Were teenagers in the 1960s injecting themselves with peanut butter and mayonnaise as a way to get high?
On a recent visit to Sitka, Alaska, I had a chance to pay my respects at the grave of Porky Bickar, the prankster responsible for one of the greatest April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. more…
In 1973, the Dutch egg industry noted a drop in sales. After studying the situation, its analysts decided that the problem was that grocery-store shoppers were put off by the antiseptic appearance of the factory-cleaned eggs on the shelves. To consumers, the sparkling clean eggs seemed to represent the "plastic and concrete style of modern living." To remedy this, the Dutch Egg Board decided to stick mud, manure, and bits of feather onto the eggs (after they had been cleaned) in order to artificially give them that "straight from the farmyard look." J.T. Mellema, head of the Egg Board, noted that a bit of carefully placed dirt would make the eggs "look real and give back that old farmhouse touch."
Early in his career, Muhammad Ali convinced Life magazine that he regularly trained underwater. In reality, he trained underwater only once — during the photoshoot for Life. more…
Poe is known to have authored six hoaxes. But for over one hundred years a story has circulated claiming that, as a young man in Baltimore, he pulled off a seventh, lesser-known hoax, involving a flight from the 234-foot tall Phoenix Shot Tower. more…
Is it true that in 1969 an Italian man was charged with selling fake Parmesan cheese made out of grated umbrella handles? more…
Here's a strange claim I recently ran across: if a man has a hairy chest he's less likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver. And by extension, if a man has a hairless chest, he's at greater risk of cirrhotic damage. Is there any truth to this claim? Or is it just a medical urban legend? more…
The area around Vernal, Utah is the only place in the world where it's legal to hunt dinosaurs. Because Vernal is the only town that issues official Dinosaur Hunting Licenses. more…
Lyst, a fashion shopping site, announced that it had begun selling dogs — as fashion accessories. It encouraged shoppers to "find the right dog to match your wardrobe." An online gallery displayed 33 breeds of dog "from petite XS puppies to oversized companions." The announcement generated angry responses on social media, as well as quite a bit of skepticism. And sure enough, a day later the company revealed it was all a hoax, designed to promote the message that "a dog is for life, not just for Instagram." more…
A 1930 news story about women pranked by a dissolving bathing suit turned out to be a hoax — but it had a long subsequent career. more…
Was poodle clipping included as an official competition in the 1900 Summer Olympics? more…
Did medical researchers really conduct a study to determine whether mother's kisses of children's boo-boos had any therapeutic value? more…
In 1965, a Copenhagen newspaper ran an April Fool hoax claiming that the Danish parliament was going to require all black dogs to be painted white, in order to increase road safety by making the dogs more visible at night. Fast forward to 2015. The Dartmoor Livestock Protection Society has launched a scheme to paint ponies with reflective blue stripes in order to allow motorists to see them more easily at night. Goes to show that, given enough time, all April Fool hoaxes eventually come true.
Jeff Wysaski's hobby is putting up fake signs at various locations such as stores, museums, or in the street. He posts examples of his creations on his blog Obvious Plant. The very first fake sign he put up was in a park, listing the Park Rules, which included that "Dogs must be clothed." Perhaps an allusion to Alan Abel's Society for the Indecency to Naked Animals? more…
No, Wisconsin has not accidentally been including concrete deer lawn ornaments in the state's official deer count. So homeowners are free to keep the concrete deer on their lawns. No matter how tacky they might be. more…
In 1949, did a California restaurant worker really find a will sealed inside a bottle that bequeathed millions of dollars to him, as the finder of the bottle?
Almost too weird to believe: Gayle Newland says that for two years she thought she was meeting and having sex with her boyfriend, Kye Fortune... a boyfriend whom she never set eyes on because she wore a blindfold the entire time they were together. Kye insisted on this, saying he was ashamed of scars from a car accident and "anxious about the way he looked." But according to a criminal complaint Newland has filed, she eventually discovered that this "boyfriend" was actually one of her female friends wearing a prosthetic penis. She's now suing that friend for sexual assault. More info: telegraph.co.uk
Since 2009, the poetry of Yi-Fen Chou has appeared in a number of journals, but Yi-Fen's big break came when one of his poems was selected for inclusion in the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry. But that's also when the trouble began, because after learning of the selection, Yi-Fen admitted that he was actually Michael Derrick Hudson, a white man who lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana and worked at the Allen County Public Library. more…
Two cases in which the press warned the public about "epidemics of baldness," only to have those epidemics turn out to be much less than was initially reported. One case occurred in 1926, when the New York Times reported that 300 young men in the town of Kittanning, Pa. had been struck by sudden-onset baldness which was attributed to a "mysterious germ." more…
In 1960, a group of janitors snuck a piece of scrap metal into an art exhibit. It was awarded a ribbon for merit. more…
