HOAXED!
While gathering in this year’s spaghetti harvest, RoB gaNDy was struck by the fact that a significant number of April Fool pranks over the decades have featured fortean themes – from fake UFOs to cryptozoological creatures – in their attempts to put one o
The world’s best fortean April Fools
on 1 April each year people everywhere play simple tricks on family and friends so they can shout “April Fool!” This has been handed down the generations, with children often encouraged by one parent to hoodwink the other with statements like “Look Mum there’s a flying saucer in the garden!” But how did this tradition begin?
April Fools’ Day, or All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for centuries by different cultures, but its exact origins are a mystery. Some historians speculate that it dates to 1582, when France switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar (see FT**:**): people who were slow or failed to recognise New Year had moved to 1 January, and continued to celebrate it from 25 March to 1 April, became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. Others link it to Hilaria, an ancient Roman festival celebrated at the end of March, which involved people dressing up in disguises. Whatever the truth, April Fools’ Day was celebrated throughout Britain from the 18th century. Increasingly, over the 20th century, the popular media tested people’s credulity with April Fools’ Day hoaxes ranging from the subtle to the outlandish; many were bought hook, line and sinker. Some reflected contemporary culture, but others involved strange creatures and scientific discoveries.
I found myself wondering what proportion of April Fools’ pranks involved fortean themes. Some lazy armchair research identified the excellent Museum of Hoaxes website, which details “Wonderful stories contrived for the public from ancient times to the present day”, and lists “The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time”. I analysed this list using “soft and slow” – as opposed to “hard and fast” – fortean categorisation and provide my analysis and some specifics below.
The range of hoaxes is wide, and includes non-fortean japes such as no-hole polo mints, the division of Belgium, and viagra for hamsters. They also include a 1983 video of a Boston University professor (apparently) revealing the fourth century origin of April Fool’s Day, and a summary of the oldest known prank: sending people to see lions washed in the Tower of London’s moat (1698). But I found 38 fortean-related hoaxes, which I categorised into: Cryptozoology (9); Science (13); UFOs/Space (4); Psychology (5); and Miscellaneous (7); see panel.
cRyPToZoology hoaxes
The highest ranked case involved zoologists from Yorkshire’s Flamingo Park Zoo finding the dead body of the Loch Ness Monster. Scottish police intercepted them taking
Nessie’s corpse back to Yorkshire, but found the creature was a large bull elephant seal that had died a week earlier in Dudley Zoo. Flamingo Park’s education officer, John Shields, had shaved its whiskers, padded its cheeks with stones, and kept it frozen, before sneakily dumping it in the Loch, intended as an April Fool’s prank on his colleagues. He admitted the joke had got a little out of hand.
Everyone knows about unicorns, but two hoaxes focused on how to eat them. In 2010 retailer ThinkGeek announced the sale of canned unicorn meat, as “the new white meat”; the concept proved popular enough for the company to later sell the product ‘for real’: customers received a stuffed unicorn toy inside a can. However, customers in Germany didn’t receive their orders because customs officials apparently believed unicorns were real and decided the product breached regulations banning the importation of meat from
‘rare’ animals. In 2012, the British Library announced the discovery of a long-lost mediæval cookbook in its archives, which featured a recipe for cooking a unicorn, including instructions for a marinade and griddle-roasting. The library reproduced hand-drawn illustrations.
A literal White Elephant, supposedly from Burma, attracted over 1,000 people to Frankfurt Zoo in 1949, but it was just a regular grey elephant painted white. The zoo’s director was forgiven for this genuine attempt to raise much-needed cash. A more Jurassic Park- style stunt involved an article about “Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth” in MIT’s Technology Review, which described Soviet scientists’ efforts to bring the creature back from extinction.
