April Fool's Day
In sixteenth-century France, the start of the new year was observed on April first. It was celebrated in much the same way as it is today with parties and dancing into the late hours of the night. Then in 1562, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the new year fell on January first. There were some people, however, who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first. Others played tricks on them and called them "April fools." They sent them on a "fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was true. In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril." French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their friends' backs. When the "young fool" discovers this trick, the prankster yells "Poisson d'Avril!" (April Fish!) Children may receive a gift of chocolate fish for their tricks. India celebrates its spring festival of Holi, ending toward the end of March, in which tricks and pranks also play a part.
Today Americans play small tricks on friends and strangers alike on the first of April. One common trick on April Fool's Day, or All Fool's Day, is pointing down to a friend's shoe and saying, "Your shoelace is untied." Teachers in the nineteenth century used to say to pupils, "Look! A flock of geese!" and point up. School children might tell a classmate that school has been canceled. Whatever the trick, if the innocent victim falls for the joke the prankster yells, "April Fool! "
The "fools' errands" we play on people are practical jokes. Putting salt in the sugar bowl for the next person is not a nice trick to play on a stranger. College students set their clocks an hour behind, so their roommates show up to the wrong class - or not at all. Some practical jokes are kept up the whole day before the victim realizes what day it is. Most April Fool jokes are in good fun and not meant to harm anyone. The most clever April Fool joke is the one where everyone laughs, especially the person upon whom the joke is played.
Fool's Day: Unofficial, But Favorite Holiday
April 1st, the Fool's Day is not included into calendars of memorable dates and holidays celebrates all over the world. However, everybody knows that this is the day when we should be ready for practical jokes, laughter and lots of fun. It's honored not less than even any traditional professional holiday.
Jokes played on people on April 1st are of different ingenuity and scale: some tricks are played inside a family and concern only direct participants of the trick; but others may infect masses of population like a virus, and may even entail unexpected consequences.
Many people still consider it the best trick of the century when on April 1, 1957 BBC reported unbelievable macaroni crop in Switzerland. The TV company broadcast a report from a field where farmers gathered boiled macaroni. At that, the announcer reported main achievement of this agricultural sector: it was for the first time that gathered macaroni were of equal length, which was possible only thanks to numerous experiments held by several breeder generations. The BBC editors got lots of responses from TV viewers: some people were surprised to learn that macaroni were growing vertically, not horizontally; some asked to send seedlings of the incredible macaroni. Just few people sounded confused in their letters: until that TV report by BBC they were perfectly sure that macaroni were made of flour, not grown on fields.
In fact, as soon as mass media appeared, they became the author of such provocations almost immediately. At that, British mass media were the most refined with practical jokes. For instance, in 1698 a London newspaper published an announcement saying that lions would be washed in Tower; the sensational news attracted crowds of idlers. In 1860, another newspaper copied the announcement, and in almost 100 years the effect of the publication was the same.
About 15 years ago Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported in its issue on April 1st that a mammoth calf was found frozen somewhere in Chukotka; when people discovered the animal, it revived and was later settled in a Moscow zoo. Some school teacher from Siberia gathered a group of pupils to make an excursion to Moscow. The woman couldn't guess it was a practical joke and kicked up a row with the zoo administration because she and her group even had to take a plain to come to Moscow and see the mammoth reported in the newspaper.
It was incredible when in 1990 Russia's weekly Sobesednik reported an allegedly scientific "research" saying that there was no poet named Alexander Blok (in fact, the poet lived in Russia in the time of the Great October Revolution). The publication was so much convincing that dozens of literary critics from all parts of the country (they were people with high scientific degrees!) started earnest and active polemics with the weekly.
Vecherny Chelyabinsk newspaper
Translated by Maria Gousseva
April Fools' Special: History's Hoaxes
By John Roach
for National Geographic News
April 1, 2003
At first glance, the headlines sound plausible: Shark leaps from ocean to attack a hovering helicopter. Mild winter brings Swiss a bumper spaghetti crop. Taco Bell Corporation purchases Liberty Bell from U.S. Government. Alabama legislature votes to change the value of the mathematical constant pi. But they are all lies.
