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:

"What's This? — Gail Speicher gives her French poodle 'Domino' an airing. But wait a minute ... that's no poodle! Seems like anything can happen today. It's April Fool."
[Lebanon Daily News - Apr 1, 1959]

"Looking for a live one, Brent Lee Hoffman, 5, of San Mateo, Calif., has his trap all baited in hopes of catching an April Fool. But Brent isn't taking any chances of having his little prank backfire — that bulging wallet is filled with play money." [United Press Photo]

In Denver, an unknown prankster transformed stop signs into giant flowers. It was suspected to be the work of "a recent arrival from neighboring Kansas, the sunflower state." [Spokane Daily Chronicle - Apr 2, 1958]

W.D. Loy of Charlotte, North Carolina first heard a loud bang, then a series of beeps coming from his front yard. He went out to investigate and found on his lawn a silvery cylinder shaped like a missile with an antenna protruding from the top.

Loy sent his family into the basement to hide, then called the police, and carried the object into the center of the road. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered to look at the strange object. The suspicion was that it was some kind of Soviet satellite, similar to Sputnik.

But when the police arrived, they unscrewed the bolts holding the object together and found inside a beeping electric bicycle horn, as well as a note that read, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. April fool!"

The photo shows Officer K.K. Scott posing by the device and reading the note.

Cass Casmir Jr., of Hammond, Indiana, found a victim for a time-worm April Fool stunt — the elusive wallet. Arthur Jennette of Calumet City went along with the gag. [Hammond Times - Apr 1, 1957]

Rear Admiral Tully Shelley, managing director of a company of oil refinery and construction engineers, designed a match striking machine as an April Fool's Day joke. He called it his "Yonghy Bonghy Bo" (an allusion to Edward Lear's poem, "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo"). However, the machine actually did work and could be used to light a cigarette.

The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." For more information, see the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest article in the Hoaxipedia. (The footage of the hoax itself can be seen on YouTube.)

"One of the Herald's photographers, Jim Parker, who has since been banished to the north, wandered up to the editor's desk the other day and offered this picture for publication. The editor recognized it as the Calgary city hall but could see no news in it as somebody is usually blowing their top over something the city does or does not do." [The Calgary Herald - Apr 1, 1954]

A boy comes to the aid of a girl, who was trying to pick up a coin that couldn't be picked up. A curious crowd looks on.

Hal Lewis, disc jockey on Hawaiian station KPOA, announced that the Senate had repealed islanders' income taxes and provided for return of 1953 taxes. The announcement elicited a huge reaction. Radio stations, newspapers, and the Internal Revenue Bureau were all flooded with calls from people seeking more information. Many banks received calls from people who wanted to place orders for stock and bond purchases with their forthcoming refund.

Lewis's announcement was believable because a tax refund for Hawaii had recently been in the news. Hawaiian congressman Joseph Farrington had, less than a month before, demanded that the islanders be given a refund of all the federal taxes they had ever paid if Hawaii was not granted full statehood. (Hawaii was made a state in 1959.)

Later in Lewis's show, the General Manager of KPOA came on the air to publicly apologize for the hoax announcement and fire Lewis. However, the audience responded with sympathy for Lewis, and many called in to urge the station to reconsider. But it turned out the "firing" was also a hoax. The "general manager" was actually one of Lewis' colleagues, Buck Buchwach.


IRS agent Stanley McKenney subsequently called the station and asked them to leave his office out of any further pranks. He said his office was busy enough processing the 1953 returns, without having to deal with numerous calls from people seeking a refund.

Lewis, who was the most popular dj in Hawaii, also went by the name "J. Aukhead Pupule," which was Polynesian for "Crazy Fishhead".

The Wiesbadener Tagblatt published a photo of a "Martian in the USA," showing American soldiers accompanying a one-legged creature with "a large head and a very small body."

The photo, as the paper subsequently explained, was created with the participation of Americans at the Wiesbaden US Army base, who posed with photographer Hans Scheffler's five-year-old son, Peter. Scheffler then replaced his son in the photo with the alien.


Scheffler's photo subsequently surfaced in the UFO-research community, where it was thought to be actual evidence of a captured extraterrestrial. This happened after an unknown informant, in May 1950, sent a clipping of the photo to the FBI, without noting its origin as an April fool spoof. The FBI duly filed away the photo and then released it to UFO researcher Barry Greenwood in 1979 after he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The next year, 1980, the photo was included in The Roswell Incident, an alien-conspiracy book written by William Moore and Charles Berlitz.

The Cologne Neue Illustrierte published a picture of "a tiny, aluminum-covered man" who had supposedly been rescued from a saucer that had crash landed after being shot by American anti-aircraft guns. The planet this being came from was unknown.

The photo subsequently became a famous "alien" photo, after its origin as an April fool hoax was forgotten. It was reproduced in books such as "Flying Saucers from Outer Space" (1953) by Donald Keyhoe and "The UFO Encyclopedia" (1980) by Margaret Sachs.