Antarctica is the source of two more crypto-hoaxes: Discover magazine reported a new species – the hotheaded naked ice borer – with bony plates on their heads which can become burning hot, because of innumerable blood vessels. This allows them to bore through ice at high speeds, or melt ice beneath penguins, causing the unfortunate birds to sink beneath the surface where the hotheads would eat them. However, penguins from Terry Jones’s colony of Adélie penguins would simply take to the air – as filmed by the BBC. 4 Rather than endure Antarctic winters, these amazing penguins fly thousands of miles to South American rainforests to bask in the tropical Sun.
The remaining two hoaxes involve unheard of animals with peculiar characteristics or powers. Telecommunications company Qualcomm suggested expanding wireless coverage by implanting tiny base-stations into pigeons hybridised with wolves (wolfpigeons). They could fly overhead but simultaneously defend themselves, forming packs when necessary, whilst going out as “lone wolves” to areas without coverage. By comparison, the Tasmanian mock walrus was four inches long, looked like a walrus, purred like a cat, and had a hamster’s temperament. It never bathed or used a litter box, but it ate cockroaches, potentially ridding an entire house of its roach problem.
SCIENCE HOAXES
Scientific breakthroughs evoke a sense of wonder, and are therefore favourites for pranksters. No surprise then that many believed the following. In Sweden, viewers were persuaded that by pulling a nylon stocking over their black & white TV screen, the mesh would cause light to bend in such a way that the image would appear as if in colour. BBC TV broadcast an interview with a London University professor who had perfected a technology called Smellovision, which allowed the transmission of smells over the airwaves.
Then there was the man who could fly using a device powered only by the breath from his lungs, or the terrifying new weapon invented by Soviet scientists capable of “harnessing the latent energy of the atmosphere” to hurl objects of any weight almost unlimited distances. Another unlikely discovery was “contra-polar energy”, negative energy that caused electrical devices to produce the opposite effect to what they normally would do: for example, the bulb of an ordinary lamp would cast darkness instead of light.
Other scientific gems were: thousands of “rogue bras” where the support wire was made from a kind of copper originally designed for use in fire alarms – when it came into contact with nylon and body heat, it produced static electricity which interfered with local television and radio broadcasts; British scientists who had developed a machine to control the weather within a 5,000-km radius; a car sunroof that could be kept open in the rain because jets of air blasted the water away from the top of the car; a Veterinary Record article about diseases afflicting the species Brunus edwardii (otherwise known as the “Teddy Bear”) 5; Thomas Edison invented a machine transforming soil directly into cereal and water directly into wine, thereby ending world hunger; a New Scientist article, by researchers MacDonald and Wimpey of the University of Hamburg, about a successful “plant-animal hybrid” called Boimate, which had resulted in tomatoes containing genes from a cow; in Germany, a farmer could obtain lard from live pigs by operating on them (using novocaine) to remove rashers, before bandaging them and letting them heal, a process that could be repeated up to three times a year; and genetically modified “whistling carrots” which grow with tapered airholes in their sides, so that when fully cooked, they emited a “97 decibel signal” indicating they should be removed from the stove.
UFO/SPACE HOAXES
The top-ranking UFO/Space hoax involved British astronomer Patrick Moore, 6 who on 1 April 1976 announced that at 9:47am that day a once-in-a-lifetime planetary alignment would occur which would temporarily counteract and lessen Earth’s own gravity. Moore told radio listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment the alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. Hundreds of listeners telephoned the BBC claiming to have felt just that.
Richard Branson flew a hot air balloon designed to look like a flying saucer over London in 1989, while in 1950 Germany saw a Roswell-like announcement of a crashed saucer near Wiesbaden, with a photo of a small, one-legged extraterrestrial supposedly found near the wreckage by American soldiers.
In 1967, Swiss Radio announced that US astronauts had just landed on the Moon – two years before they actually did – with an hour of elaborately staged updates, correspondent reports and expert interviews. Belief was near total – as advised, masses of people left Zurich to watch the “Moonship” take off from the Moon at 7pm, from high vantage points away from city lights.
