April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day, is one of the most light-hearted days of the year. It came from an old tradition in American and European cultures, but no one knows its exact origin. What everyone knows is that April Fools’ is the perfect day for trickery, jokes, and invention.
Some tricks during this day include sending someone on a “fool’s errand,” looking for things that don’t exist; playing pranks; and trying to get people to believe ridiculous things.
So while you think that making prank calls is an impressive feat, know that there are actually big-scale pranks that fooled people for decades and even changed the course of history.
1.) The great spaghetti harvest
One of the most famous April Fools’ Day pranks of all time is the BBC’s famous “spaghetti harvest” segment. On April 1, 1957, a news broadcaster told his British audience that a Swiss region near the Italian border, called Ticino, had “an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop” that year. BBC showed footage of people picking spaghetti off of trees and bushes, then sitting down at a table to eat some of their “real, home-grown spaghetti.”
While some viewers were not fazed by the prank pulled off by BBC, there were others who reportedly asked about how they could grow their own spaghetti at home.
2.) UFO of Virgin Airlines
Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has a well-documented love of April Fools’ Day. But in 1989, his annual prank came a day early, on March 31.
That evening, residents outside of London spotted a flying saucer that appeared to land in a nearby field in Surrey. Police officers went to the field to investigate the supposed UFO and were probably surprised when they actually found one. As they approached the flying saucer, a door opened and a silver-clad figure walked out. The cops promptly ran away.
Little did they know, Branson was hiding out in the UFO behind his silver-clad companion, whose name was Don Cameron. The two of them had taken off in the flying saucer—which was actually a hot-air balloon—and planned to land in Hyde Park on April 1 as a prank. However, changing winds forced them to land a little earlier in Surrey.
3.) A rhino elected to the City Council
In 1959, a group of students in Sao Paolo, Brazil, managed to swing an election when they got a five-year-old rhinoceros named Cacareco elected to the city council. The four-legged candidate won by a landslide, garnering 100,000 votes—one of the highest totals for a local candidate in Brazil’s history to that point. The students had ballots printed up with Cacareco’s name on them and then got thousands of voters to send them in.
After Cacareco won, the head of the zoo where she lived, demanded that the rhino receive a councilman’s salary, but the election was nullified before any paychecks were cut.
4.) An iceberg appeared in Sydney Harbour
On April 1, 1978, residents of Sydney, Australia, awoke to find a gigantic iceberg floating in Sydney Harbour. Days before the prank, electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith announced that an iceberg he had towed from Antarctica would be arriving in Sydney. The public was surprised by the display. The Australian navy even called Smith to ask if he needed help mooring his iceberg. Not until a rainstorm revealed the iceberg for what it truly was: A barge covered in sheets of white plastic and fire-fighting foam.
5.) Turning black & white TVs to color
Sweden’s most famous April Fool’s Day hoax occurred on April 1, 1962. At the time, SVT (Sveriges Television) was the only television channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white.
The station announced that Kjell Stensson, a “technical expert,” was going to describe a process that would allow people to view colored images on their existing black-and-white TV sets. That if they stretched a pair of nylon stockings over their television sets, the light would be filtered in such a way that it will allow them to see the broadcast in color. To see the results, Stensson recommended that the viewers would need to move their heads from side to side as they watched. While not everyone fell for this hoax, thousands of viewers who followed Stensson’s instructions looked a little bit silly. /rcg