But who hired the Bs?

I believe your not-so-fuzzy memory is recalling the Hand Held HERF contest, which can be found archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040608055602/www.voltsamps.com/pages/projects/hhh/. Seems like HERF has been around forever, but for some reason it's always hard to find good info on it. Slava takes down the site altogether not too long after that archive snapshot "due to the abuse of this site's content".