Whatever the reason, our readers know that, come April, it pays to stay on your toes. But we're not the only ones playing jokes; far more serious periodicals than Games have gotten into the April Fools' spirit.
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“Who wants to come out and support drunkenness and computer sex?”
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Just this past year, Discover buried a short item in its "Breakthroughs" column about archeologist Leon Decoeur, who announced that he'd discovered the Holy Grail while working late (and presumably alone) at his Jerusalem-based dig. If readers weren't alerted by the archeologist's name — Leon Decoeur, or "Lion of Heart," a reference to the Grail-seeking Richard the Lion-Hearted—they might have taken a cue from "the one blemish on Decoeur's otherwise unstained record as a careful scientist: the episode 15 years ago when he claimed to have found the first draft of the Sermon on the Mount." Or they might have wondered about Decoeur's claim that testing a reddish-brown residue at the bottom of the cup yielded the blood type of a universal donor—"just what you'd expect from Jesus."
If some gullible readers of Discover were indignant (and they were), readers of PC Computing grew more and more outraged as they read through John Dvorak's April 1994 column, "Trust Congress? Not With This Unbelievable Lair of Slop." The article detailed Senate Bill #040194, an act designed to keep drunken drivers off the Information Superhighway. "Congress," Dvorak wrote, "apparently thinks that being drunk on a highway is bad no matter what kind of highway it is." One senator is quoted asking whether one needs a driving permit to operate on the Information Superhighway, and another is cited for adding a rider to make it a felony to discuss sex on the Internet. Dvorak reported that opponents of the law were having a tough time fighting it. As one anonymous congressman said, "Who wants to come out and support drunkenness and computer sex?"
When Dvorak ended by imploring readers to register their complaints with a Ms. Lirpa Sloop ("her name spelled backward says it all"), readers were still outraged, but now their ire was directed at John Dvorak. Bill Roberts, editor of PC Computing, received about 200 letters. A third of them congratulated Dvorak and the magazine on a joke well executed. The majority, though, came from readers who, we could say, were Not Amused.
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“A fictitious Virginia City camel race gave birth to the real thing.”
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Apparently, some readers even went so far as to call their representatives in an effort to stop the fictional legislation; we can hope that these were people who picked up a pen before they finished reading the article. Savvy readers, however, could have figured things out well before reaching the end of the article: check out the number of the drunk-driving bill. And, of course, "Lair of Slop" in the title anagrams into... you got it.
Practical jokes in periodicals existed well before 1994, and they didn't always occur on April Fools' Day. Mark Twain himself clearly had Halloween on his mind when, on October 28, 1863, he reported on a gruesome string of murders for the Territorial Enterprise, a Virginia City, Nevada newspaper. The murderer's home was supposedly deep within the nearby "giant forest." Of course, every reader of the small-town newspaper knew that there was no giant forest anywhere near Virginia City. But while locals understood immediately that the Halloween murders were a big joke, other area papers picked up the story and ran it as fact. "[If] it were not for the responsible source, we could deny it credence," said one local editor who reran Twain's story.
Bob Richards, editor for the Enterprise in 1959, evidently followed in Twain's footsteps when he wrote about a fictitious Virginia City camel race. When Richards did the same thing the following year, his joke gave birth to the real thing: two other newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Phoenix Gazette, organized the first of what is now an annual event, the Virginia City Camel Races. Movie director John Huston, filming The Misfits nearby, won the first race back in 1960.
Sometimes hoaxers see their creations take on too much reality. The Reagan administration kept it hush-hush, but the House school lunch bill designating ketchup as a vegetable actually started as a satirical commentary on the perceived Scrooge-like tendencies of the people in power. The congressman/hoaxer (who shall remain nameless in thanks for telling Games the inside story) had the Congressional Record print up the ketchup-is-a-vegetable idea as a proposed rider to the actual lunch bill, which was coming up for enactment. Apparently a young and overeager staffer working for one of the bill's sponsoring representatives found the idea not outlandish at all and added "ketchup" to the "vegetables" list in the latest draft of the bill. Since few representatives read every word of every act they vote on, the bill was passed before the embarrassing inclusion was discovered, and the rest is, literally, history.
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“Solutions were received in Cyrillic after the unsolvable puzzle was reprinted in Bulgaria.”
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For some reason, science-oriented magazines seem particularly susceptible to the temptation of putting one over on their readers. In 1993, Omni columnist Scot Morris printed "The Counter-Intuitive Problem," a simple-enough-looking puzzle that happened to have no actual solution. Despite the fact that the article was subtitled "April Foolery," readers were invited to give the puzzle their best shot, with a $5,000 reward for the first solver. Many readers took up the gauntlet; Morris even received solutions in Cyrillic after the article was reprinted in Bulgaria. But the unsolvable puzzle remains, of course, unsolved.
Games contributing editor Martin Gardner, all by himself, has played numerous practical jokes on highly educated readers of Scientific American. For instance, in April of 1975, readers of "Six Sensational Discoveries" learned that "[i]n number theory the most exciting discovery of the past year is that when the transcendental number e is raised to the power of pi times the square root of 163, the result is an integer"; that the four-color map theorem had been disproved; that the special theory of relativity contained a logical flaw; and that a chess-playing program named MacHic "had established, with a high degree of probability, that pawn to king's rook 4 is a win for White."
