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Best April Fool’s Day tricks

The media cottoned on to the idea of having fun with their readers and viewers very early on but plenty of other organisations have enjoyed the opportunity as well.

The Spaghetti Harvest
It was in 1957 that the BBC’s highly respected news program Panorama did a feature on harvesting spaghetti from trees. The fact that the story was presented by the august Richard Dimbleby gave it even more credence. Many people were outraged that the BBC (and especially Richard Dimbleby) should do such a thing. What they really objected to was the fact that they had been taken in.

The Islands of San Serriffe
In 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a special supplement in honour of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. What made this one so effective was that travel companies had joined in and the article was surrounded by adverts for San Serriffe holidays. Those in the know realised that everything about the feature including the names of the main islands Upper and Lower Caisse, the capital Bodoni and President Pica, were all typographical terms.

Redefining Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant Pi from 3.14159 (roughly, it cannot be explicitly stated which is why it has a name) to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. The original article was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution and written by physicist Mark Boslough.

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
In 1976 the British astronomer and composer Patrick Moore (whose programme The Sky at Night is still running every month for 50 years) announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM the planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, causing a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth's gravity and that if listeners jumped in the air at that moment, they would experience a strange floating sensation. Many people claimed they had – though it’s not clear whether they were simply carrying on the joke.

As a final note, the author of these pages was once the editor of a consumer computer magazine and was guilty of embarrassing a teacher in front his pupils with an April Fool computer program.