On This Date In History

On April 1, 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other.
Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.
Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.
These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as poisson d’avril (April fish), said to symbolize a young, “easily hooked” fish and a gullible person.
April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.

Here are a few of my favorite large scale April Fools' Day hoaxes:

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

On April 1, 1957 the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the "virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil." The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."
The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax generated an enormous response. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree.
It is also believed to be the first time the medium of television was used to stage an April Fool's Day hoax.
A Panorama cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, who had a reputation for being a practical joker, came up with the idea for the spaghetti harvest hoax. De Jaeger was born in Vienna in 1911. He worked in Austria as a freelance photographer before moving to Britain during the 1930s where he worked for the film unit of General Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces. He joined the BBC in 1943.
De Jaeger headed to Switzerland in March and, accompanied by a representative from the Swiss Tourist Office, scouted out a location. The weather proved problematic. It was misty and cold, and most of the trees were not in blossom. But eventually they found the perfect setting, a hotel in Castiglione on the shore of Lake Lugano surrounded by evergreen Laurel trees.
De Jaeger obtained twenty pounds of uncooked homemade spaghetti, and began hanging it from branches to create spaghetti trees. But soon he encountered a problem. The spaghetti quickly dried out and wouldn't hang from the branches.
He tried to solve the problem by cooking the spaghetti and then hanging it, but once cooked the spaghetti became slippery and slid off the branches onto the ground. The tourist rep hit on the solution by placing the uncooked spaghetti between damp cloths to keep it moist until it was ready to use.
With this problem solved, de Jaeger hired some local girls to hang the spaghetti in the trees. He had them wear their national costume, and then he filmed them as they climbed ladders carrying wicker baskets which they filled full of spaghetti, and then laid it out to dry in the sun.
After he had all the shots he needed of the spaghetti harvest, he prepared a spaghetti feast for his actors, which he filmed also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

The morning of April 1, 1974 was clear and beautiful. Mt. Edgecumbe, a dormant volcano located 13 miles west of Sitka, Alaska on Kruzof Island, was clearly visible across Sitka Sound. Upon seeing the mountain when he woke up, life-long prankster Oliver “Porky” Bickar reportedly turned to his wife, Patty, and said, “This is it. We’ve gotta do it today.” Kissing him on the forehead, Patty replied, “Don’t make an ass of yourself.”
Porky had waited three years for this, collecting old tires in his shop ever since he hatched the idea back in 1971. April Fool’s Day, 1974 had finally provided the right visibility conditions. He planned to fly his collection of tires into the crater of the volcano and set them on fire, all in an attempt to fool Sitka’s residents into thinking that the familiar volcano was about to erupt.
Porky rushed to his shop and, after calling multiple helicopter charters, was able to enlist the services of Earl Walker from Petersburg. Although Earl was fog-bound in Petersburg, he was excited by Porky’s idea and said he would be on his way to Sitka as soon as the weather cleared. While waiting, Porky made two rope slings about 150 feet long, each holding 50 old car tires. He also gathered oily rags, a gallon of Sterno, a whole lot of diesel oil, and a dozen smoke bombs, anything and everything that would emit thick, black smoke.
Upon Earl’s arrival, and with the help of their accomplices, Larry Nelson and Ken Stedman, Porky and Earl loaded the helicopter and off they flew toward Mt. Edgecumbe.  They dropped the tires and incendiaries into the volcano’s crater. They spray-painted “APRIL FOOL’S” in 50-foot letters onto the snow and set their creation ablaze.
When asking the FAA tower for permission to land back in Sitka, Homer Sutter, the air-traffic controller, said, “I’ll bring you in as low and inconspicuously as possible, and, by the way, the son of a gun looks fantastic!” Porky had notified the FAA and the Sitka Police Department, but had somehow forgotten the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard quickly scrambled to its boats and helicopter to investigate, but the chopper pilot soon found himself looking down at a pile of smoldering tires and a big April Fool’s sign in the snow.
Phones rang off the hook at radio stations and the Police Department as concerned citizens called in. Porky has accomplished his mission. He had fooled Sitka into thinking their supposedly extinct volcano was preparing to erupt.
The prank went on to make AP news worldwide. News of Porky’s antics in Sitka even reached Jimmy Johnson, Vice President of Alaska Airlines, who called the Sitka station to instruct their departing plane to fly over the mountain, giving their passengers a front-row seat to the spectacle.

 

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity
1976: The Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect was a phenomenon purported to cause a noticeable short-term reduction in gravity on Earth. Patrick Moore, who was the doyen of British television astronomers, boasting a long career in public service broadcasting, a quick-fire manner of speech, and a number of eccentric habits, including the wearing of a monocle, announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

 

Patrick Moore

And I don't guess I should leave this one out.

The Left-Handed Whopper
1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

 

You can look through the Top 100 here:

The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time

http://hoaxes.org/aprilfool/