Robert G. Heft

This goo was worth a point in February 2025.

publication date: Saturday, February 8, 2025 (part of February 2025)

category: Hoaxes

clue: This long-serving mayor and self-serving public speaker told a hefty lie about his place in American vexillological history, which became so widely repeated as fact that it was treated as such by the Smithsonian Institute, Wikipedia, and Celebrity Goo Game.

explanation: Long before he passed away in 2009, Heft claimed to have designed the 50-star flag of the United States as a class project and submitted it in a contest that led to it being selected by the federal government. Over the years, he made additional false embellishments such as being present on stage when President Eisenhower revealed it to the public, having it flown around the world hundreds of times to hang in various embassies, having it be damaged in the 1965 car bomb attack on the American embassy in Saigon in the lead-up to the Vietnam War, and personally being on The Tonight Show three times to discuss it. He became the subject of a celebrity goo in 2017 that treated his story as fact, since it was widely considered to be true at the time. A 2022 investigation by Slate exposed that Heft had manufactured almost the entire story, probably innocently at first but eventually in service of being elected six times as an Ohio mayor and earning an income for decades as a paid public speaker. Heft did manufacture his own 50-star flag for a class project and submit it in a contest, but he did not design it (the same design had been under consideration by the government for most of the 1950s in anticipation of Alaska and Hawaii becoming states), nor was he ever officially credited as the designer by an act of Congress as he long claimed. more…

intended difficulty: hard

solved by: Russ Wilhelm, Steve West, and Samir Mehta

trivia: When Scott discovered an article online about Heft's hoax, he remembered the 2017 goo and considered revising it, but decided that this information would work better as the basis for an entirely new goo.