The @BicycleLobby Twitter account is a parody inspired by last year’s unhinged rant about bike-share from Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz. Its running joke for the past 13 months has been that “the all-powerful bike lobby” envisioned by Rabinowitz is real — and yes, it controls the universe.

Sample tweet from July 20: “Today is the 45th anniversary of the day we faked the Moon landing.”

So when someone noticed this morning that the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge had been replaced with white flags, naturally @BicycleLobby took credit:

The funny thing is, some big news organizations took the bait. First the New York Daily News and then the Associated Press reported that bicyclists had claimed credit for the prank. Not long after, those early reports were scrubbed from the Daily News site and the paper was calling it a mystery. But News 1130 in Vancouver, BC, was still carrying the AP story at 2 p.m.

No one seemed to be enjoying it more than the mysterious @BicycleLobby author:

To be fair, we don’t reveal we’re a parody account until the second line of our profile. pic.twitter.com/fnS8um2tgO

— Bike Lobby (@BicycleLobby) July 22, 2014

If you believe we’re for real, we have a bridge in Brooklyn we’d like to sell you.

— Bike Lobby (@BicycleLobby) July 22, 2014