Happy April Fools' Day. In celebration of the day, National Geographic News has compiled a listing of some of the greatest hoaxes in history. They are the lies, darned lies, and whoppers that have been perpetrated on the gullible and unsuspecting, probably since humans evolved the art of speech.
Internet Hoaxes
The internet has given birth to a rise in popularity and proliferation of hoaxes. E-mail inboxes are bombarded on an almost daily basis with messages warning of terrible computer viruses that cause users to delete benign chunks of data from their hard drives, or of credit card scams that entice the naive to give all their personal information, including passwords and bank account, to identity thieves. Other e-mails make users gasp with incredulity and awe, which is where this list begins.
Shark "Photo of the Year"
A famous hoax from last year, (2002) was created when somebody manipulated two photographs, reversing the helicopter photograph and pasting the breaching Great White shark.
Center: Photograph by Lance Cheung/U.S. Air Force Photo
Bottom: Photograph copyright Charles Maxwell
National Geographic's Web site was deluged with hundreds of queries a day when an e-mail containing a photo of a shark leaping out of the water to attack a helicopter began flooding inboxes around the world in August 2001. The email claims the photo is National Geographic's "Photo of the Year."
National Geographic replied that the photo is a fake and sent out its sleuths to track down the source. They found that the image was spliced together from a U.S. Air Force photo taken near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge by Lance Cheung and a photo of a breaching great white shark taken by South African photographer Charles Maxwell, but the person responsible for making the composite image has never been identified.
Maxwell, who has worked for National Geographic several times, is not thrilled that an image from his Web site was taken and manipulated in this fashion, but told National Geographic News that he'd "like to make contact with the person who did thisnot to get him or her into trouble, but because it's a lot of fun and it is a good job."
The e-mail containing the hoax reads:
AND YOU THINK YOUR [sic] HAVING A BAD DAY AT WORK!!
Although this looks like a picture taken from a Hollywood movie, it is in fact a real photo, taken near the South African coast during a military exercise by the British Navy.
It has been nominated by National Geographic as "THE photo of the year."
Tourist Guy
Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, a photo began circulating the Internet that showed a man in a black cap and sunglasses standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center just seconds before it was struck by American Airlines Flight 11, which is seen in the background. The photo was accompanied with a message saying it was found in the wreckage and that the tourist has no name and is missing. A few months later, well after the photo leaked from a close-knit circle of friends to e-mail inboxes around the world, Peter Guzli, a man from Budapest, Hungary, stepped forward and accepted responsibility for the hoax.
Guzli, who first came clean by e-mailing the original photo to Wired, said it was taken while on vacation to New York in November 1997. After 9/11, he found the photo and spliced it with a picture of an American Airlines plane taken by Jonathon Derden at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport that was part of an aircraft photography database maintained by Airliners.net. Guzli then sent his creation out to a few friends for a dark laugh. It spread around the world.
Alex Boese, the author and curator of The Museum of Hoaxes (see sidebar), says the photo represents successful dark humor. "It did manage to capture some of the feelings people were experiencing at that time," he said. "Seeing someone with their back turned to the plane evoked a feeling of being sucker-punched."
Alabama Changes Value of Pi
The April 1998 newsletter put out by New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) contains an article titled "Alabama Legislature Lays Siege to Pi." It was penned by April Holiday of the Associmated Press (sic) and told the story of how the Alabama state legislature voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the round number of 3.
The news story was written as a parody of legislative and school board attacks on the teaching of evolution in New Mexico. At the suggestion of the real author, Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Mark Boslough, Dave Thomas, the president of NMSR posted the article on April 1 in its entirety to the Internet newsgroup talk.origins, where creation vs. evolution is lively debated. That evening, Thomas posted a full confession and thought he had put all rumors to bed.
To Thomas' surprise, however, several readers of the newsgroup forwarded the article to friends and posted it on other newsgroups. When Thomas checked in on the story a few weeks later he was surprised to learn that it had spread like wildfire. The telltale signs of it being a hoax, such as the April Holiday and Associmated Press's bylines, had been replaced or deleted. Alabama legislators were bombarded with calls protesting the law. The legislators explained that the news was a hoax, there was not and never had been such a law.
