In February 1948, giant three-toed footprints were found on a Florida beach. They looked like they had been made by an enormous sea turtle, except for the fact they were spaced too far apart. Over the following months, more prints continued to be found. In Nov. 1948, naturalist Ivan Sanderson examined some of them and speculated they had been made by a "vast penguin," 15-feet tall. The mystery wasn't fully solved until 1988 when a local prankster, Tony Signorini, admitted he had made them with the help of a friend. He had strapped cast-iron monster-print shoes to his feet and then stomped up and down along local beaches. [Tampa Bay Times, Orgone Research]

The painting "Figure of Eight, Skegness" (referring to a roller coaster at the Skegness amusement park) was displayed at a public library art exhibition in Loughborough, England. Critics praised it as a "fine specimen of modernism in colour." But then its creator was revealed to be 6-year-old Tommy Warbis from Barrow-on-Soar. Tommy had plastered a piece of white paper with multi-colored paints and then allowed his pet cat Jill to sit in the middle while the paint was still wet. Tommy's father, a commercial artist who disliked modern art, had been invited to submit work to the show and sent his son's work instead "as a joke to test people's knowledge of art."

Police in Miami, Florida accidentally discovered a crime ring that had been stealing thousands of dollars from the local phone company for years — in a highly unusual way. The thieves were young women, employed by Southern Bell Telephone Company to count coins collected from pay phones. They were smuggling coin rolls out of the building by hiding them in their bras. The exploits of the "brassiere brigade," once exposed, made headlines across the nation, and later inspired several movies. More…

After going missing for several days, French actress Nicole Riche reappeared claiming that she had been kidnapped by "Puritans" who kept her in a room without food while they lectured her about the immorality of her life. Finally, she said, her captors abandoned her in the Fontainebleau Forest, where she was found and helped to safety by kindly gypsies. The police believed none of her tale, and rightly so. Her "kidnapping" turned out to have been an elaborate publicity stunt designed to promote Paris's infamous Grand Guignol theater. More…

On July 14, 1951, Forestry Commission employee Lachlan Stuart took a picture of mysterious humps rising from the loch. Over twenty years later researchers visited the spot where he had taken the picture and realized the humps would have been in extremely shallow water close to the shore, meaning that Stuart's monster must have been awfully flat. Confirming their suspicions, author Richard Frere later revealed that Stuart had confessed to him the humps were nothing more than bales of hay covered with tarpaulins. More…

Science reporter Hugh Stewart approached his editors at the Chicago Herald-American with a hot tip. He had learned that a Chicago mother was about to give birth to sextuplets — the first time a confirmed birth of sextuplets had occurred in America. Stewart offered no verifiable sources for the news. Nor would he disclose the mother's name. Nevertheless, the Herald-American decided to run his story on its front page. They shouldn't have, because it turned out that Stewart had made the whole thing up. More…

A small ad ran in the Washington Post offering the services of "ghost artists" for those who wanted to be an artist, but lacked skill. The company's staff would produce art, to which clients could attach their name. This curious business quickly attracted media attention, until some reporters eventually recognized that the spokesman for the company was the notorious prankster (and professional illustrator) Hugh Troy. More…

The story of Rudolph Fentz was long considered an unsolved mystery, and a case of possible time travel. In June 1950, Fentz was said to have suddenly appeared in New York City's Times Square, as if from out of the blue, wearing old-fashioned clothes and sporting mutton-chop sideburns. Glancing around, a look of astonishment and then of panic flashed across his face. He sprinted forwards, and was then struck down and killed by a car. More…

Three young men reported running over a space alien on a rural Georgia highway. What made this case unusual is that the body of the alien was lying on the highway to prove their tale. The incident quickly made national headlines. But when scientists from Emory University examined the 'alien,' they determined it was actually a Capuchin monkey with its tail cut off and fur removed with depilatory cream. The boys confessed they had created it as a prank. More…

A 3-week exhibition of modern art in Birmingham town hall included a piece by a previously unknown artist, Jan Michel, which won praise for its picassolike features. Only as the show was closing did Ronald Allin, a musician with the Birmingham city orchestra, reveal that "Jan Michel" was actually his 8-year-old son Michael. The father had told his son to paint "anything he liked" and then secretly included the result in the exhibition. He titled the piece "Mermaid" because the image bore a vague resemblance to that mythical creature. The exhibition director said it was a pity the joke was only revealed on the last day because "it might have attracted more people."

