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Historic hoaxes
and how not to be fooled yourself
(Page 2 of 3)
"The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry," Dimbleday told viewers. "For the Swiss ... it tends to be more of a family affair." Viewers eager to grow spaghetti were reportedly told by the BBC to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." (To be fair, spaghetti was an exotic dish in Britain in the 1950s.) To see the broadcast, go to www.bbc.co.uk and search for "Swiss spaghetti harvest."
Alex Boese, who has tracked hoaxes for several years on MuseumOfHoaxes.com, says this is his favorite. It meets his top criteria for a "good" hoax: "That it's not mean, and that it makes people laugh."
A new name for the Liberty Bell
Today, many companies send out phony press releases or publish fake ads on April Fool's Day. They want to show customers that they can be lighthearted and, of course, they want the publicity.
On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out full-page ads in five major newspapers announcing that they were buying the Liberty Bell and renaming it. It would now be known as the "Taco Liberty Bell."
"A lot of people were angry," says Mr. Boese. "You just think of all the sports stadiums being named after companies these days - but now the Liberty Bell?" Taco Bell kept a straight corporate face until noon and then revealed that it was a joke.
Taco Bell got an estimated $25 million in free publicity for the stunt. And sales for that April 1-2 were $1.1 million higher compared with sales on March 25-26.
Finally, a favorite ploy of hoaxers has been to make their stories hard to verify. In 1702, the self-proclaimed "Native of Formosa" arrived in Holland. His eccentric behavior seemed to prove his claim: He worshiped the sun and moon and ate heavily spiced raw meat. Because the people had never met anyone from Formosa (now Taiwan), he was treated as a celebrity.
He managed to confound his critics for years. No one could check his story. In 1706, he finally confessed. He was an imposter looking for easy money.
Today, the Internet and e-mails make great use of this trick. Among the classic examples is the "Internet Cleaning" e-mail of 1997. It warned that the Internet would be shut down on April 1. Everyone was encouraged to turn off their computers and servers and disconnect their Internet connections so that "Internet-crawling robots" could remove "electronic flotsam and jetsam" to create a "better-working and faster" Internet.
"It was just plausible enough for new computer users to believe it," says David Emory of UrbanLegends.About.com. But one giveaway that it was fraudulent, he says, was that the source on the e-mail was phony, so there was no one to contact to verify the story.
Good hoaxes always seem outlandish, but possible, Boese says. But often, so does the truth. How did people greet the news that the Earth was round? Or that it revolved around the sun? Common sense sometimes exposes a hoax, but look deeper.
Boese says to ask yourself:
