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Alan Abel, known for his media hoaxes, holds a copy of the official magazine for the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. The gag sought “to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches”Larry Stoddard/AP

Alan Abel, a professional hoaxer who for more than half a century gleefully hoodwinked the American public, not least of all by making himself the subject of an earnest news obituary in The New York Times in 1980, apparently actually did die, Friday, at his home in Southbury, Conn. He was 94.

His daughter, Jenny Abel, said the cause was complications of cancer and heart failure.

Abel’s putative 1980 death, orchestrated with his characteristic military precision and involving a dozen accomplices, had been confirmed to The New York Times by several rigorously rehearsed confederates. One masqueraded as the grieving widow. Another posed as an undertaker, answering fact-checking calls from the newspaper on a dedicated phone line that Mr. Abel had installed.

After the obituary was published, Mr. Abel, symbolically rising from the grave, held a gleeful news conference, and a much-abashed Times ran a retraction.

This time around, Mr. Abel’s death was additionally confirmed by the Regional Hospice and Palliative Care in Connecticut, which said it had tended to him in his last days, and Carpino Funeral Home in Southbury, which said it was overseeing the arrangements.

Long before The Onion began printing farcical news articles, there was Alan Abel. A former jazz drummer and stand-up comic who was later a writer, campus lecturer and filmmaker, Mr. Abel was best known as a perennial public gadfly, a self-appointed calling that combined the verbal pyrotechnics of a 19th-century flimflam man with acute 20th-century media savvy.

He was, the news media conceded with a kind of irritated admiration, an American original in the mould of P.T. Barnum, a role model whom Mr. Abel reverently acknowledged.

A master psychologist, keen strategist and possessor of an enviable deadpan and a string of handy aliases, Mr. Abel had an almost unrivalled ability to divine exactly what a harried news media wanted to hear and then give it to them, irresistibly gift-wrapped. At the spate of news conferences he orchestrated over the years, the presence of comely women, free food and free liquor also did not hurt.

But beneath the attractive packaging lay a box of snakes on springs.

Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA – which sought “to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches” – began in 1959. It starred his friend, Buck Henry, who later became a well-known actor and screenwriter, as the group’s puritanical president, G. Clifford Prout.

The campaign, which Abel intended as a sendup of censorship, proved so convincing that it found a bevy of authentic adherents, with SINA chapters springing up throughout the country. Over the next few years, the organization’s activities were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News. The group was exposed as a hoax by Time magazine in 1963.

“People tell me that Walter Cronkite is still mad at me,” Mr. Abel told The Washington Post in 2006. “He’s not mad at Hitler. He’s not mad at Castro. He’s mad at me because I fooled him with ‘A nude horse is a rude horse.’”

As Mr. Abel often had to explain, he did not perpetrate his hoaxes to fleece anyone: He made a point of returning donations sent by innocents to his spurious causes. Mr. Abel’s lifework appeared to be a highly personal brand of performance art, equal parts self-promotion, social commentary, study of the breathtaking naiveté of press and public, and, last but far from least, pure old-fashioned high jinks.

“A few hundred years ago, I would have been a court jester,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2007. His primary intent, Mr. Abel often said, was “to give people a kick in the intellect.”

His best-known kicks included Yetta Bronstein, the phantom Jewish grandmother from the Bronx who ran for president in 1964 and at least once afterward on a platform that included fluoridation, national Bingo tournaments and the installation of truth serum in congressional drinking fountains.

Never seen in person, Yetta was voiced by Mr. Abel’s wife, Jeanne, in a spate of telephone and radio interviews.

Alan Irwin Abel was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1924. He was reared 30 miles away in Coshocton, where the Abels were among the few Jewish families in town. From his mother, Ida, who once called the FBI to report as a spy a neighbour who refused to take down a cherished portrait of Hitler, the young Mr. Abel learned the efficacy of direct action.

From his father, Louis, who kept a general store, he learned the value of hucksterism.

“He’d put ‘Limit – Two to a Customer’ in front of the things that wouldn’t sell,” Mr. Abel told The New Yorker in 1990, “and they’d be gone in a minute.”

According to records in the National Archives, Abel enlisted in the Army in 1943. After the war, he resumed his college education, earning a bachelor’s degree in education from Ohio State University in 1950.

Mr. Abel toured for a time as a one-man percussion act – half playing, half comic patter. He soon realized he wanted to be a stand-up comic but found he could not make a career of it. He worked briefly at more conventional jobs, including one day as a liquid fertilizer salesman, but the grey-flannel life was not for him.

Then, in 1959, he found himself stuck in backed-up traffic on a Texas highway. What had brought things to a standstill were a cow and bull in the middle of the road, in the vigorous act of making a calf. As Mr. Abel studied the aghast faces of his fellow drivers, the seeds of SINA were sown.

But as he discovered, there was barely a living in hoaxing. To stage his more lavish stunts, he depended on a series of well-heeled backers of roguish bent. Over time, as one late-20th-century recession gave way to another, such angels grew harder to come by.

Mr. Abel earned a modest living through his books, magazine articles and speeches. But as “Abel Raises Cain” depicts, he and his wife eventually lost their house in Westport, Conn., to creditors.

In addition to his daughter, he leaves his wife and a grandson.

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