When political newcomer Douglas R. Stringfellow was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Utah, much of the appeal of his candidacy lay in his decorated past as a hero during World War Two, a past which he made frequent references to during his revival-style campaign speeches. He served one term, and was running for reelection, when his heroic past was exposed as a fraud by his Democratic opponents. More…

In the 1950s, bestseller lists were partially based on the number of requests for a title at bookstores. So nighttime deejay Jean Shepherd hatched a plan to throw a wrench in this system by having his listeners descend on bookstores en masse and ask for a non-existent book titled I, Libertine. Requests for this title, relayed by puzzled bookstore owners, eventually made their way to publisher Ian Ballantine who (once he figured out what was going on), decided it would be interesting to publish I, Libertine as an actual book. Author Theodore Sturgeon was commissioned to write it, and the book was released to stores (for real) on Sep 20, 1956. More…

Bank manager Peter MacNab took this photo on a "warm hazy" July afternoon in 1955, but he didn't share it with the world until October 1958 on account of "diffidence and fear of ridicule." It quickly came to be considered a classic Loch Ness Monster photo. However, MacNab distributed two slightly different versions of what he claimed was the original negative, leading many (even Nessie believers) to suspect a hoax, because if MacNab did doctor the image (either painting in the monster, or painting out a boat) he may created multiple "original" negatives during this process and then forgotten which was the original "original". More…

In his book The Third Eye, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa claimed to offer an autobiographical account of growing up in Tibet. He described being born into a wealthy family and studying in Lhasa to become a lama. He said that he had then undergone an operation to open up the "third eye" in the middle of his forehead, which bestowed upon him amazing psychic powers. The more prosaic reality was that he had been born in England, the son of a plumber. More…

In 1956, runners bore the Olympic flame across Australia. When it was scheduled to arrive in Sydney, thousands lined the street to see it. Finally the runner appeared, bearing the flame aloft. With a police escort around him, the runner made his way to the Town Hall, bounded up the steps, and handed the torch to the waiting mayor who promptly turned to begin his prepared speech. Then someone whispered in the mayor's ear, "That's not the torch." It was a wooden chair leg topped by a plum pudding can inside of which a pair of kerosene-soaked underwear was burning with a greasy flame. Meanwhile, the runner had already disappeared into the crowd. More…

In 1957, with interest in Sasquatches growing on account of the Yeti crazi, a former logger, Albert Ostman, came forward with a strange story about how he had been abducted by a Sasquatch back in 1924. Ostman claimed that he had been on a prospecting holiday in Toba Inlet (British Columbia) when a Sasquatch carried him off and forced him to live with its family. Apparently the Sasquatch wanted to use Ostman for breeding purposes. After six days Ostman escaped. Ostman's story stretches credibility, and the fact that he supposedly waited 33 years before telling it makes it even harder to believe. Even some prominent Bigfoot adherents dismiss his story as a tall tale.

In 1957, Rosa Panvini and her daughter Amalia offered to sell the diaries of dictator Benito Mussolini to Life magazine and the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. The two women claimed the diaries had been given to their late father after the war for safekeeping, by a friend of a friend of Mussolini. Before the sale could be completed, Italian police arrested the Panvinis and charged them with forgery and fraud. In 1968, more of the same forged volumes resurfaced, at which time the London Sunday Times paid close to $300,000 for them, before realizing they were fake. [Life - May 3, 1968]

On April 1, 1957 the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The report generated an enormous response. Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." To this day the Panorama broadcast remains one of the most famous and popular April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. More…

The French doctor Emile Coudé (1800-1870) was the inventor of the curved "Coudé catheter" used by urologists to relieve urinary obstruction. Except that he wasn't. The man and his biography were invented as a joke by Welsh medical students in the 1950s. However, some physicians didn't realize it was a joke and referred to the man in medical textbooks. A few sources still mistakenly claim that the coudé catheter was named after a French physician. In reality, the coudé catheter was invented by Louis Mercier (1811-1882). In French, coudé (the adjective) means bent; coude (the noun) means elbow. More…

Michigan motorists began to report sightings of a glowing "little blue man," like a spaceman from a science-fiction movie, who would appear out of nowhere on rural roads, and then just as suddenly disappear. Police couldn't figure out what was going on, until eventually three young men confessed that the blue man was their work. They had created a costume consisting of long underwear, gloves, combat boots, a sheet, and a football helmet with blinking lights. One of them, wearing this costume, would hide in a ditch and leap out when a motorist approached. More…

While working on a rural road construction project near Bluff Creek, California, tractor-operator Jerry Crew found a series of massive footprints in the mud. Due to the size of the prints, the media began referring to the creature that created them as "Bigfoot." The name stuck and soon became the most widely used term for North America's legendary ape-man. However, it was suspected that Crew's prank-loving boss, Ray Wallace, created the prints by strapping carved wooden feet to his boots and stomping around in the mud. Wallace's family confirmed this after his death in 2002. More…

Reports of a giant monster with glowing eyes stalking the woods of Central Florida at night aroused the curiosity of two Tampa Tribune reporters. But after interviewing locals, they discovered that the creature was actually a "homemade spook" created by a housewife who had fashioned it out of a bed sheet, a cow's skull, and a flashlight inside the skull. She had tied her monster to a 100-foot rope between two trees and pulled it from side to side with a fishing line. More…