• The German newspaper
Berliner Tageblatt reported in 1905 that thieves had tunneled beneath the U.S. Federal Treasury and stolen all its silver and gold. • On April 1, 1906, the
Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers printed an elaborate two-page feature article detailing the recent invasion of Chicago by "hordes of prehistoric monsters", illustrated with a series of 8 doctored photographs purporting to show
tyrannosaurs,
diplodocii and other dinosaurs wreaking havoc throughout the metropolis. • On April 1, 1965, the covers of the rival Belgian comic magazines
Tintin and
Spirou were redesigned to make the
Tintin cover look like
Spirou and vice versa, complete with restyled logos and lay-out. The joke was thought up by Spirou editor
Yvan Delporte in collaboration with Tintin's editors. •
Scientific American columnist
Martin Gardner wrote in an April 1975 article that
MIT had invented a new chess computer program that predicted "
pawn to queens rook four" is always the best opening move. • In
The Guardian newspaper, in the United Kingdom, on April Fools' Day, 1977, a fictional mid-ocean state of
San Serriffe was created in a seven-page supplement. •
Associated Press were fooled in 1983 when
Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University, provided an alternative explanation for the origins of April Fools' Day. He claimed to have traced the practice to
Constantine I's period, when a group of
court jesters jocularly told the emperor that jesters could do a better job of running the empire, and the amused emperor nominated a jester, Kugel, to be the king for a day. Boskin related how the jester passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day and the custom became an annual event. Boskin explained the jester's role as being able to put serious matters into perspective with humor. An Associated Press article brought this alternative explanation to public's attention in newspapers, not knowing that Boskin had invented the entire story as an April Fools' joke itself, and were not made aware of this until some weeks later. • A 1985 issue of
Sports Illustrated, dated April 1, featured a story by
George Plimpton on a baseball player,
Hayden Siddhartha Finch, a
New York Mets pitching prospect who could throw the ball and who had a number of eccentric quirks, such as playing with one barefoot and one hiking boot. Plimpton later expanded the piece into a full-length novel on Finch's life.
Sports Illustrated cites the story as one of the more memorable in the magazine's history. •
Taco Liberty Bell: In 1996,
Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in seven major newspapers announcing that they had purchased the
Liberty Bell to "reduce
the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell". When asked about the sale,
White House press secretary
Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the
Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the
Lincoln-
Mercury Memorial. • The
comic strip switcheroo, in which newspaper
comic strip artists had created each other's strips, occurred on April Fools' Day 1997. • In 2008,
Car and Driver and
Automobile Magazine both reported that
Toyota had acquired the rights to the defunct
Oldsmobile brand from
General Motors and intended to relaunch it with a line-up of
rebadged Toyota SUVs positioned between its mainline
Toyota and luxury
Lexus brands. • In 2010, the UK newspaper
The Independent reported that the
Circle line of the London Underground was being considered as a new location for a
particle accelerator by
CERN. • Every April until 2007, as an April Fools' Day prank,
GamePro printed a 2-5 page satirical spoof of the magazine called
Lamepro, a parody of
GamePro's own official title. The feature contained humorous game titles and fictional news similar to
The Onion, though some content, such as ways to get useless game glitches (games getting stuck, reset, or otherwise), was real. The section parodied
GamePro itself, as well as other game magazines. • In 2013, Puerto Rican linguistics professor Aida Vergne penned a mock newspaper article stating that the
Royal Spanish Academy had opted to eliminate the
ñ from the Spanish language, instead being replaced by the original
nn in
Old Spanish. As the Academy had previously eliminated letters such as
ch and
ll, such an allegation was taken seriously and occasionally the Academy has to resort to deny and clarify the allegation. • The
National Geographic announced via Twitter in 2016 that they would no longer be publishing photographs of naked animals. The story was picked up by media in Turkey, before it was marked as a fool at noon by the newspaper. ==Internet==