Alan & Jeanne Abel: Inside SINA

The first comprehensive documentation of one of the 20th century's most audacious and longest-running media hoaxes: the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), perpetrated by husband-and-wife prankster team Alan and Jeanne Abel along with their friend Buck Henry. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, SINA claimed to be a moralist campaign advocating for the clothing of all animals taller than four inches and longer than six inches. The fictional organization's leader appeared on The Tonight Show, the Today Show, and CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, picketed the White House demanding the Kennedys cover their horses, and generated vast international media coverage before Time Magazine finally exposed the hoax in 1963.

The book tells the whole story through Alan Abel's own words and an eye-popping array of original documents, news reports, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera that reveal how three comedic anarchists pioneered techniques of media manipulation that remain relevant in our current era of viral misinformation and performative outrage. A brilliant satire of moral panic and censorship that succeeded so well many people took it entirely seriously.