Wednesday, April 1, 2009

April Fool's!


In honor of April Fool’s Day, I thought I’d share a few classic April Fool’s pranks I found on Museumofhoaxes.com:

-In 1995, Discover magazine ran a story about a recently discovered creature in Antarctica called the Hot-Headed Ice Borer. Dr. Aprile Pazzo (a check on Google translator says pazzo=crazy in Italian) took credit for discovering the creature, which supposedly had a bony plate on its forehead filled with blood vessels, which heated up and allowed the creature to bore quickly through the ice, hunting penguins and unwary Antarctic explorers.

-In 1976, an astronomer announced on BBC that, due to the alignment of Jupiter and Pluto, at 9:47 AM Earth’s gravity would lessen, so much so that anyone who jumped in the air would experience a strange floating sensation. Of course, at the specified time, hundreds of people called in to the BBC, reporting their success in the experiment. One woman even claimed to have floated around the room with her friends.

-In 1974, residents of Sitka, Alaska, ran terrified from their homes after smoke began streaming into the air from nearby volcano Mt. Edgecombe. The ‘eruption’ turned out to be a local prankster’s coup; he’d flown hundreds of tires into the volcanic crater and lit them on fire. A few years later, when Mt. St. Helens erupted for real, several Sitka residents wrote to him, chiding him for “going too far this time.”

1 comment:

Rose317 said...

i wonder what kind of psychedelic drugs the floating people were on in '76...