Years ago, a visitor from England pointed to various rock formations and asked me, “Is that man-made?” Of course, none were, but the thought that some striking natural feature could have been constructed seems, for some people, to have been a possibility.

Artist Scott Knauer seized on that notion in the Summer 1985 issue of The Boulder Lampoon, with his cover illustration of the “Construction of the Third Flatiron, 1885.”

In the mid-1980s, Boulder residents had a good sense of humor.

The Boulder Lampoon was billed as “Boulder’s humor magazine for adults of all ages,” including some content that would not be considered politically correct today. The free magazine made fun of everything and everybody. It also was short-lived and published only six issues — summer and winter in 1984, 1985, and 1986.

Intrigued with the drawing on the cover, I searched for a story on the Flatiron’s “construction.” Within the issue’s nearly 100 pages, I learned that successful Realtors were taught to say, “It used to be insulated with asbestos, but we replaced it with tofu.” Also, there was an article on the Boulder County mountain town of Jamestown that had declared itself a nuclear-free zone and wouldn’t allow nuclear weapons to invade its airspace.

But there was nothing at all on the construction of Boulder’s iconic mountain backdrop.

Millions of years ago, streams from the ancestral Rockies washed sediments that settled into layers. During the uplift of today’s Rockies, stress caused faults that uplifted the layers into what early Boulder settlers called “slabs” or “slides.”

The name “Flatiron” was said to have been given to these rock formations because they looked like irons that were standing upright on an ironing board. An early newspaper reference from 1898 — during the first year of Boulder’s Chautauqua summer resort — described the frontier town’s location by stating, ” On the west, the mountains rise abruptly, displaying perpendicular rocks called slides, or flatirons.”

The “construction” drawing depicts extensive scaffolding and a huge crane, with a person driving what appears to be an ox-drawn wagon toward tents set up for construction workers. The scene inspired a couple of spin-offs, including updated images (in both sepia and color) dated “1931,” complete with a truck and an airplane.

These images fooled some readers of a Reddit thread, on social media, who continued the spoof. One comment read, “After they finished this they constructed the Grand Canyon. It was part of the New Deal.” Another person asked, “Are the Flatirons fake?” to which another replied, “The entire town is as a matter of fact. It was all built as a backlot for [the 1970s television show] Mork and Mindy.”

What most readers haven’t recognized, however, is that the Flatirons are numbered from north to south. According to Pat Ament and Cleveland McCarty’s 1970 definitive book “High Over Boulder,” the flatiron labeled the “third,” actually is the “first.” This time, the joke’s on The Boulder Lampoon. But maybe the artist planned it that way.

Copies of The Boulder Lampoon are available to read in the Carnegie Library for Local History, at 1125 Pine St., Boulder.

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com.