In Sitka, Alaska, the volcano Mount Edgecumbe had been dormant for around 9,000 years when, one morning in 1974, residents noticed dark smoke spooling from its top. Round up the children! Call the authorities! When a coastguard helicopter flew in to investigate, the pilot saw that 100 tyres had been doused in cooking fuel and set alight in the volcano’s crater. Meanwhile, around the rim, someone had spraypainted “April Fool” in 50ft letters. It was the careful work of a local joker, Oliver Bickar, who’d been planning the prank for four years Photograph: Public Domain
“The biggest hoax any reputable news establishment ever pulled,” CNN later said of this celebrated stunt on the BBC’s Panorama. In a Richard Dimbleby-narrated short, around 8m viewers were told of Swiss farmers struggling to cope with “an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop”. Pickers were filmed taking spaghetti strands from plants while Dimbleby soberly explained that “after picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm Alpine air”. Among those fooled were then-director of the BBC, Ian Jacobs, who admitted having to look up “spaghetti” in his encyclopedia Photograph: BBC
When, in 2001, a competitive fishing competition was scheduled for 1 April on Lake Palestine in Texas, animal rights group Peta decided to have some fun. The organisation promised to disrupt the event by dissolving sleeping pills into the 40bn-gallon lake, thus knocking out all the fish for the day and sparing them the anglers’ hooks… Local newspapers took the threat seriously (complaining of “borderline terroristic methods”) and Texan officials followed suit. Park rangers were soon in position around the lake to intercept any Peta members carrying armfuls of tranquiliser tablets Photograph: Matthew Peyton/Getty Images
The casual but enormous risk taken with this 1989 prank merits its inclusion. In a publicity-stunt-cum-April-Fool-joke, Richard Branson flew across London in a hot-air balloon made to look like an alien spacecraft. The plan had been to land in Hyde Park, where everyone would chuckle and run off to buy tickets on Branson’s new airline, Virgin Galactic. But wind blew Branson off course and he ended up floating to Surrey over the M25. Police later confirmed they’d received calls from emergency roadside phones, motorists having halted their speeding cars, convinced they’d seen a UFO Photograph: Rex Features
American newspaper The Daily Graphic published, in 1878, news of a technological breakthrough: Thomas Edison had invented “the Food Creator... a machine that will feed the human race!”. How, exactly, was unclear, but it would be able to manufacture meat, vegetables, wine and biscuits using only air, water and “common earth”. A final paragraph in the April article revealed that “the Food Creator” did not in fact exist; but not every reader got that far, and Thomas Edison received “a flood of letters from all parts of the country”, as he wrote to tell the Graphic’s editor. “Very ingenious,” he said Photograph: Corbis
In an article for American Esquire magazine, journalist Ted Fishman wrote about a company called Freewheelz who planned to offer members of the public a free Nissan Maxima if they would agree to it being covered with colourful adverts. “The revolution will get rolling in full on 1 April,” teased Fishman, who’d paid £40 for the domain name freewheelz.com as part of the wheeze. Meanwhile, a genuine start-up company called Freecar had been planning to launch just such a business, and its CEO (who later confessed he had wept when he read the article) paid the Esquire writer £15,000 for the domain name Photograph: Alamy
The relaxation of press strictures in China by Chairman Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s encouraged young editors like the China Youth Daily’s Yang Lang to have some fun on 1 April. In 1993 Lang ran several joke news stories in the Daily including one about a government plan to relax the one-child-per-family limit. It was a sensitive subject to lampoon, and according to prank aficionado Alex Boese (curator of a website called the Museum of Hoaxes and author of a 2004 book of the same name), the stunt was fiercely condemned. “Put plainly,” an editorial in the Guangming Daily warned, “April Fool’s Day is liar’s day.” Photograph: AP
Big-corporation pranks tend to range from the pointlessly timid (Starbucks were to introduce a new miniature cup size!) to the lazily implausible (Air France would fly to Jupiter!). Burger King’s 1998 unveiling of a “left-handed Whopper” – a normal burger, with “the condiments rotated 180 degrees” – was at the wimpier end of the scale. Still it fooled thousands in the US and UK with left-handers going out of their way to order one, and righties making it clear they’d prefer the original version. “Everyone knows that it takes two hands to hold a Whopper!” said a Burger King spokesperson later, ruining the fun by getting aggressively on-message Photograph: Alamy
A hoax is only as impressive as those it tricks, and there can be no better dupe than the fact-proud New York Times. The newspaper was the most prominent of several to pick up a 1934 spoof story from German publication Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, purporting to show a test pilot successfully using a device that enabled personal flight. Powered by lung power, it featured two rotor-blades attached to the man’s chest, and skis for landing. Rival publication Time was gleeful that the Times had been caught out. “The most amazing news pictures of the decade appeared last week…” began a crowing follow-up piece Photograph: The Daily Independent, Monessen, Pa
To publicise a new biography, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, the author William Boyd and a small band of conspirators arranged a launch party at a Manhattan gallery on 1 April 1998. Guests listened to David Bowie read extracts and made appreciative noises about the entirely forgotten Tate, whose reputation the book might yet revive… Tate, in fact, didn’t exist. The book was a mock-biography, and a journalist in on the joke had been circulating at the party, asking leading questions and getting New York’s cultural elite to feign knowledge of the artist. Boyd later sold a sketch he’d made under the guise of Tate, raising £7,250 for charity Photograph: PR