Perhaps the thousand or so readers who wrote letters taking the article seriously could be forgiven for not recognizing the humbug nature of those four items, but they surely must have skipped Gardner's final two "sensational discoveries." The first detailed the uncovering of a previously unknown drawing that had been torn from one of Leonardo de Vinci's "lost" notebooks and misfiled. Gardner reported that Ramón Paz y Bicuspid, the Madrid Library's head of manuscripts, found the page stuck in a 15th-century treatise on perfume-making. It doesn't take a reader of Scientific American to recognize the sketch as a plan for a flush toilet, nor, one would think, to wonder whether Paz y Bicuspid is exactly your typical Spanish surname. (It is, in fact, a play on the name of the real discovered of the two lost notebooks, Ramón Paz y Remolar.)
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“Place the little motor on a copy of the Bible. Make your mind blanker than usual...”
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The final sensational discovery was "a simple motor that runs on psi energy," constructed by noted Prague parapsychologist Robert Ripoff and brought to the U.S. by Henrietta Birdbrain, an American expert on Kirlian photography. Gardner included detailed instructions for making the motor out of bond paper, a needle, and a bottle.
If the names of the experts weren't enough of a tip-off that legs were being pulled, Gardner's instructions should have been. "Place the little motor on a copy of the Bible or the I Ching," he wrote. "Make your mind blanker than usual..."
Even the very first science magazines felt the urge to pull the occasional fast one. Science and Invention ran a cover story about man's conquest of gravity in September of 1927. According to the story, quartz crystals literally "lose their weight" when exposed to high-frequency currents. Further fictional experimentation showed that a tiny crystal, when charged with the proper frequency, could expand, lose its weight, and float to the ceiling, even attached to a weight of 55 pounds. "There can be no doubt that a beginning has made toward overcoming gravitation," the article proclaimed.
Perhaps the name of the editor of Science and Invention, Hugo Gernsback, sounds familiar. Gernsback eventually found a field where he could make up amazing stories all day long—he created science fiction's first magazine, Amazing Stories. The editor had such a profound effect on the infant genre that he would later be called "the father of science fiction" and have one of sci-fi's major awards (the Hugo) named in his honor.
Learned scientific journals have also gotten into the act: The Royal Society of Medicine published a report in 1990 that seemed to verify the claims of palm readers. The study supposedly examined the lifelines of 100 corpses, and the result was a remarkable correlation between life span and the length of the lifeline. Of course, there were a few tip-offs—statistics, for instance, were analyzed by the "Program for Analysis of Log-linear Multidimensional contingencies (PALM)." Nonetheless, UPI reported on the story as factual.
But if readers of scientific magazines and journals have learned the hard way not to believe everything they see in print, readers of sports magazines apparently have not. And that's probably why "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" fooled so many people. Written by George Plimpton for Sports Illustrated's April 1, 1985, issue, the article tells the tale of Sidd Finch, an eccentric English Buddhist and Harvard dropout who plays a beautiful French horn, and, by the way, can throw a baseball with deadly accuracy at speeds approaching 168 miles per hour. Finch, according to the article, demonstrated this ability to a manager for the New York Mets, and immediately the team began a quest to sign up the reclusive superstar. This effort was hampered by Sidd's lack of materialism; all the basic lures of professional baseball—adulation, a high salary, a picture on a trading card—meant very little to his Buddhist nature. In fact, Finch wasn't sure if he wanted to play baseball at all, because to do so would mean many adjustments to his quiet life. The article focused on the fact that all the Mets management could do was wait for Finch to make up his mind. Mets fans must have been driven near-crazy by the idea of an unhittable pitcher so close to joining their team, but the story was entirely fictional. (It was turned into a novel a few years later.)
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“Nobody wondered why everybody pictured in the article was wearing a Groucho Marx disguise.”
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And surely only the savviest of readers took an extra look at the article's subhead: "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball." The first letter of each word spells out the truth of the matter.
National magazines aren't the only ones with a sense of humor. Artscape, a cultural magazine out of Cincinnati, fills its April radio programming calendar with events too punny to be true: "At 4:00 p.m., Roger Grooms reviews Robert Altman's new movie in which Holly Hunter plays a movie studio executive in New Zealand: The Player Piano. On 'Music Till Noon,' Haydn: Variations on a Hindu Religious Cult Theme ('Haydn Go Sikh')." Despite such clear-cut silliness, Artscape is careful to say "April Fools!" at the end of the column. Connecticut isn't as willing to give up the joke, so readers are on their own to figure out that the "flatworm beauty contests" announced in the regional calendar are not exactly legit.
The Orlando Sentinel's Sunday magazine ran a feature story on the "Tasmanian Mock Walrus," a whiskered, four-inch-long rodent that can be trained as a house pet... and can be used to fight Florida's explosive cockroach population. The story focused on the red tee being face by a married couple hoping to breed Mock Walruses as pets for Floridians and everyone else sick of roach-infested homes.
People wanted Tasmanian Mock Walruses; dozens contacted the Sentinel in hopes of getting their hands on one. And that's despite the fact that the TMW was one of the most unbelievably ugly animals imaginable. (The TMW shown in the article was, in reality, a "naked mole rat," once featured in a pictorial in National Geographic.) Nowhere in the article did the words "April Fools!" appear, and cockroach-crazed Floridians didn't stop to wonder why everyone pictured in the article was, ahem, wearing a Groucho Marx disguise. Perhaps readers should have focused on the article's last line, which complained that the government's keeping a lid on the existence of the Mock Walrus was "a pretty cruel hoax."
So now that it's April again, you may want to take a second look through the magazines and newspapers you receive. If something seems just a little too fantastic, or just a little too good to be true, keep the month in mind. Clearly, editors and writers around the country are having a fine old time dreaming up ways to trick the very people who keep them in business. You've been warned... and with good reason. You may want to take a second look through this article, where one of the hoaxes is... a hoax. Click here for the answer.