Keith Henson - Druid Prank

Druid Prank

Henson was known at the University of Arizona as one of the founders of the Druid Student Center, where a campus humor newspaper, The Frumious Bandersnatch was published in the late 1960s. He later cited an incident that occurred in his student days as a good example of memetic replication. When asked to fill in a form that required him to disclose his religious affiliations he wrote Druid. His prank was soon noticed by other students and before long almost 20% of the student body had registered themselves as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, Zen Druids, Latter-Day Druids and so on. The university was forced to remove the religious affiliation question, breaking the chain of replication and variation.

During much of this period, Henson worked at a geophysics company, mostly running induced polarization surveys in the western US and Peru. Henson also programmed geophysical type cases and wrote data reduction programs for the company.