Not many people know how long April Fool's Day has been around.
Officially, it began in England in 1700, although it is estimated that its origins can be traced back to 1582, according to history.com.
That's at least the more than 300-plus years of pranks that have been played out, so obviously there's been a doozy here and there. Here are some of the most memorable April Fools' Day pranks ever played.
Great Spaghetti Harvest
Best cited online than any other prank, the story behind the Great Spaghetti Harvest began with the iconic and (usually) grim British Broadcasting Corporation.
According to History.com, the network reported on April 1, 1957, that a region of Switzerland was having a bountiful spaghetti harvest that year. Spaghetti was not a common food in Britain at the time.
The story also shows people picking up varieties of spaghetti from trees. This made the BBC a mountain of calls about how people could grow their own spaghetti trees. The network joked for a while before being cleared.
Sid finch
This is generally considered to be the best April Fools' Day prank ever in the sports world. The April 1, 1985, edition of Sports Illustrated arrived in People's mailboxes with a story on an unnamed New York Mets prospect named Sid Finch.
The story went like this: Finch reportedly could throw a baseball at 168 mph (more than 60 mph faster than the fastest pitch ever thrown today), could play the French horn, wore only one shoe and was generally considered wildly cynical. Mets players and coaches went with this trick. There were even pictures of "Sid Finch".
Fans and news outlets followed the story until the magazine finally admitted to the hoax 15 days after the article ran.
According to Enacademic.com, the BBC Radio Network reported that at 9:47 a.m. on 1 April 1976, the alignment of Pluto and Jupiter would result in a powerful gravitational conjunction that would briefly reduce gravity on Earth. The audience was told that if they jumped at the right time, they would feel a floating point.
Although the BBC received calls from hundreds of people reporting the unique effects, the story quickly turned out to be false.
Nixon for President... Again
Richard Nixon is one of the most disgraced US presidents because of Watergate, but according to National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" on April 1, 1992, he announced that he would be in office for 18 years after resigning in disgrace. are running for.
There were even audio clips of Nixon saying "I've never done anything wrong, and I won't do it again", in his announcement speech, according to hoaxes.org.
The reaction was immediate and overwhelmingly negative, from listeners to political pundits. But the mischief was exposed in the second part of the program.
Clown in a bottle
It goes back to the days before April Fools' Day, which took place in 1749.
According to History.com, an ad in a London newspaper advertised an incident where a man would squeeze himself into a bottle of wine and sing inside it. Legend has it that there was a bet between the two men whether men would appear to see something impossible.
Show they did, fill the house. However, none of the actors ever appeared on stage. The audience felt that they were deceived, rioted.