From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, plane hijackings that diverted flights to Cuba were as popular as lava lamps and sobbing in a field after taking bad acid. There's even an unsettlingly long Wikipedia entry dedicated to this very specific kind of hijacking, the Golden Age of which stretched from 1968 to 1972. In February of 1969, a guy named Allen Funt was on one of those flights. He was flying Newark to Miami, and the fun began when the captain announced they'd first be making a quick stop in Havana at the request of a particularly insistent set of passengers.
Fear rippled throughout the cabin -- save for a handful of passengers who immediately got the joke. What joke? Well, see, before Ashton Kutcher donned the iconic trucker hat that bestowed upon him the mystical ancient power of annoying celebrities with ridiculous pranks, Allen Funt hosted America's original hidden camera prank show, Candid Camera, from 1948 to 1967. Some of the passengers looked at the hijackers, then looked at Funt, then back at the hijackers, and then reached the very logical conclusion that they were on Candid Camera.There were a couple of problems with that assumption. Candid Camera had been canceled two years earlier, for starters. But of course, that's just what the Candid Camera guy would want you to think. The second was that this was extremely real. Funt couldn't convince the few passengers who thought otherwise until the plane landed in Havana hours later. He, his wife and children, and all his fellow passengers eventually made it back to the states safely -- and so did Funt's camera crew, who were flying to Miami with him to film an entire movie made of hidden camera footage.
The story has been exaggerated over the years. Some versions of it have the passengers exploding into uproarious applause at the committed performances of the actors playing the hijackers. According to Funt, only about four people were convinced it was a setup. Everyone else was soiling themselves in frightened silence, hoping there wasn't a camera watching them do it.