Media Hoaxes
Before the advent of the Internet, and even still today, traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio, and television, have often hoaxed their audiences. The deceptions run the gamut from purported natural disasters to wishful news.
Swiss Spaghetti Harvest
In what is Boese's all-time favorite Hoax, on April 1, 1957 the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) aired on television a report on the news show Panorama about the bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. Viewers watched Swiss farmers pull pasta off spaghetti trees as the show's anchor Richard Dimbleby attributed the bountiful harvest to the mild winter and the disappearance of the spaghetti weevil. He detailed the ins and outs of the life of the spaghetti farmer and anticipated questions about how spaghetti grows on trees. Thousands of people believed the report and called the BBC to inquire about growing their own spaghetti trees to which the BBC replied, "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."
"It [was] a great satirical effect about British society," said Boese. "British society really was like that at that time. The British have a tendency to be a bit insulated and do not know that much about the rest of Europe."
Taco Liberty Bell
On April Fools' Day in 1996 readers in five major cities opened their newspapers to learn from a full page announcement that Taco Bell Corporation had purchased the Liberty Bell from the U.S. government and was re-locating it from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Irvine, California. The move, the corporation said in the advertisement, was part of an "effort to help the national debt."
Hundreds of other newspapers and television shows ran stories related to a press release on the matter put out by Taco Bell's public relations firm PainePR. Outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia to express their disgust. A few hours later, the public relations firm followed with another release stating that it was a hoax.
White House press secretary Mike McCurry got into the act when he remarked that the government would also be "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial."
As a marketing ploy, the hoax was successful, states PainePR on their Web site. The firm claims that more than 70 million Americans were exposed to the story, which resulted in a U.S.$500,000 sales increase for Taco Bell on April 1 and a $600,000 increase on April 2.
The threat of disaster and the wonders of science and nature are often evoked in the form of a hoax. Other scientific or natural achievements are so seemingly unbelievable that some people cannot accept that they are in fact true, and to this day maintain that what is real is really a hoax. Some of these include:
Crop Circles
Strange, circular formations began to appear in the fields of southern England in the mid-1970s, bringing busloads of curious onlookers, media representatives, and believers in the paranormal out to the countryside for a look. A sometimes vitriolic debate on their origins has since ensued and the curious formations have spread around the world, becoming more and more elaborate as the years go by.
Some people consider the crop formations to be the greatest works of modern art to emerge from the 20th century, while others are convinced they are signs of extraterrestrial communications or landing sites of UFOs.
The debate rages even today, although in 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two elderly men from Wiltshire County, came forward and claimed responsibility for the crop circles there over the past 20 years. They made the circles by pushing down nearly-ripe crops with a plank suspended from a rope. It seems logical to think that their art was copied around the world, but who knows?
Piltdown Man
In December of 1912, a 500,000-year-old skull that represented the "missing-link" between modern humans and their prehistoric ancestors went on display at the British Museum in London. The specimen was recovered by an amateur fossil collector named Charles Dawson and put on display by Aurthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Department of Geology at the museum.
The skull caused a stir amongst scientists, who felt that the lower jaw belonged to a different species, perhaps an ape. Eventually, however, those in favor of Piltdown Man's authenticity won out and the skull was given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawson and recorded in the textbooks.
Over the next several years, Dawson recovered other bones from the Piltdown site and they were added to the collection. It was not until 1953, 37 years after Dawson had died, that British Museum researchers Kenneth Oakley, Wilfred Le Gros Clark, and Joseph Weiner published a paper in which they announced that the fossil was a fake. They concluded that Piltdown Man was a combination of human cranial pieces and the jawbone of an orangutan that had been stained to make it look old.
Moon Landing a Hoax?
Ever since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972, skeptics have questioned whether the Apollo missions were real or simply a ploy to one-up the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The debate resurfaced and reached crescendo levels in February 2001 when Fox television aired a program called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?.
