In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama
announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination
of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper
spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss
peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of
viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they
could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC
diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in
a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." Check out the actual broadcast archived on the BBC's website (You need the RealVideo player installed to see it, and it usually loads very slowly).

In its April 1985 edition, Sports Illustrated
published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for
the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch and he could reportedly throw a
baseball with startling, pinpoint accuracy at 168 mph (65 mph faster
than anyone else has ever been able to throw a ball). Surprisingly,
Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had
mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the
guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa." Mets fans everywhere
celebrated at their teams's amazing luck at having found such a gifted
player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for
more information. But in reality this legendary player only existed in
the imagination of the writer of the article, George Plimpton.

 

In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in
black and white. The station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson,
appeared on the news to announce that thanks to a newly developed
technology, all viewers could now quickly and easily convert their
existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a
nylon stocking over their tv screen, and they would begin to see their
favorite shows in color. Stensson then proceeded to demonstrate the
process. Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of people, out of the
population of seven million, were taken in. Actual color tv
transmission only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.

In
1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty
Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty
Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic
Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger.
Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed that it was all a
practical joke a few hours later. The best line inspired by the affair
came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the
sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold,
though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford
Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

 

In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian
published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth
anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian
Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of
articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this
obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower
Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's
phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the
idyllic holiday spot. Few noticed that everything about the island was
named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely
credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that then
gripped the British tabloids in the following decades.

 

In 1992 National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation
program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running
for President again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything
wrong, and I won't do it again." Accompanying this announcement were
audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners
responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls
expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show
did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a
practical joke. Nixon's voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.


The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason
newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state
legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant
pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article
had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way
around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became
apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature
began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the
legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of
legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was
written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.


In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today
announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed
Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans.
According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same
ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty,
etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit
of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a
follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a
hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the
new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many
others requested their own 'right handed' version."

In its April 1995 issue Discover
Magazine announced that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr.
Aprile Pazzo had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded
naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their
heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot,
allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this
ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and
causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the
hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that
the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious
disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To
the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article
quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

 

In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2
that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to
occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The
planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a
gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's
own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at
the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would
experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2
began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to
have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her
eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

 

Saddam Hussein and his sons may have been ruthless, power-hungry dictators, but that didn't stop them from trying to give the people of Iraq a good chuckle every April Fool's Day. On April 1, 1998 the Babil newspaper, owned by Hussein's son Uday, informed its readers that President Clinton had decided to lift sanctions against Iraq, only to admit later that it was just joking. One can imagine the knee-slapping guffaws when readers realized how they'd been taken for a ride. The laughs continued in 1999 when Uday mischeviously announced that the monthly food rations would be supplemented to include bananas, Pepsi, and chocolate. Again, just a joke. At this point, the Husseins appear to have run out of material, because in 2000 they recycled the sanction-lifting gag, and in 2001 trotted out the ration-supplement crowd-pleaser one more time. The merciless quality with which the same joke was repeated year after year had an almost surreal quality to it. In fact, it almost makes one sympathize with Saudi Arabia's chief cleric, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, who in 2001 decreed that the celebration of April Fool's Day should be banned altogether. It's not known if the Sheikh had his neighbor's hijinks in mind when he issued the ban.

Imagine reading that your husband or brother who has been held in a squalid Romanian prison for years is finally going to be released. You make the long journey to the prison and stand outside the prison gates, waiting desperately for the moment you'll be reunited with your loved one, only to hear... 'April Fools! No one's being released!' This experience happened to sixty people in April 2000 who read in the Opinia newspaper that their loved ones were going to be released from the Baia Mare prison in Romania. They made the long journey to the prison, only to learn that the paper had played an April Fool's joke on them. The Opinia later published an apology.

