Confession: I don’t really care for April Fools’ Day. I think most pranks and jokes of that nature are juvenile. At the same time, some of the social media posts that companies and organizations produce can be fun and clever.
A historic preservation group in Athens, Ga., which I follow in spite of its occasional forays into wokeness, posted that a notorious strip club downtown was now a historic space:
My local Chick-fil-A is always good for an April Fools’ product launch:
The historical April Fools’ pranks, jokes, and hoaxes I enjoy are the ones that fooled people who should know better. The Associated Press got entangled in one in the early ‘80s (see the related link below).
Related: When the AP Fell for an April Fools' Joke
BBC Radio 2 pranked its listenership on April Fools’ Day in 1976. Hoaxes.org explains:
During an interview on BBC Radio 2, on the morning of April 1, 1976, the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that an extraordinary astronomical event was about to occur. At exactly 9:47 am, the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, in relation to the Earth. This rare alignment would mean that the combined gravitational force of the two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, temporarily counteracting the Earth's own gravity and making people weigh less. Moore called this the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect.
Moore told listeners that they could experience the phenomenon by jumping in the air at the precise moment the alignment occurred. If they did so, he promised, they would experience a strange floating sensation.
At 9:47, Moore declared, "Jump now!" A minute passed, and then the BBC switchboard lit up with dozens of people calling in to report that the experiment had worked!
People called in saying that they actually defied gravity. A Dutch woman said that she and her husband “floated around the room,” while another said that she and her friends levitated along with the table they were seated around. One angry man claimed that he hit his head on the ceiling, and he asked for compensation. It’s not clear whether the callers were playing along with the joke or if they fell for the hoax.
Moore’s April Fools’ joke was more than a prank. It was a spoof of a cockamamie idea that had been floating around astronomical circles in the mid-‘70s.
Published in late 1974, the Jupiter Effect's starting point was the observation that in 1982 a rare alignment of the planets was going to occur, in which all the planets, including Earth, would line up on one side of the sun. This much was agreed upon by all astronomers. This unusual planetary alignment occurs every 179 years, and had last been seen in 1803. But then the authors argued that this alignment was going to cause "one of the greatest disasters of modern times." Through an extended chain of events, it would trigger a series of massive earthquakes on Earth. Los Angeles in particular, the authors said, would be completely destroyed.
John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, the “scientists” behind the theory, kept moving the goalposts on their idea. In 1980, they admitted that they might be wrong, but in 1982, the two men wrote a sequel in which they claimed that the “Jupiter Effect” was responsible for the eruption of Mount St. Helens. By 1999, Gribbin admitted, "I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it."
