By Charles Layton (Reposted for April Fools Day 2018 but, because of Easter Sunday on April 1, this will appear on April 2, from April 1, 2012 on Blogfinger.)
The hoax is a venerable journalistic tradition — such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe indulged in hoaxes — but these days a good hoax, like a good man, is hard to find.
Not impossible though. Burger King once published a full-page ad in an April 1 edition of USA Today announcing the introduction of a “left-handed whopper.” A 1957 BBC news story announced that, thanks to a mild winter, European farmers were harvesting a record spaghetti crop. An April 1998 issue of a science newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama legislature had voted to change the value of pi from 3.14 to the “Biblical value” of 3.0.
The Taco Bell Corporation took out big newspaper ads in 1996 saying it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. (According to museumofhoaxes.com, hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia to complain.)
But these are not hoaxes in the true sense, they’re just jokes. Likewise the April 1, 2008 BBC story about a flock of flying penguins. The report, complete with video, explained that instead of enduring another long Antarctic winter these penguins had taken to the air, bound for the steamy jungles of South America.
Likewise the 1975 report by an Australian news program that the country was about to convert to “metric time” — 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour. Likewise the report by a New Zealand radio deejay who told listeners that a mile-wide swarm of wasps was headed for Auckland. He urged people to protect themselves by wearing their socks over their pant legs. Some did.
While being interviewed on BBC radio on April 1, 1976, the astronomer Patrick Moore said that a freakish, once-in-a-lifetime event was about to happen. Pluto was about to pass behind Jupiter, causing a temporary lessening of the Earth’s gravity. Moore said if people jumped in the air at exactly 9:47 a.m. they would feel a floating sensation. At the appointed time, the radio station started to receive phone calls from people who said they had felt the sensation. One woman said she and eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room. (I’m not sure who was kidding whom.)
But once upon a time a hoax was more than just a joke of the moment. In Denver, in June of 1899, four reporters for four different papers conspired to report what later came to be called the Great Wall of China hoax. The reporters were all desperate for news that day. While commiserating with one another at a hotel bar, they decided to just make up something. The story they concocted was that a certain American capitalist was on his way to China to tear down parts of the Great Wall and use the material for road paving. The story was picked up and republished in papers throughout the country.
I guess my favorite hoax story would be “The Great Moon Hoax,” which is also one of the oldest. Published in the New York Sun in 1835, it was a series of six articles, with elaborate illustrations, telling how a new, extremely powerful telescope had revealed life and civilization on the moon. The articles described fantastic animal forms — bison, goats, unicorns and tail-less beavers — and, the most spectacular of all, human-like creatures with bat-like wings. These discoveries were attributed to an actual astronomer of the day, Sir John Herschel.
It’s never been established for certain who authored this hoax, and I’m not sure The Sun ever retracted the story. But from what I’ve read, it seems that there might have been some satirical intent. A certain minister, Rev. Thomas Dick, had published popular writings around that time in which he calculated that the solar system contained many trillions of inhabitants, including approximately 4.2 billion creatures on the moon.
Sometimes a good hoax story will contain subtle clues confirming the fact that it’s a phony. In the April 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated the writer George Plimpton related that the Mets had signed a new pitcher, Sidd Finch, who could throw a baseball 168 miles per hour. The story said Finch had learned to perform this feat while studying with a Tibetan Lama.
The clue Plimpton left for his readers was in the sub-head of the article, which read; “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga — and his future in baseball.”
If you extract the first letter from each of these words, they spell: Happy April Fools Day — Ah Fib.”
I’d like to suggest a different headline for next year’s April 1st article: “Historic Preservation Commission approves plan for Hooters on Main Street.”
This is an outrage. Oh wait it’s April 1st. LOL
Very interesting. Have to say–you “caught me” with that arresting headline! Thanks for the humor!