Best all-time april fools day pranks

I’ve stopped doing april fools pranks, hoaxes and jokes, since unfortunately my jokes had a tendency to become true. “Dude, we’ve got a tax-misunderstanding” led to half a year of explaining why nothing was wrong. “DHL wants us to pay a strange import fee” wasn’t fun when DHL called three days later. I talked to your boss and hear Microsoft has bought your company… a couple of days later… you get the picture.

But, that doesn’t stop me enjoying aprils fools day, my favourite came early with the EU requiring online retailers to refund their customers before getting the merchandise back. Let’s have a look at great april fools jokes and pranks:

• In 1957 a show called Panorama announced that a mild winter had increased the Swiss spaghetti harvest (see YouTube)
• The BBC had a commercial for a documentary of Antarctica’s colony of flying penguins
• In 1980, the Big Ben was reported to be switching to digital, and the clocks hands would be sold to whoever called in first
• Branson’s hot air balloon that resembled a UFO in 1989 was a great one (video below)
• What I’m sure would tame many flamewars online was also an april fools joke: the proposed law that it’d be illegal to use the Internet while drunk from 1994
• The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from ~3.14 to the Biblical value of 3.0

See these great clips:

Do you have other april fools jokes, hoaxes or pranks that are worthy to be included in this very informal all-time best list? Leave a comment