Article April Fools Day - 1976
Summary: Hoaxes perpetrated on April Fool’s Day, 1976.
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Table of Contents
- Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
- Pennsylvania Capitol Building Collapses
- First Practical Touring Machine
- King Kong Climbs CN Tower
Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at exactly 9:47 a.m. the planet Pluto would pass behind the planet Jupiter, and that this alignment of the planets would result in a stronger gravitational pull from Jupiter, counteracting the Earth’s own gravity and making people momentarily weigh less. He told listeners that they could experience this phenomenon for themselves by jumping in the air at 9:47. If they did so, he said, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 a.m. arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of calls from listeners who claimed that they had felt the sensation. One woman claimed that she had been seated around a table with eleven friends, and that all of them, including the table, had begun to float around the room. Another caller complained that she had risen from the ground so rapidly that she had hit her head on the ceiling.
Pennsylvania Capitol Building Collapses
The Patriot, a newspaper based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, published a photograph of the state capitol building collapsing. A caption below the picture read, “Custodian A.F. Day said the blast occurred during a joint House-Senate session addressed by Hubert Humphrey and Gov. Milton Shapp… Day attributed the explosion to an abnormal expansion of hot air which usually is absorbed by acoustic seats in the chamber.” The hoax elicited negative comments from many readers who accused the paper of “confusing fun with irresponsibility.” Two days later the paper apologized for the hoax and promised that it would never publish another. The hoax recalled a similar April Fool’s Day joke published by the Madison Capital-Times in 1933.
First Practical Touring Machine
Byte Magazine published a technology update describing, in highly technical language, an invention that it called the “first practical Touring Machine” possessing a “unary relocatable-based operator.” The invention was also known as a bicycle. The “unary relocatable-based operator” was a person.
King Kong Climbs CN Tower
The Toronto Star printed on its front page a picture of King Kong hanging from the top of the CN Tower.