newsletter that first-period teachers were supposed to read to the students. One time, I made a fake one and carefully replaced every single one in the school. And it was structured to start out realistic and eventually turn crazy until it was obviously a fake. But for the science project, we didn't do that. Our goal wasn't to point and laugh at people's gullibility (although that was a nice side benefit). We wanted to create the fake, but telling everybody about the joke wasn't our scene, man.

We just walked away and let poor Michael Ellis's science project sit in the gym. I assume someone eventually threw it away. It was great.