Two white flags were discovered to have replaced American flags flying high on Brooklyn Bridge Tuesday morning causing general confusion and leaving two news sites open to a Twitter prank.
According to The New York Times, examinations of photos taken of the flags show the possibility that the flags might not have been replaced at all, but were instead white-washed.
The flags were pulled down before lunch after a brief investigation, which resulted in the closure of one lane on the bridge.
When the Times reached out to the New York Police Department over the flags they were simply told, "There's a white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge." When asked if police were looking into the matter, the officer simply replied, "'Course, yeah."
With no one quite sure of the reason yet, some news organizations were willing to believe just about anything in a hurry to be one of the first to report, with The Associated Press and The NY Daily News getting tricked by a parody Twitter account.
The Huffington Post reports that both were initially fooled by @BikeLobby, which took to Twitter to write they switched the flags "to signal our complete surrender of the Brooklyn Bridge bicycle path to pedestrians."
Both the Daily News and AP were initially fooled by the silly Twitter account, which noted, "To be fair, we don't reveal we're a parody account until the second line of our profile."
It still isn't known why the flags were either replaced or white-washed.