People like to play pranks on their friends and relatives on this day, but that is not where the buck stops. Some corporations also have made it their tradition to hoax people by playing mind blowing pranks on their clients.
Us takes a look at some hoaxes perpetrated on the gullible public by individuals and corporations...
April 1, 1698: As reported in Dawks’s News-Letter, “several persons were sent to the Tower Ditch to see the Lions washed.” This is the earliest known record of an April Fool’s Day prank. The joke was that there were no lions being washed in the Ditch (i.e. moat) of the Tower of London. It was a fool’s errand. For well over a century after this, the prank of sending unsuspecting victims to see the “washing of the lions” at the Tower of London remained a favorite April Fool’s Day joke. In the mid-nineteenth century, pranksters even printed up official-looking tickets that they distributed around London on April first, promising admittance to the (non-existent) annual lion-washing ceremony.
April 1, 1972: Newspapers around the world reported the sensational news that the dead body of the Loch Ness Monster had been found. A team of zoologists from Yorkshire’s Flamingo Park Zoo had come across it while working at the Loch. The researchers tried to take the Nessie corpse back to Yorkshire, but Scottish police promptly stopped them, citing an old law that made it illegal to remove “unidentified creatures” from Loch Ness. However, subsequent examination of the creature determined that it wasn’t actually Nessie. Instead, it was a large bull elephant seal from the South Atlantic. But how had it gotten to Loch Ness? This was revealed the next day when the Flamingo Park’s education officer, John Shields, confessed responsibility. The seal had died the week before at Dudley Zoo. He had shaved off its whiskers, padded its cheeks with stones, and kept it frozen for a week, before surreptitiously dumping it in the Loch, intending to play an April Fool’s prank on his colleagues. He admitted the joke got somewhat out of hand when the police became involved.
April 1, 1983: BMW’s UK division ran an ad in British papers revealing that one of its engineers, Herr Blöhn, had designed a sunroof that could be kept open even in the rain, thanks to jets of air that blasted the water away from the top of the car. The system worked completely automatically, even in a car wash. Those seeking more information were directed to query “Miss April Wurst” in the BMW marketing department. The ad was the start of a long tradition of the company creating spoof ads every April 1st. In fact, BMW has probably been creating April Fool ads longer and more consistently than any other company, and the success of their ads played a large role in convincing other companies to run spoof ads on the first of April. This practice has now become so widespread that many companies say they feel compelled to create spoof ads for April 1, lest their customers think they lack a sense of humour.
March 31, 1989: Thousands of motorists driving on the highway outside London looked up in the air to see a glowing flying saucer descending on their city. Many of them pulled to the side of the road to watch the bizarre craft float through the air. The saucer finally landed in a field on the outskirts of London where local residents immediately called the police to warn them of an alien invasion. Soon the police arrived on the scene, and one brave officer approached the craft with his truncheon extended before him. When a door in the craft popped open, and a small, silver-suited figure emerged, the policeman ran in the opposite direction. The saucer turned out to be a hot-air balloon that had been specially built to look like a UFO by Richard Branson, the 36-year-old chairman of Virgin Records. The stunt combined his passion for ballooning with his love of pranks. His plan was to land the craft in London’s Hyde Park on April 1. Unfortunately, the wind blew him off course, and he was forced to land a day early in the wrong location.
One of the policemen who had to approach the craft later admitted, “I have never been so scared in 20 years of being a policeman.”
April 1, 1992: Airline passengers descending into Los Angeles Airport might have experienced a momentary feeling of panic when they looked out the window and saw an 85-foot-long yellow banner on the ground that spelled out, in 20-foot-high red letters, “Welcome to Chicago.” It was raised above the Hollywood Park race track, which lay directly along the flight path for arriving planes, about three miles from the airport. Park spokesman Brock Sheridan explained, “It was something we always wanted to do. We thought it would be kind of funny and our new management... thought it would be a great practical joke.” The sign remained up for two days.
April 1, 2000: A news release informed the media that the 15th annual New York City April Fool’s Day Parade would begin at noon on 59th Street and proceed down to Fifth Avenue. It would include a “Beat ‘em, Bust ‘em, Book ‘em” float created by the New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle police departments, portraying “themes of brutality, corruption and incompetence.” There would also be an “Atlanta Braves Baseball Tribute to Racism” float featuring John Rocker “spewing racial epithets at the crowd.” CNN and the Fox affiliate WNYW promptly sent news crews to cover the parade. They arrived at 59th Street at noon and patiently waited for the parade to start. It never did. The prank was the handiwork of long-time hoaxer Joey Skaggs, who had been issuing press releases announcing the nonexistent parade every April Fool’s Day since 1986