The April Fool's Day Archive
A catalog of April Fool's Day hoaxes, pranks, and related events throughout history, categorized by year and theme.

April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

Radio Merseyside in Britain reported about a ‘bionic’ horse. The broken leg of this horse had been replaced with a plastic leg that gave the horse more spring in its step. As a result, the horse was favored to win the Grand National.

Nationwide, a BBC television program, profiled a well located on James Coatsworth’s farm in Rothbury, Northumberland. This well supposedly had the power to make hair grow on bald men’s heads.

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. 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 he had risen from the ground so rapidly that he had hit his head on the ceiling.

The Toronto Star printed on its front page a picture of King Kong hanging from the top of the CN Tower, which at the time was nearing completion. (It opened to the public in June 1976.) Carmen Nigro, who claimed to have played King Kong in the 1933 film (although a rubber model was used in most shots) was inside the costume.

Byte Magazine published a technology update describing, in highly technical language, an invention that it called the “first practical Touring Machine” (which bore a strong resemblance to a bicycle):

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.

The famous naturalist David Attenborough gave a report on BBC Radio 3 about a group of islands in the Pacific known as the Sheba Islands. He played sound recordings of the island’s fauna, including a recording of an alleged night-singing tree mouse called the Musendrophilus. He also described a web-footed species whose webs were prized by inhabitants of the island as reeds for musical instruments.

Australia's This Day Tonight revealed that the country would soon be converting to "metric time." Under the new system there would be 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 20-hour days. Furthermore, seconds would become millidays, minutes become centidays, and hours become decidays. The report included an interview with Deputy Premier Des Corcoran who (participating in the prank) praised the new time system. The Adelaide townhall was shown sporting a new 10-hour metric clock face. The show received numerous calls from viewers who fell for the hoax. One caller wanted to know how he could convert his newly purchased digital clock to metric time. [Source: Talking TelevisionAU]

BBC Radio 4’s Today Show also reported about a controversy involving the Island of Foley, located between Sheppey and the Kent Coast. Apparently the island was the cause of numerous shipwrecks. Therefore, authorities had decided to destroy it. However, because this decision had been protested by conservationists, authorities had decided to tow it somewhere safer instead. Towing islands has been a source of jokes as far back as 1824, when a hoaxer supposedly had the residents of Manhattan believing that their island was going to be towed out to sea.

BBC Radio 4’s Today Show announced that as part of the centenary celebrations for Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River, Major John Blashford Snell had just completed a secret journey into the African interior in search of a rare tribe mentioned in that book. The heads of the members of this tribe supposedly grew beneath their shoulders, giving them a stooped appearance. It was also reported that the chief of this tribe had once been a lift attendant.

Residents of Sitka, Alaska were alarmed when the long-dormant volcano neighboring them, Mount Edgecumbe, suddenly began to belch out billows of black smoke. Did this mean that the volcano was active again and would soon erupt? Terrified residents spilled out of their homes onto the streets to gaze up at the volcano, and calls poured into the local authorities. Luckily it turned out that man, not nature, was responsible for the smoke. A local prankster named Porky Bickar had flown hundreds of old tires into the volcano's crater and then lit them on fire, all in a (successful) attempt to fool the city dwellers into believing that the volcano was stirring to life. Six years later when Mount St. Helens erupted a Sitka resident wrote to Bickar to tell him, "This time you've gone too far!"

Westward Television, a British TV studio, produced a documentary feature about the village of Spiggot. Apparently the members of this town were refusing to accept the new decimal currency recently adopted by the British government. The feature included interviews with local officials from Spiggot. The documentary prompted an outpouring of support for this rebellious village from the British public, and many people expressed a willingness to join it in its anti-decimal crusade. Unfortunately for this burgeoning rebellion, the village of Spiggot did not exist.

BBC Radio broadcast an interview with an elderly academic, Dr. Clothier, who discoursed on the government’s efforts to stop the spread of Dutch Elm Disease, the disease that had been infecting many of England’s trees. The academic described some startling discoveries that had been made about the tree disease. For instance, he referred to the research of Dr. Emily Lang of the London School of Pathological and Environmental Medicine. Dr. Lang had apparently found that exposure to Dutch Elm Disease immunized people to the common cold. Unfortunately, there was a side effect. Exposure to the disease also caused red hair to turn yellow. This was attributed to a similarity between the blood count of redheads and the soil conditions in which affected trees grew. Therefore, redheads were advised to stay away from forests for the foreseeable future. Of course, none of these discoveries were real. The academic was really the comedian Spike Milligan disguising his voice.

1972 was the 100-year anniversary of Thomas Cook’s first round the world travel tour. To commemmorate the occasion, the London Times ran a full article (top) about Cook’s 1872 tour, in which it noted that the vacation had cost the participants only 210 guineas each, or approximately $575. Of course, inflation had made a similar vacation quite a bit more expensive by 1972. A few pages later, the Times included a small article (bottom) noting that in honor of the 100-year anniversary, the travel agent Thomas Cook was offering 1000 lucky people the chance to buy a similar package deal at 1872 prices. The offer would be given to the first 1000 people to apply. The article noted that applications should be addressed to “Miss Avril Foley.“ The public response to this bargain-basement offer was swift and enthusiastic. Huge lines of people formed outside the Thomas Cook offices, and the travel agent was swamped with calls. Belatedly the Times identified the offer as an April Fool’s joke and apologized for the inconvenience it had caused. The people who had waited in line for hours were, to put it mildly, not amused. The reporter who wrote the article, John Carter, was fired (though he was later reinstated).

The April 1st, 1972 issue of the Veterinary Record, the weekly journal of the British veterinary profession, contained an article about the diseases of Brunus edwardii, which was described as a species "commonly kept in homes in the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe and North America." The article warned:


For months afterwards the correspondence section of the Veterinary Record was dominated by letters about Brunus edwardii, most of which offered new observations about the species. However, a few correspondents were outraged by the article, such as A. Noel Smith who wrote, "How three members holding sets of impressive degrees can waste their time writing such garbage in a journal that is the official publication of the B.V.A. is beyond my comprehension, as is your effrontery to publish it under 'Clinical Papers'."

It was reported that the British Library later had difficulty deciding how to classify the article, but the article proved so popular that it was eventually published in a special edition by Whittington Press.

The images below, which accompanied the article, illustrate some of the diseases of Brunus edwardii. They are (from left to right): 1) Alopecia, discoloration (very loved); 2) Torticollis and loss of limb; 3) A case of emotional disturbance, hypertension; 4) Attic bear and mice; 5) Lopsided squint.