A meteoric descent

Wolfgang Mayer, a German publicist who was a distant relative of the West German goal keeping ace, Sepp Mayer, came up with an excellent idea to promote a science fiction movie in the 1950’s. The name of the film is not known, it’s all a bit hazy as the publicity for it was actually bigger than the film itself!

Wolfgang Mayer shipped in a large amount of aggregate from the Jura region of France and in the depths of the night, he had it deposited on a main traffic artery in Paris. Mayer then contacted various media agencies, informing them that this was debris from a meteorite. Mayer also payed local residents to corroborate his story by saying that they had actually seen this mass falling from the sky. However, in true French fashion, by lunchtime the following day everyone had reneged on the deal and outed the stunt.

For causing major traffic chaos, Mayer was arrested and charged and put in prison for many months. The movie was quickly forgotten. When Mayer got out of prison, he tried similar stunts of which some were successful and others not. He went on to work in a governement department creating a document on the future of media/press intrusion. In his later years, he lectured in numerous universities in Europe, as he had become a vehement critic of publicity stunts, based on his own experiences. He died in relative obscurity in the 1960s.