April Fool's Day

April Fool's Day or All Fools' Day, though not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible.

Well-known hoaxes

• Cleveland Dinosaur Attack: a joke saying that dinosaurs attacked all over Cleveland, including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Gund Arena.
• Kremvax: one of the early Internet April Fool's day hoaxes.
• San Serriffe: The Guardian printed a supplement featuring this fictional island (a reference to "sans-serif", a family of typefaces).
• FBI Crackdown: These crackdowns http://songzilla.blogspot.com/2005/04/confirmed-cassette-prosecutions-fbi.html are rarely true, though entirely feasible.
• Smell-o-vision: The BBC purported to conduct a trial of a new technology allowing the transmission of odor over the airwaves to all viewers. Despite the fact that no such capability existed, many viewers reportedly contacted the BBC to report the trial's success.
• Spaghetti trees: The BBC television program Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing the Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. A lot of people wanted spaghetti trees of their own.
• Metric time: Repeated several times in various countries over the years, this hoax claims that the time system will be changed to some system where one subdivision is some power of 10 smaller than the next. The idea to metricate time was suggested in France after the French Revolution: see French Revolutionary Calendar.
• Tower of Pisa: The Dutch television news once reported that the famous Tower of Pisa had fallen over. Many shocked and even mourning people contacted the television studio.
• Television licence: In another year the Dutch television news reported that the government had introduced a new way to detect hidden televisions (in many countries in Europe, one must pay a television licence to fund public broadcasting) by simply driving through the streets with a new detector, and that the only way to keep your television from being detected was to wrap it in aluminum foil. Within a few hours all aluminum foil was sold out throughout the country.
• Sidd Finch: George Plimpton wrote an article in Sports Illustrated about a New York Mets prospect who could throw a fastball at 176 mph (283 km/h) (the fastest pitchers in baseball barely reach 100mph ). This kid was known as "Barefoot" Sidd Finch. He reportedly learned to throw a ball that fast in a Buddhist monastery, and also threw a javelin a quarter of a mile at the British Olympic tryouts. Plimpton said the boy refused to go to the Olympics for fear of hurting someone. Barefoot Sidd was later the subject of a moderately successful book.
• Assassination of Bill Gates: many Chinese and South Korean websites claimed that CNN reported Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was assassinated.
• Write Only Memory: advertised for sale by Signetics in April of 1972; included in its IC databooks through the late 70s.
• Death of a Mayor: in 1998, local radio hosts Opie and Anthony reported that Boston mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in a car accident while in Florida. Menino happened to be on a flight at the time, lending truth to the prank as he could not be reached. The rumor spread quickly across the city, eventually causing news stations to issue alerts denying the hoax. The pair were fired shortly thereafter.
• Wheel of Fortune/Jeopardy! Double Switch: In 1997, Pat Sajak, the host of Wheel of Fortune, traded hosting duties with Jeopardy!'s Alex Trebek for one show. In addition to Sajak hosting Jeopardy!, he and cohost Vanna White appeared as contestants on the episode of Wheel that was being hosted by Trebek. White's position at the famed Wheel letterboard was filled by Sajak's wife Leslie.
• Comic strip switcheroo: For April Fool's Day 1997, the cartoonists who draw a number of popularly sydicated comic strips switched roles for a day, each finding someone else to draw their strip for April Fools'. In some cases, the artist drew his or her own characters in the other strip's milieu, while in others, he or she drew their own strip, with visitors from another. While cartoonists have done this sort of "switcheroo" since 1997, especially in online comics, the biggest such example was on this single day in 1997.
• The Trouble with Tracy: In 2003, The Comedy Network in Canada announced that it would be producing and airing a remake of the 1970s Canadian sitcom The Trouble with Tracy, with Laurie Elliott in the role of Tracy (originally played by Diane Nyland). The original series is widely considered to be one of the worst sitcoms ever produced. Several media outlets fell for the hoax.
• Shuttle landing: A Vancouver radio station successfully tricked many listeners in believing that a space shuttle had to do an emergency landing at the Vancouver International Airport.
• Howard Stern's April 1st, 2004 show: The show started off with a message stating that due to increased pressure from the FCC, the Howard Stern show had been cancelled, and they played pop songs till after 7:00 am, when Stern came back on and said it was a joke. The pop music was a joke due to the fact that Stern's home station is 92.3 FM K-ROCK, which at the time was an alternative rock station.
• Taco Liberty Bell: On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it to "the Taco Liberty Bell." In a White House press conference, Mike McCurry was quoted as saying that the federal government would also be "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial." Thousands of people who did not immediately get the April Fool's Day hoax protested.
• In 1995, the National Television Station TVM in Malta announced the discovery of a new underground prehistoric temple. The discovery of a mummy eventually led to the announcement that it was an April's Fool joke. This was done during a TV programme conducted by John Demanuele.
• Another famous April's Fool Joke was carried out by newscaster Anna Bonanno, which announced that Malta would follow the European continent in changing its motoring rules and motor vehicles would start driving on the right. At the end of the news, it was announced that this was nothing but an April's Fool Joke.
• In 2005, one of the largest P2P web sites in China, VeryCD, announced that it had been closed due to some uncontrollable force.
• Alternative 3, a fictional documentary broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1977, was originally intended as an April Fool's Day hoax, but due to industrial action it was not broadcast until June. This exposé of international collusion to prepare for global catastrophe fooled many people, and is still the subject of conspiracy theories.
• On the first of April, 2004, suprnova.org announced that, owing to a huge surge in Japanese traffic, the site would slowly transition to Japanese, and discontinue its English-language version.
• In 2002, the Canadian news site bourque.org announced that Finance Minister Paul Martin had resigned "in order to breed prize Charolais cattle and handsome Fawn Runner ducks." The Canadian dollar dropped to its lowest level in a month before Martin's office denied the story.
• In 2003, there was a rumor in Hong Kong that Hong Kong had become an infected area and would be quarantined because of SARS, all immigration ports would also be closed. The same rumor also mentions Tung Chee Hwa, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong at that time, had resigned. This caused a panic that Hong Kong people rushed into supermarkets to buy food. The Hong Kong government had to hold a press conference that officially denied the rumor. Later it was revealed that the rumor was spread by a student, by imitating the design of Ming Pao newspaper website, which was intended to be an April Fool's Day hoax, and the student was arrested for spreading false news.
• Ouija Board Comic. In April Fools 2005, FoxTrot, Pearls Before Swine, and Get Fuzzy pulled April Fools by having all three strips with the same Ouija Board gag. Basically, a character commented on how a Ouija board sends messages from the afterlife. The Ouija board then told the character to punch another next to him, all ending with the second character commenting that the afterlife wasn't a peaceful place, and the first commenting that he has pleased the gods. http://blogs.sun.com/roller/comments/kevin/Weblog/art_imitates_art_april_fools
• BMW has published full page adverts every yearhttp://www.bmweducation.co.uk/coFacts/view.asp?docID=49&topicID=5 in several countries, including:
• its MINI cars being used in upcoming space missions to Mars,
• special wipers for the BMW crest on the boot and bonnet coming as standard on all future models
• using GPS links to domestic ovens so that your meal is cooked to perfection as you walk in the door
• BMW "uninventing the wheel" to counter the "EU ban" on right-hand drive cars (i.e. British cars)
• April 1st RFC
• Google's hoaxes

