Waking up to a shocking or surprising phone call today will be something experienced by plenty. It’s the day when your cousin gets pregnant, your friend wins the lottery and wants to share the prize money with you, and your brother quits his successful job. Yes, it’s April Fools’ Day.

This day, awaited by many and despised by some, is celebrated every year on April 1 and comes with its own arsenal of pranks and hoaxes.

The jokes and their victims are called April fools and people playing April Fool jokes expose their prank by shouting “April Fool” and guffawing at your expense.

Whether you like it or not, we all end up being a part of the tradition of April Fools’ Day, whether we’re the pranksters or the victims.

Despite its popularity globally, however, the stories surrounding the origin of April Fools’ Day vary.

One popular theory dates backto 1564, when France officially changed its calendar to the modern Gregorian version, consequently moving the celebration of the New Year from the last week of March to January 1.

The story goes that those who continued to celebrate the end of the year on April 1 were deemed fools and became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.

These allegedly included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolise a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.

We are all guilty of sometimes taking ourselves too seriously

On the other hand, some believe that it was the result of a desire to celebrate the turning of the season at springtime, the end of grey winter days to bright, sunny longer ones.

Nonetheless, despite not knowing the exact origin of such a popular holiday, it was in the 1700s that English pranksters began popularising the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. The holiday then spread throughout Britain during the 18th century and has since then continued to grow, with modern times seeing people all over the world going to great lengths to create elaborate hoaxes.

So much so that newspapers, radio and TV stations, websites and international companies too participate by reporting outrageous fictional claims – many times succeeding in fooling their audiences.

One such successful claim was in 2008 when the BBC announced that camera crews filming near the Antarctic for its natural history series Miracles of Evolution had captured footage of penguins taking to the air. It even offered a video clip of these flying penguins, which became one of the most viewed videos on the internet.

In another instance, Google announced in 2011 the new Gmail Motion, which would allow its users to control Gmail with their bodies. The elaborate hoax was so thoroughly planned out that it came with a how-to-video, safety instructions and ‘testimonials’ from ‘specialists’ with gems such as: “No longer will people be required to bend to the will of technology. Instead, technology will now bend to our will.”

We are all guilty of sometimes taking ourselves too seriously and April Fools’ Day encourages us to take a step back and take life with a pinch of salt, at least for a day.

The jokes, hoaxes and hearty laughs allow everyone to take a much-needed break from the gloom of everyday routines. Just remember, the trick is to be ridiculous yet somewhat plausible!

Some memorable hoaxes through the years

#1: The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

April 1, 1957: The respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC replied: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

#2: The Body of Nessie Found

April 1, 1972: Newspapers around the world reported that the dead body of the Loch Ness Monster had been found. A team of zoologists from Yorkshire’s Flamingo Park Zoo had come across it while working at the Loch. The researchers tried to take the Nessie corpse back to Yorkshire but Scottish police promptly stopped them, citing an old law that made it illegal to remove “unidentified creatures” from Loch Ness. However, subsequent examination of the creature determined that it wasn’t actually Nessie. Instead, it was a large bull elephant seal from the South Atlantic. The joke got somewhat out of hand when the police became involved.

#3: UFO Lands in London

March 31, 1989: Thousands of motorists driving on the highway outside London looked up in the air to see a flying saucer descending on their city. The saucer landed in a field on the outskirts of London where local residents immediately called the police to warn them of an alien invasion. Soon the police arrived on the scene and the door of the craft popped open revealing a small, silver-suited figure. The saucer turned out to be a hot-air balloon that had been specially built to look like a UFO by Richard Branson, the 36-year-old chairman of Virgin Records.

#4: The Left-Handed Whopper

April 1, 1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers.

#5: Swiss Mountain Cleaners

April 1, 2009: The Swiss Tourism Board released a video that revealed the secret of why their mountains look so clean. It was due to the hard work of the Association of Swiss Mountain Cleaners, whose members daily scaled the Alps, scrubbing the rocks of unsightly bird droppings. Millions of people watched the video and 30,000 took the online test to determine whether they had what it took to become a mountain cleaner.

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