Psychology hoaxes
Google’s announcement introducing Gmail Motion, a technology enabling email writing using only hand gestures through a computer’s webcam with a “spatial tracking algorithm” translating gestures into words and commands, is very vaguely plausible. But a Left-Handed Whopper? Burger King advertised this as being specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans: the same ingredients were used as for the original Whopper, but all condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of left-handed customers. The next day Burger King had to confirm this was a hoax because thousands of customers had requested the new sandwich in restaurants, and “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.” In early 1960 – pre-Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura – a viewer complained about seeing a black man kiss a white woman on a television show. The network concerned flew an executive to meet the viewer to explain that the actor was actually white, but the local station had accidentally broadcast the show at a high contrast ratio, making him look dark-skinned. Paul Krassner (editor of the satirical underground magazine The Realist) was outraged that a TV network was so afraid of offending a racist, and asked his readers to write to the network after the 1 April
airing of the panel show Masquerade Party to complain about being offended by something on it, without specifying what had offended them. Hundreds obliged, causing panic at the network. Apparently the TV executives watched recordings of the show repeatedly, desperate to work out what had caused so much offence.
William Boyd’s biography of the late American artist Nat Tate — a troubled abstract expressionist who leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry – was launched at a star-studded party in New York, with David Bowie reading selections aloud, and art critics making appreciative remarks about Tate’s work. A week later it was revealed that Nat Tate didn’t exist and was entirely Boyd’s fabrication. It was noted that while no one at the party had claimed to know Tate well, no one admitted to never having heard of him — although no one had.
When NPR News linked its Facebook page to the article “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” it generated hundreds of comments. However, none of these posters had clicked on the link to read the article, because if they had, they would have read: “We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this ‘story.’” Clearly the posters had unwittingly demonstrated the relevance of the question.
MIscellaNeoUs hoaxes
These hoaxes demonstrate the full range of human ingenuity and gullibility at the same time. In 1962, an “authentic” Easter Island statue was washed up on the beach near Holland’s Zandvoort. An “atomic mist” was to descend upon Eindhoven in 1947, but the effects could be ameliorated by “sitting on a thin pole with your arms and legs stretched out in front of you”. At 10 o’clock on 1 April 1906, thousands of Kansans went to Wichita to see the predicted meeting of an 11-feet high wave moving southward down the Arkansas River with an 11-mile long mass of millions of frogs migrating northward up the river. In 2005, an eight-inch winged creature found in Derbyshire and identified as a mummified fairy, with many dismissing the subsequent confession of hoax as a a “cover-up”.
Then there was the press release from Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute on 31 March 1940 declaring the world would end the following day. 7 More than 200 years earlier, in 1708, there was Jonathan Swift’s prank aimed at the famous astrologer John Partridge. Assuming the personage of Isaac Bickerstaff, an unknown London astrologer, Swift published an almanac predicting Partridge’s death by fever on 29 March, and then published a pamphlet announcing the prediction’s fulfilment on 30 March. Despite his protests Partridge couldn’t convince people that he wasn’t dead, and eventually stopped publishing his own almanacs.
But for sheer effort, a prize must go to Alaska’s Porky Bickar who flew hundreds of old tyres into the crater of the long-dormant volcano Mount Edgecumbe. He set them on fire and convinced the people of nearby Sitka that the volcano was stirring to life.
FINal ThoUghTs
Over one-third of the best April Fools’ hoaxes have a fortean theme. I find it reassuring that fortean topics appear to play such a major role in the public imagination, with so many people accepting the possibility of decidedly strange phenomena. It’s worth noting that in very many cases people simply reacted to headlines rather than reading further, and the more reliable and established the source, the more willing people were to believe. What was the Number One hoax on the list? It couldn’t be anything other than the superb Swiss Spaghetti Harvest shown on the BBC news programme Panorama in 1957. This reported a bumper spaghetti crop and showed Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. 7 Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. So on 1 April 2017, don’t believe everything you see and hear reported in the media!