Little Blue Man Hoax

The Chicago Tribune (via the Huron Daily Tribune) offers a retrospective on 1958's Little Blue Man hoax.

The story: in early 1958 sightings of a "little blue man" running along the side of Michigan highways began appearing in the news. It turned out that what motorists were seeing was actually a young man named Jerry Sprague, dressed in a costume that included: long underwear, a football helmet, gloves, combat boots, a bedsheet with two holes cut out for the eyes and a button sewed on for the mouth and blinking lights on the helmet -- all of which had been spray painted a shade of blue that glowed faintly in the dark. He would jump out of the trunk of his friend's car, run along the highway a bit, and then jump back in the trunk.

The mysterious little blue man soon became national news. The pranksters eventually turned themselves in to the police and were let off with a warning.

Extraterrestrial Life

Posted on Mon Nov 10, 2008


Comments

Jerry Sprague never should have turned himself in. If the Internet had existed in 1958, the guy would have been a viral sensation.
Posted by Cranky Media Guy  on  Mon Nov 10, 2008  at  07:03 PM
In 1958, Betty Johnson released a single called "The Little Blue Man" about a magic blue man that only she could see. She pushed it off a building but only hurt its feelings. The song is vague enough to be about Sprague but the article didn't mention it.

The cherry on top of this weird sundae is that the voice of the little blue man was Hugh Downs.
Posted by Mark  on  Tue Nov 11, 2008  at  12:12 PM
erm... from the article

He said there was a song on the radio at the time called "Little Blue Man" by Betty Johnson, which inspired the blue color of their "alien" creation.
Posted by zoo  on  Tue Nov 11, 2008  at  12:56 PM
And some thirty years later we get the Blue Man Group.

Coincidence? I think not.
Posted by KDP  on  Wed Nov 12, 2008  at  07:18 AM
Oh, well those Blue Men confined to a musical theater group. They brought smiles to those kids. But the term
Posted by collen  on  Thu Sep 10, 2009  at  08:49 PM
I watched Mr. Paul Karason -- the so-called "colloidal silver blue man" -- on television and he was demonstrating how much colloidal silver he takes to stay infection-free. It is WAY too much. Like twenty or thirty times the normal daily dosage. No wonder he turned blue.

I was fortunate enough to find a
Posted by Spencer Jones  on  Sat Oct 03, 2009  at  01:27 AM
Only got off with a warning? Nowadays he'd be fined a few hundred thousand dollars, and sent to 3 months in prison.
Posted by D.  on  Fri May 24, 2013  at  02:17 AM
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