Keep your guard up today for hoaxes, pranks, scams and spoofs.
(I guess I could say that almost any day in this day and age.)
Nonetheless, April Fools’ Day is famous for being a time when people try to mislead each other.
Sometimes it’s the people you’d least suspect, like on this day in 1957, when one of the world’s most steady and preeminent news outlets reported that spaghetti was growing on trees.
The BBC may spend most of the year reporting from all corners of the world, but it also has a long history of producing April Fools’ Day stories.
This one came from Charles De Jaeger, a TV producer on the show Panorama.
He said one of his schoolteachers had once scolded him, saying that he was so gullible that if she’d told him spaghetti grew on trees he’d believe it!
De Jaeger pitched the idea for the April 1 edition of the show, and since he was headed to Switzerland for an actual program segment anyway, the showrunners gave him a small budget to put his spoof story together too.
The three-minute segment starts with host Richard Dimbleby describing springtime in the area between Switzerland and Italy, and how people there were so excited that the mild winter meant that the spaghetti crop harvest was coming in early.
Spaghetti wasn’t that common in the UK in the 1950s, which helped make the story a little more believable.
But what really sold the deliberately far-fetched piece was the way Dimbleby described life on the big spaghetti plantations, and how the families that ran those plantations were so relieved that they hadn’t seen much of the dreaded spaghetti weevil.
The visuals were pretty impressive, too: the show had hired locals to put on traditional outfits and pull down strands of spaghetti they’d hung from the trees.
Of the many people who saw the piece, some recognized it as an April Fools’ Day story right away.
They criticized the BBC for putting a false story on an otherwise reputable news program.
But other members of the audience thought it was real; some of them even wrote in to ask how they might grow their own spaghetti trees.
The service wrote back with a tip that was in line with the rest of the ruse: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
Today in 2015, someone played an April Fools’ Day joke on the community of Winters, California, installing an old parking meter in town.
Atlas Obscura reports that even though it’s not a real meter and there are dozens of free parking spots nearby, people do sometimes feed it.
The town uses the proceeds to help pay for its Fourth of July fireworks show.
BBC’s 1957 April Fool’s “spaghetti-tree hoax” is more relevant than ever (Ars Technica)
The Lonely Parking Meter (Atlas Obscura)