April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:

In late March, Australian fruit grower Bob Boyce revealed that he had unearthed a 10-pound gold nugget while planting a citrus tree. He told the media, "I've dug hundreds of holes for trees on my property and I've never found anything apart from a few river stones." After having the nugget assayed, he named it "Mortgage Buster," because it was found to be worth around $70,000, enough to pay off his mortgage. The story was picked up by the international media, with Reuters reporting that the Australian government had confirmed the worth of the nugget.

But on April 1, Boyce confessed that the gold nugget was phony. He explained, "I didn't plan the joke for personal publicity. I just wanted to bring a smile to people on April Fools' Day."

An unknown prankster planted a 16-foot missile decorated with the hammer and sickle symbol of the Soviet Union outside of Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, DC. The missile was point-down in the ground, as if it had landed nose-first and become embedded in the ground. It was clearly visible to commuters on their morning drive into work. A sign near the missile read "April Fools... Courtesy of Mothers Against Missiles." Park police quickly cleared the missile away.

Lloyd Stallkamp, electronics instructor at South Dakota's National College, announced that Albert Einstein was wrong about the existence of photons that travel at the speed of light. Stallkamp had discovered that, in reality, it was darkness that was composed of "darkons" that were gradually filling up the universe:

"All the caves are filled with dark already. Outer space is filled with dark already. Once the sun gets filled up, that's it. There's no other place to put it... We can see inside the sunspots that the sun is black inside. So my theory is that the sun is going to fill up with black and become a black hole."

Stallkamp offered experimental evidence to back up his theory: "I took a flashlight. Now a flashlight doesn't emit light. It's just sucking in dark. So I did an experiment. I left the flashlight on a considerable time until it went out. Then I cut the battery apart — and it's all dark inside."

Stallkamp also had concluded that darkness was heavier than light: "Just look in a pool of water. You'll see all the dark has settled to the bottom."

Adrian Fisher and Charles Gutierrez of Chicago invited 25 of their closest friends to their April 1st wedding. But at the champagne reception following the ceremony, everyone was handed an envelope that contained the following poem:

"We don't want you to forget the date. It's April First, 1978. Now that the wedding knot has been tied, we have to tell you we have lied. Don't be angry, don't be mad, we hate to say it but you've been had. We meant no harm, so keep it cool, we hate to say it, but April Fool!"

The couple said their motive for staging the fake wedding was to "teach our dear friends a lesson not to gossip and spread rumors." Their friends had been spreading the rumor that the two were a "serious" item, even though Fisher insisted, "We haven't even had a date."

When Linas Gylys noticed that the Continental Illinois Bank had accidentally credited his account with an extra $4,757,000, he waited until April 1st, then went into the bank and requested a certified check made out to one "John H. Perkins." Bank officials hurriedly escorted him into a back office, where they interrogated him for an hour. They only became friendlier when he revealed that the man accompanying him was a reporter, and that John H. Perkins, to whom the check would be made out, was the president of the bank.

One young woman celebrated April Fool's Day by running naked past the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C.

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!"

On the morning of Friday March 31, 1972, an eight-member team of scientists from Yorkshire's Flamingo Park Zoo were having their breakfast in the dining room of the Foyers House hotel, on the shore of Loch Ness. They were there on a joint mission with the Loch Ness Phenomena Bureau to prove the existence of a monster in the loch. They had developed a new form of "hormone sex bait" that they hoped would lure Nessie out of the depths.

As they dug into their bacon and eggs, the manager of the hotel approached them. Someone had just called, she said, to report seeing a "large hump" floating in the loch near the hotel. Intrigued, the team put down their knives and forks and walked outside. Sure enough, a large, dark object was bobbing up and down in the waves about 300-yards offshore.

Terence O'Brien, the leader of the team, immediately swung into action. He directed the team into their boat, and they headed out to investigate. Twenty minutes later, at around 9 a.m., they returned, dragging behind them a bizarre object. It appeared to be the dead body of the Loch Ness Monster.

Ken Piper, former paratrooper, tried to fly over the Thames River by jumping off the Twickenham Bridge with wings attached to his arms. He flapped the wings and fell into the water. When he regained dry land, he said, "It was a good one for April Fool's Day."

A few months later, Mr. Piper returned to the news on account of his cabaret act in which he cracked a thick slab of concrete by means of a head-on collision with his head.

Printed leaflets were distributed throughout Stockholm informing people that the water company was soon going to cut off the water. Housewives were urged to fill the bathtub and whatever containers they had with water while "certain adjustments" were made to the water system. The water company, after receiving hundreds of calls, eventually issued an official denial, blaming the leaflets on an unknown prankster. [Appleton Post-Crescent, Apr 1, 1965.]

Bob Grove lost his head for April Fool's Day, and wandered the streets of Salinas, California in this condition.

A prankster painted a trail of white footprints along the main street of Wellingborough, England. At the end of the trail were the words, "I must fly." [Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 2, 1959.]

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.

Residents of Skyforest, near Lake Arrowhead in Southern California, staged an elaborate prank. Twenty-five of them, led by cartoonist Frank Adams, crept out during the night and strung 50,000 oranges along a one-mile section of the scenic Rim of the World highway, making it appear that the region's pine and cedar trees had suddenly grown fruit. The oranges were leftovers from the recent National Orange Show in San Bernardino. [The Independent Record (Helena, Montana), Apr 2, 1950.]