 

Glenn Howlett's colleagues at London city hall thought they had dreamed up a great gag. They sent him a memo informing him that the really big report he was working on was going to be due early, in just two weeks. The tip-off was that the memo was dated April 1st. Ha Ha. Except Howlett didn't realize it was a joke. He received the memo while on vacation and immediately cut his vacation short and phoned the office to tell everyone to start getting busy. But as he contemplated the new deadline he worked himself up into an increasing state of panic, until soon he began to experience heart palpitations. Finally he collapsed from the stress and had to take leave from work. As he was recovering he realized it just wasn't worth risking his health to finish the report, so he filed for early retirement. At which point someone told him the early deadline was just a joke. He responded by suing for damages. As a consequence of his lawsuit, city hall banned employees from pulling any more pranks.

The film National Lampoon's Vacation includes a scene in which Chevy Chase ties a dog to the bumper of his car, then forgets the dog is there and drives away. Inspired by this scene, Paul Goobie tied a dead chihuahua to the bumper of his co-worker's car. His co-worker, Kevin Meloy, got in the car and drove off, unaware that the chihuahua was there. Obviously passing motorists were horrified. But what made the situation even worse was that Meloy was deaf, so he couldn't hear the other motorists frantically honking at him. Happily he drove on for miles until finally someone was able to get his attention. Police charged Goobie with unlawful disposal of a dead animal.

Randy Wood's marriage was over, but apparently he was still a little bitter about the divorce. So he decided to play a prank on his ex-wife. He called her up and asked her to come over, telling her that he had something to show her. Obligingly she drove over, only to find him hanging by a noose from a tree in his front yard. Terrifed, she immediately dialed 911. Emergency services, including firefighters, policemen, and paramedics, soon showed up. But when they went to cut Wood down they discovered he wasn't dead. He wasn't even hurt. He had strung himself up as a prank to scare his ex-wife, using a lineman's harness similar to those used by utility crews. The authorities warned that he would face a fine of up to $1,000 and a year in jail for his prank.

Sitra Walker was an employee at a clothing store in Columbus, Ohio. She had only been working there for two weeks, but already she felt that she knew the manager well enough to joke around with him. So on April 1, 2003 she called him up at his home and told him that armed men were robbing the store. The manager immediately called the police, who promptly dispatched four cruisers. Minutes later Walker phoned the manager again and screamed 'April Fools'. Too late. When the police arrived moments later they weren't amused and charged her with inducing a panic. Walker's manager fired her.

In 1996 the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported that the Russian parliament was debating whether to revive the Warsaw Pact. The startling report was immediately repeated by news agencies in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, causing widespread panic. A few hours later Itar-Tass admitted that it had just been joking, and apologized for any confusion it might have caused.

In 1986 Israel Radio broadcast that Nabih Berri, leader of the Shi'ite Amal movement, had been assassinated. The news caused an immediate flare-up of tensions in the region. However, Israeli officials quickly denounced the report as a hoax. The false report was traced back to an army intelligence officer who had planted the news item in the broadcasts of the Israeli Army's intelligence monitoring unit, from which it had been picked up by Israel Radio. Apparently the officer had meant it as an April Fool's joke (because hey, nothing says funny like stirring up tension in the Middle-East). Israel's Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, announced that the unnamed officer would be court-martialed. "Berri Berri funny," one foreign correspondent wryly commented.

In 1999 DJs at Oregon radio station KSJJ announced that the Ochoco dam had burst, threatening downstream areas with massive flooding. What made the warning believable was that hundreds of houses in these areas had been damaged the previous year when the Ochoco Creek had flooded, so terrified homeowners who heard the news quickly prepared to flee. Later the DJs informed their listeners that it was all a joke. They had just been 'having a little fun'. The homeowners were not amused.

On April 1, 2003, as thousands of American-led coalition troops stormed across Iraq, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, held a press conference in Moscow. Many were expecting him to announce that Iraq conceded defeat. Instead Kunfuth chose this moment to hold a gag press conference. Holding up a piece of paper that he identified as a news flash from Reuters, he read aloud from it: "The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven." Immediately the room full of reporters went silent with shock. Then Kunfuth grinned and shouted 'April Fools!' Only a few days after this unexpected moment of levity, the Iraqi government completely collapsed.