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…

Italian newsman Francesco Gasparini claimed in an article published in the Milan weekly magazine Visto that he had invented the Loch Ness Monster. His story was that in August 1933, while working in London as a UK correspondent for an Italian newspaper, he saw a two-line item in the Glasgow Herald about a "strange fish" caught in Loch Ness. Having nothing else to write about, he expanded on this, turning the fish into a monster, and soon "other papers began to print eyewitness accounts of the monster being sighted." Gasparini's claim was not taken very seriously. "The man is talking rot," one Scot was quoted as saying.

G. Clifford Prout was a man with a mission, and that mission was to put clothes on all the millions of naked animals throughout the world. To realize his dream, Prout founded the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA). Prout's campaign continued until it reached a high point in August 1962, when SINA was featured on the CBS News with Walter Cronkite. But as the segment was airing, a few CBS employees recognized that Prout was actually Buck Henry, a comedian and CBS employee. SINA was subsequently revealed to have been an elaborate hoax. More…

Cacareco, a 5-year-old female rhinoceros, was elected to an empty seat on the city council in Sao Paulo, Brazil after students printed up 200,000 ballots, urging people to vote for her. Not only did Cacareco win, but she did so by a landslide. The voters hadn't been deceived. They were quite aware they were voting for a rhino. One of them even commented, "Better to elect a rhino than an ass." The election of Cacareco is considered to be the most famous example of a protest vote in history. More…

Colgate-Palmolive aired TV ads claiming that the moisturizing action of its Rapid-Shave shaving cream was so powerful that it would not only soften up even the heaviest beard in seconds, but also make sandpaper shaveable. To prove this, it showed sandpaper being shaved. But what viewers were led to believe was sandpaper was actually plexiglass covered with sand. The Federal Trade Commission objected to the misleading demonstration, and this became a landmark case defining false advertising. More…

On June 5, 1961, BBC radio broadcast a 12-minute documentary on its Third Programme network about an "exciting new, imaginative, young Polish composer" called Piotr Zak. The documentary included the airing of one of his works titled "Mobile for Tape and Percussion." Two months later, the BBC confessed that Piotr Zak didn't exist. A BBC spokesman explained, "We dragged together all the instruments we could and went around the studio banging them… It was an experiment to demonstrate that some contemporary compositions are so obscure as to be indistinguishable from tapes of percussion played at random." [More info: wikipedia]

Robert Webb, a car mechanic in Richmond, Surrey, welded together some pieces of scrap metal and sent the resulting work, as a joke, to a prominent London art gallery. To his surprise, not only was the work accepted, but it resulted in a £105 commission from a wealthy collector to do a "nautical scene" in old iron.

Spectators filled Pasadena's Rose Bowl stadium to watch the Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the Washington Huskies in the New Year's Day game. Millions more watched around the nation, crowded in front of tv sets in living rooms, restaurants, and bars. NBC was providing live coverage of the game. At the end of the first half the Huskies led 17 to 0, and the audience settled in to watch the half-time show for which the Washington marching band had prepared an elaborate flip-card routine. What happened next is remembered as one of the greatest student pranks of all time. More…

An advertisement in the New York Herald-Tribune for the Broadway play "Subways Are For Sleeping" made it appear that the play was a critical success. The ad listed the names of seven well-known theater critics, accompanied by the rave reviews they had given the play. But, in truth, the quotations came from ordinary people who happened to have the same names as the critics. More…

In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. On April 1st of that year, the station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular color broadcasts only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970. More…

In 1963 an entrepreneur conceived of a way to promote antisocial tendencies and profit from it. Charlie Hollis, a 37-year-old copywriter and Brooklyn College sophomore, printed up stickers that bore messages such as LOATHE THY NEIGHBOR and KICK A PUPPY TODAY. He then placed an ad for his misanthropic product in the Village Voice: More…

Yetta Bronstein, a 48-year-old Bronx housewife, ran for President in 1964, and again in 1968, as the candidate for the Best Party. Her slogans were "Vote for Yetta and watch things get better" and "Put a mother in the White House." Her proposals included national bingo, self-fluoridation, placing a suggestion box on the White House fence, and printing a nude picture of Jane Fonda on postage stamps "to ease the post office deficit and also give a little pleasure for six cents to those who can't afford Playboy magazine." She promised she would staff her cabinet with "people who have failed in life and learned to live with it." More…

A giant steel block lost its form while being hammered at a factory. Instead of melting it down and recasting it, the workmen decided that it looked like a piece of abstract art. So they polished it up and submitted it to the Documenta III art and design exhibition in Kassel, Germany. When the directors of the exhibition discovered it was the result of an industrial accident, they had it removed from the show.

Paintings by a previously unknown avant-garde French artist named Pierre Brassau, exhibited at an art show in Sweden, won praise from critics, one of whom described Brassau's work as having "the delicacy of a ballet dancer." What the critics didn't know was that Brassau was actually a chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden's Boras zoo. A journalist had come up with the idea of exhibiting Peter's work as a way of putting critics to the test — would they be able to tell the difference between modern art and chimpanzee art? To the great amusement of the press, the critics failed the test. More…