category
Space and Astronomy-Themed April Fool's Day Hoaxes
Also see Extraterrestrial Life-Themed April Fool's Day Hoaxes

Expedia.com announced it was offering flights to Mars for only $99, which it calculated to be a savings of $3 trillion for travelers. "In this economy, you can't afford NOT to go!" it declared.

Google announced that they were accepting applications for positions at Copernicus Center, their new "lunar hosting and research center." Applicants, Google noted, must be "capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen." Google went on to say that the facility, set to open in Spring 2007, would house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost Web servers, two massage therapists and a sushi chef.

Novoye Pokoleniye, a Kazakh newspaper, reported on Friday, March 30 that Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, would become the first Kazakh woman to fly into space. Accompanying her would be her one-year-old daughter who was receiving special training to become the world's first child astronaut. Nazarbayeva was already something of a Kazakh celebrity because of her presidency of Khabar TV. Her mission in space would be to launch a new satellite TV channel, Khabar-3, which would transmit to "the most remote areas of the world where the Kazakh diaspora lives: in the USA, Mongolia, France, New Zealand and so on." The paper also reported that only Kazakh cuisine would be served on the flight. In addition, "The research programme also envisages making several feminine space experiments such as wet cleaning in zero-gravity conditions, cleaning of portholes in open space, nail-varnishing and hair-dyeing in a vacuum. The time of narrow specialist-orientated research is gone and the epoch of space exploration for everyday-life purposes is coming. So, who else, if not a woman and housewife, is to make laboratory experiments here?"

The internet-based service America Online grew rapidly throughout the 1990s, demonstrating the power of the internet to serve as a new basis for mass communication. By 1996 it had gained five million subscribers, all of whom were greeted with a news flash that read, "Government source reveals signs of life on Jupiter," when they logged onto the service on April 1. This headline was backed up by statements from a planetary biologist and an assertion by Ted Leonsis, AOL's president, that his company was in possession of documents that proved the government was hiding the existence of life on the massive planet. The story quickly generated over 1300 messages on AOL, and hundreds of people called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California trying to obtain more details about the discovery. When it turned out to be a prank, many questioned whether the service had risked losing its credibility by perpetrating such a stunt, but AOL dismissed these concerns. A spokeswoman for the company later explained that the hoax had been intended as a tribute to Orson Welles' 1938 halloween broadcast of the "War of the Worlds."

Dave Rickards, a deejay at KGB-FM in San Diego, announced that the space shuttle Discovery had been diverted from Edwards Air Force Base and would land instead at Montgomery Field in a few hours (at 8:30 am). Montgomery Field is a small military airport located in the middle of a residential area just outside of San Diego. Thousands of commuters immediately headed towards the supposed landing site, causing enormous traffic jams that lasted for almost an hour. Police eventually had to be called in to clear the traffic. People arrived at the military airport armed with cameras, camcorders, and even folding chairs, ready to witness the landing. Reportedly the crowd swelled to over 1,000 people. Of course, the shuttle never landed. In fact, the Montgomery Field airport would have been far too small for the shuttle to even consider landing there. Moreover, there wasn't even a shuttle in orbit at the time. The police were not amused by the prank. They announced that they would be billing the radio station for the cost of forcing officers to direct the traffic. In its defense, the radio station said, "It was a joke. We're sorry, but it was April Fools. We're just trying to have some fun." The prank was actually not original. A Belgian newspaper had perpetrated the identical hoax on its readers in 1992. However, the San Diego hoax fooled far more people than its Belgian predecessor.

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.

The Daily Journal, based in Kankakee, Illinois, reported that a Soviet space capsule had landed just outside of the city. Apparently the cosmonauts had seriously miscalculated their trajectory during reentry. The Soviet government was said to be keeping its silence about the capsule. An accompanying photograph showed a space capsule with a hammer and sickle displayed on its side. The article said that one of the cosmonauts was named Lirpa Loof, who had been missing for over a year. Many people drove to the supposed site of the landing to see the capsule.

An April Fool's joke by an amateur American astronomer was apparently taken seriously by a highly regarded Soviet scientist. Walter Scott Houston, professor of English at Kansas State College and editor of the Great Plains Observer, the monthly newsletter of the Great Plains Astronomical Society, included an article in the April edition that made the following claim:


Houston later explained that he chose the story because it was "so ludicrous it would not need to be labeled a gag." Both Dr. Hayall and the University of the Sierras were fictitious.

But soon after, the same theory was advanced by a Soviet scientist, Dr. Iosip Shklovsky, in an interview with Komsomol Pravda, a Communist youth league publication. American scientists were baffled by Shklovsky's assertion since there was no indication he was joking. Dr. Gerald Kuiper of the Yerkes Observatory was quoted as saying, "He is much too brilliant to believe such nonsense." [Jefferson City Post-Tribune, May 4, 1959.]

On March 31, 1940 Philadelphia radio station KYW broadcast the following message:

The announcement came after a radio program by Jack Benny that had been devoted to a discussion of how the world might end. The program had mentioned the name of Orson Welles, who had been responsible for the notorious War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast of 1938. The public reaction to KYW's announcement was dramatic. Newspapers, police stations and the city's information bureau received hundreds of calls from frightened citizens.

KYW later issued an apology and an explanation. The announcement was, of course, false, but the station denied responsibility for it. It said that it had received the announcement from William Castellini, press agent for the Franklin Institute and had read it in good faith, believing it to be genuine. However, Castellini had intended it as a publicity stunt to publicize an April 1st lecture at the planetarium titled "How Will the World End?" Castellini later explained that he came up with the idea for the stunt after hearing Benny's program and thinking it a good chance to get some publicity for the planetarium. He claimed, in his own defense, that he had told "some of the people" at the radio station about the announcement and "thought they would know it was a stunt." Soon afterwards, the Franklin Institute dismissed Castellini. [Oakland Tribune, Apr 1, 1940; The Washington Post, Apr 2, 1940.]