By radio stations

• Chattanooga, Tennessee radio station 98.1 KISS FM thought it would be a great joke to bring rapper Eminem to Chattanooga, it ended up in a near riot and sending the 98.1 KISS FM DJ's to jail for disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance (Joke was on 4/1/03).
• Radio Station "Power 106": A Los Angeles radio station "announced" a change from pop to disco music at 7:00 AM, April 1, (1993?). After 12 hours they admitted it was a joke, and switched back to their standard playlist. Within minutes complaints rolled in of "where's the disco?", and the station actually changed formats the next day (and kept disco for a year or two).
• Radio Station KFOG (San Francisco, CA): Pretended to have been the victim of a corporate radio buyout, with a switch to a new format: just the best 15 seconds of every song! The entire morning show was formatted this way, with taped interruptions of various perky listeners gushing over the new format. (This hoax can also be considered a parody of several radio buyouts during the late 1990s media consolidations.)
• Australian Radio Station Triple J: On 1999-04-01, breakfast show co-host Adam Spencer said he had a journalist on the line from overseas where there had just been a secret 9 hour IOC meeting and that Sydney had lost the 2000 Olympic Games. New South Wales Premier Bob Carr was also in on the joke. The story was picked up by mainstream media (including Channel 9's Today Show) before Adam revealed the truth.

Lists of April Fool hoaxes

• April 1, 2002
• April 1, 2004
• April 1, 2005