Reason #2: You Scare Easily

Imagine that you live downvalley from the Ochoco Dam in Oregon. You hear on the radio that the dam has burst and that a tidal wave of water is fast approaching your house. Terrified, you gather together your family and prepare to flee. But just then you hear an evil voice cackling on the radio, "April Fools!" It would be enough to make anyone hate April Fool's Day, which was the very reaction many Oregon homeowners had when this exact scenario occurred in 1999.

The fake disaster gag is one of the oldest practical jokes in the April Fool's Day book. Every time it's perpetrated, a swell of criticism arises from those who contend there's no humor in needlessly scaring people. And perhaps there isn't, but that doesn't deter the pranksters who love the prank and keep repeating it year after year.

As far back as the 1840s we find newspapers such as the Boston Post scaring readers on April 1st with false reports of volcanic eruptions in Italy, massive floods in Switzerland, and massacres in Turkey. In 1933 the Madison Capital-Times famously announced that the state capitol building had exploded, due to a build-up of "large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the Senate and Assembly chambers." Furious readers wrote in to declare the article a "hideous jest." On March 31, 1940 Philadelphia residents were terrified to learn that astronomers at the prestigious Franklin Institute had discovered the world would end the following day. The mischievous press agent responsible for this bogus prediction was promptly fired. And in 1949 a New Zealand deejay warned that a gigantic wasp swarm was approaching the city of Auckland. Though he offered his listeners the helpful recommendation that they should pull their socks up over their pantlegs in order to stop the wasps from flying up their trousers, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service didn't think his prank was funny and sent him a stern warning telling him so.

Closer to the present, the disaster prank has proven to be in no danger of extinction. What is probably the most elaborate disaster gag ever occurred in 1974 when a prankster named Porky Bickar air-dropped hundreds of old tires into the crater of Mount Edgecumbe in Alaska, and then set them on fire in order to fool the residents of nearby Sitka into believing that the long dormant volcano was stirring to life. According to legend, when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 a Sitka resident wrote to Bickar to tell him, "This time you've gone too far!" Continuing on the theme of volcanoes, a reporter for Channel 7 news in Boston informed viewers in 1980 that Mount Milton near Boston had erupted. Numerous people fled their homes, despite the fact that Mount Milton is little more than a hill and that the reporter held up a sign at the end of his broadcast reading "April Fools."

In 1981 the Roscommon Herald-News warned its readers of the National Biological Foundation's plan to release two thousand sharks into selected Michigan lakes (supposedly in order to study the cold-water breeding habits of the sharks). Readers of the paper, especially those who were swimmers or fishermen, were none too happy to receive the information. In 1992 terrified residents of Virginia Beach were conned into believing that a nearby landfill called Mount Trashmore was about to violently explode due to a buildup of methane. In 1996 the Itar-Tass news agency reported that Russia had decided to revive the Warsaw pact, causing ripples of panic to spread throughout the former Eastern bloc countries. And the list goes on and on.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the disaster gag in the present era of code-orange terror alerts. Will would-be pranksters be deterred, for fear of bringing the wrath of the HomeLand Security Department down on their heads? Or will we see the opposite reaction, the attention given to terror alerts spurring the pranksters to even greater heights? Stay tuned and find out.

Next: Reason #3: You're the Leader of a Repressive Regime
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