Guests on the show argued that NASA did not have the technology to land on the moon, but, anxious to win the space race, acted out the Apollo program in movie studios. The conspiracy theorists pointed out things such as the pictures transmitted from the moon do not include stars and that the flag the Americans planted on the moon is waving even though there is thought to be no breeze on the moon.
NASA quickly refuted these claims in a series of press releases, stating that any photographer would know it is difficult to capture something very bright and very dim on the same piece of film and since the photographers wanted to capture the astronauts striding across the lunar surface in their sunlit spacesuits, the background stars were too faint to see. For the flag, NASA said that the astronauts were turning it back and forth to get in firmly planted in the lunar soil, which made it wave.
The issue may have been put to rest when NASA pointed out that the show never raises a question about the more than 800 pounds (363 kilograms) of rocks brought back from the moon. "Geologists worldwide have been examining these samples for 30 years, and the conclusion is inescapable. The rocks could not have been collected or manufactured on Earth," NASA says on its Web site. Regardless, the conspiracy theory abounds today.
Similarly, there are still people who claim that the Earth really is flat. Some people are convinced that there is a vast conspiracy to hide evidence of flying saucers and that dead aliens lie in a secret government mortuary in a place known as Area 51 in Nevada. Others think that aliens are alive and well and living in the White House.
For many people, the world is full of conspiracies and hoaxes. So if you notice any bizarre headlines or strange e-mails on this day, April 1, check that you are not being played for a fool.
Extra:
What Is A Hoax?
"A hoax," according to Alex Boese, curator of the The Museum of Hoaxes, a regularly updated Web site that was published as a book in November of 2002, "is an outrageous claim that is publicly exposed as a lie or deception."
Hoaxes have been performed for centuries, sometimes with malicious intent but mostly to rouse good friends to laughter. They run the spectrum from the lighthearted to evil and are performed for variety of motivations, said Boese, who is also a graduate student in science and popular culture at the University of California at San Diego.
Whether malicious or good willed, what all hoaxes seem to have in common is an element of gaining power over somebody. "The power of manipulating other people appeals to a lot of hoaxers," said Boese, who believes the best hoaxes are ones that don't hurt anybody and are educational and funny.
History of Hoaxes
Hoaxes date back at least to the 17th century and began to appear at about the same time that cultures began to celebrate April Fools Day, although Boese believes there is no concrete evidence to link the practice of hoaxing and the tricks that now proliferate on April 1.
Some historians trace the roots of April Fools Day to 16th century France where for a time the start of the New Year was observed on April 1. Then in 1562 Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, which placed the New Year on January 1. Some people, however, continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1. According to the lore, tricks were played on these disbelievers and many called them fools.
Today hoaxes are carried out on an almost constant, daily basis thanks to the advent of the Internet. Email quickly and efficiently sends out word of purported viruses, get-rich-quick schemes, and incredulous stories. Digital photography and software allows anyone to alter reality in images, superimposing the head of one person on the body of another, making someone vanish from a sceneor capturing the moment when a giant shark jumps out of the ocean to attack a helicopter.
While considered a boon to the public exposure of deliberately deceitful acts that "has charged up the whole hoaxing environment," said Boese, the more malicious of these emails keep Bill Orvis, a senior security analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, on his toes.
When not tracking down hackers trying to access top secret information, Orvis maintains CIAC's "Hoaxbusters" Web site, which was started in 1995 in response to the overwhelming calls for help concerning an widely spread email that warned of a virus called Good Times that would supposedly wipe a computer's hard drive clean.
"We were getting hundreds of phone calls. People were asking is this true? What should be done about it? For survival, we put up some web pages that described the Good Times message, advertised the fact that it was a fake and to please stop sending it around," said Orvis. "And it worked. Our telephone and email traffic dropped by 80 percent."
Today the Hoaxbusters Web site is a repository of email hoaxes that range from fake viruses to financial scams. Orvis asks that whenever a computer user gets a suspicious email to check out his or one of several antivirus software vendors' Web sites before forwarding the message.
"If you get a message that says 'send me to all your friends,' odds are about 99.9 percent that it is a fake," he said.
You can also use this very helpful website to check for hoaxes, chainletters, etc.:
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