A few April Fools Day jokes in the 1950’s top the list of all time best.
Be careful what you believe on April Fools’ Day! Especially nowadays with the internet and social media, it’s so easy to play pranks on the public. While April Fools’ Day is not a national holiday in any country, it has been a popular practice around the world since medieval times. It seems like every year there are some major hoaxes that circulate on-line and fool a lot of people. In 2013 Scope said they created bacon flavored mouthwash and Virgin Atlantic Airway claimed to have created the first glass-bottomed plane.
Back in the 1950’s people still pulled some major hoaxes, they just didn’t have the internet to help them. Some of these ended up on the Museum of Hoaxes list of Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes of All Time. Number 23 on the list happened in 1950 when 50,000 oranges were attached to the pine and cedar trees lining a one-mile section of highway near Lake Arrowhead in southern California. This was the work of the residents of the nearby town of Skyforest, led by the cartoonist Frank Adams. At number 85 on the list is the Kokomo Tribune in Indiana that ran an article saying that in order to save money the police department would be closed from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and an answering machine would record all the phone calls, which would be screened by an officer in the morning. Number 1 on the list was the BBC’s 1957 report that Swiss farmers were enjoying a huge bumper crop of spaghetti, complete with footage of people standing on ladders pulling strands of spaghetti from trees.
Were you fooled by any hoaxes today? Or did you pull a few good ones of your own? Happy April Fools’ Day!
The number one hoax of all time – The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest by the BBC.
Photo courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes.