Saturday, March 31 2012 - 05:56 PM
April the First
Flying Penguins

On April 1, 2008, the BBC played footage of a colony of flying penguins that it claimed had just been discovered on King George Island near Antarctica. In the “mockumentary,” former Monty Python star Terry Jones played the David Attenborough-esque guide.

“We’d been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come,” Jones said. “But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.”

Scientists and science journals seem an unlikely source for April Fools pranks, which is the reason they are often so successful.

Discovering the bigon

In April 1996, Discover Magazine reported that physicists had discovered a new fundamental particle of matter: the bigon. Like other recent particle finds, the bigon flutters in and out of existence in mere millionths of a second, they explained. But unlike the others, this one is the size of a bowling ball.

Physicist Albert Manque (not a real person) and his colleagues at the Centre de l’Étude des Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris (not a real institute) supposedly found the particle by accident, when a computer connected to one of their vacuum-tube experiments exploded. “The physicists set up a video camera and repeated the experiment with the same explosive results,” Discover journalist Tim Folger wrote. “In one of the video frames a black bowling-ball-sized object hovered above the wreckage of the computer. In the next frame it was gone.”

Discover’s parody of science-speak was truly impressive: “The researchers believe that the electric field in the vacuum tube somehow altered the energy state of the vacuum inside the cathode-ray tube in the nearby computer monitor. The physicists believe that they accidentally generated an electric field of just the right size in the computer to nudge a new particle, a bigon, into being,” Folger wrote.

Despite the claims that the bigon might be responsible for a host of unexplained phenomena such as ball lightning , sinking souffles, and spontaneous human combustion, and despite the April 1 publication date, the fake story generated a huge response from readers.

Swiss spaghetti

On April 1, 1957, the BBC decided to pull a prank on its audience by airing a story on the fragile Swiss spaghetti crop, a food source that was having a bumper year. Along with footage of peasants plucking strands of pasta from trees, the BBC advised viewers on how to grow their own spaghetti garden. Hilarity ensued.

The Museum of Hoaxes curator called this British prank the best of all time. “I think it shows absurdity in a gentle way,” Boese said. “It highlights how easily we can be fooled, but in a fairly harmless way. And above all, it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

Left-handed burgers

In 1998, Burger King ran an ad in USA Today saying people could get a Whopper specially created for left-handed people . Its condiments, the ad claimed, were designed to drip out of the right side. According to sources, not only did customers order the new burgers, but some burger-eaters specifically requested the “old” right-handed artery-smasher.

The Taco Liberty Bell

In 1996, the Taco Bell Corp. announced it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. The announcement caused much consternation among citizens, who started calling the National Historic Park in Philadelphia to protest the corporate name-change. Hours later, Taco Bell let the word slip that it was all a practical joke.

Telepathic tweeting

The April 1999 edition of Red Herring Magazine, then a successful tech/business publication, included an article about a revolutionary new technology that allowed users to compose and send email messages of up to 240 characters… telepathically.

The article attributed the new development to computer genius Yuri Maldini, who had supposedly created it as a spinoff of the encrypted communications systems he developed for the U.S. Army during the Gulf War. The article even describes an incident when Maldini answered his interviewer’s question telepathically, via email. Red Herring received numerous letters from fooled readers.

Dragons In Nature

In 1998, the online edition of Nature pulled what may be the most cerebral April Fools’ Day prank in history. In an article discussing the debate over the origin of birds, the writer refers to the discovery of “a near-complete skeleton of a theropod [T. rex-like] dinosaur in North Dakota.” Dubbed Smaugia volans, paleontologists believe the dino “could have flown.”

The skeleton, including rib and neck bones that showed signs of frequent exposure to fire, was supposedly discovered by Randy Sepulchrave of the Museum of the University of Southern North Dakota.

There is no University of Southern North Dakota. That clue-in is straightforward enough, but the other two are more obscure: First, Smaug was the name of the dragon in JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” Secondly, Sepulchrave was the 76th Earl of Groan in Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan”. The earl believed that he was an owl, and leapt to his death from a high tower. He discovered too late that he could not fly.

Auspicious alignments

On the first morning in April 1976, BBC Radio 2 astronomer Patrick Moore announced the approach of a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event. At 9:47 a.m., Moore said, the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, and at that moment their gravitational alignment would counteract and thus lessen the pull of Earth’s gravity.

Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment of this planetary alignment, they would experience a strange floating sensation. At 9:48, callers flooded the lines of BBC 2 with stories of their brief buoyant experiences.

Google’s Topeka Name Change

Bright and early this April Fools’ morning, Google announced it was changing its name…to Topeka.

The gag comes one month after the real Topeka decided to temporarily change its name to Google. Topeka’s mayor signed a proclamation to help convince Google his city was the best place for its soon-to-be-launched broadband network.

Google fired back, replacing its standard home page logo with the word “Topeka.” A photo showed the Google headquarters with a freshly updated sign. And a placard was even provided to help you learn the proper way to use the new name in conversation.

“Before our blind date I Topeka’d him”

TiSP

Google’s broadband initiative may be the real deal, but back in 2007, the G-team joked that it was launching a wireless broadband service that’d run through the sewers.

TiSP, short for Toilet Internet Service Provider, was described as a “self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a Wi-Fi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.” To use the service, all you had to do was flush a fiber-optic cable down the john and connect the other end to a specially provided router.

MentalPlex

One of Google’s earliest April Fools’ pranks, MentalPlex was presented in the year 2000 as a cutting-edge new way to search by brainwave. Just stare into a swirling circle, project a mental image of what you want to find, and MentalPlex would do the work.

“MentalPlex is the only search engine that accurately returns results without requiring you enter a query,” a FAQ created specially for the joke explained. “Google’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page calls MentalPlex ‘a quantum leap in finding what you are looking for on the Internet. Typing in queries is so 1999.’”

Instructions:
• Remove hat and glasses
• Peer into MentalPlex circle. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HEAD
• Project mental image of what you want to find.
• Click or visualize clicking within MentalPlex circle.

Pi gets rewritten

In 2008, an executive with the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments posted on his personal blog an updated value for pi. The hoax claimed that Microsoft Research had determined the true-up value of pi to be a definitive 3.141999, or as expressed in company literature, “Three easy payments of 1.047333”. Which is fairly hilarious.

This 2008 prank harked back to an older spoof. In 1998, a researcher published an article suggesting that Alabama’s state legislature had rounded the value of pi to the “Biblical value of 3”. Some pranks come around again and again.

Nixon again?!

It’s not just corporations that can jump on the bandwagon of hoaxes. In 1992, National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” program announced Richard Nixon, who in 1974 became the only U.S. president to resign from office, was running for president again.

According to NPR, Nixon’s new campaign slogan was, “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” NPR even ginned up audio clips of Nixon’s candidacy speech, causing much angst from listeners. NPR gave up the joke after a few minutes.

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