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On the first morning in April 1976 , BBC Radio 2 astronomer Patrick Moore announced the approach of a once - in - a - lifespan astronomical event . At 9:47 ante meridiem , Moore said , the planet Plutothe would pass away directly behindJupiter , and at that bit their gravitative alinement would counteract and thus lessen the pull ofEarth ’s gravity . Moore secern his attender that if they jump in the aura at the accurate moment of this planetary alinement , they would know a strange float wiz . At 9:48 , callers deluge the lines of BBC 2 with tale of their brief chirpy experience .

The bustle of headache about theMarch 19 , 2011 " Supermoon,“which masses feared would dress off earthquakes and other cataclysmic events , showed the populace has n’t come very far in its intellect of astronomical influences since the 1976 prank . [ discontinue the Lunacy ! 5 harebrained Myths About the Moon ]

Flying penguins supposedly discovered on an island near Antarctica.

2 quick Penguins

On April 1 , 2008 , the BBC play footage of a settlement of flyingpenguinsthat it claimed had just been discovered on King George Island near Antarctica . In the " mockumentary , " former Monty Python mavin Terry Jones played the David Attenborough - esque template .

" We ’d been look on the penguins and filming them for day , without a confidential information of what was to come , " Jones said . " But then the weather condition took a bit for the bad . It was quite awe-inspiring . Rather than getting together in a powwow to protect themselves from the low temperature , they did something quite unexpected , that no other penguin can do . "

Though penguins ca n’t actually get airborne — not even when Terry Jones is around — themechanics of how they swimare unmistakably like to how bird fly .

3 Telepathic Tweeting

The April 1999 variant of Red Herring Magazine , then a successful tech / business publishing , included an article about a revolutionary new technology that allowed users to compose and send email subject matter of up to 240 character … telepathically . The article attributed the new development to computer wiz Yuri Maldini , who had supposedly create it as a spinoff of the encrypted communications systems he developed for the   U.S. Army , during the Gulf War . The clause even describes an incident when Maldini answered his interviewer ’s query telepathically , via e-mail . Red Herring received numerous letter from fooled readers .

Telepathic electronic mail may not seem as ludicrous now as it did then . idea - controlled   technologies , such as athought - driven carnow under evolution in Germany , are fuck off a boost in recent years from rotatory neuroscience research . [ Super - Intelligent Machines : 7 Robotic Futures ]

4 Dragons in Nature

In 1998 , the   online variation of Nature pulled what may be the most intellectual April Fools ' Day prank in story . In an article talk over the debate over theorigin of birds , the writer refers to the discovery of " a nearly - sodding skeleton of a theropod [ T. rex - like ] dinosaur in North Dakota . " DubbedSmaugia volans , paleontologists think the dino " could have flown . "

The skeleton , including rib and cervix bone that showed signs of frequent exposure to fire , was supposedly discovered by Randy Sepulchrave of the Museum of the University of Southern North Dakota .

There is no University of Southern North Dakota . That clue - in is square enough , but the other two are more apart : First , Smaug was the name of the dragon in JRR Tolkien ’s " The Hobbit . " second , Sepulchrave was the 76th Earl of Groan in Mervyn Peake ’s Titus Groan . The earl believed that he was an owl , and jump off to his death from a in high spirits tower . He discovered too recently that he could not fly . [ Are Dragons Real ? Facts Behind the creature ]

5 Discovering the Bigon

In April 1996 , Discover Magazine reported that physicists had discovered a novel key atom of matter : the bigon . Like other recent particle finds , the bigon flutters in and out of existence in mere one-millionth of a secondment , they explained . But unlike the others , this one is the size of a bowling glob .

Physicist Albert Manque — not a material somebody — and his colleague at the Centre de l’Étude des Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris — not a real institute — supposedly found the particle by stroke , when a computer connected to one of their void - tube experiments blow up . " The physicist set up a video camera and repeated the experiment — with the same explosive results , " Discover diary keeper Tim Folger wrote . " In one of the video frames a bleak bowling - ball - size target hovered above the wreckage of the computer . In the next shape it was rifle . "

Discover ’s parody of skill - speak is really telling : " The researchers think that the galvanising field in the vacuum tube somehow alter the energy state of the vacuum inside the cathode - ray tube in the nearby computing gadget monitor . No vacuum is truly empty — practical particles , most of them quite small , continually break into existence and then dissolve back into the void . The physicists believe that they by chance generated an electric bailiwick of just the right size in the computer to poke at a new particle — a bigon — into being , " Folger wrote .

Despite absurd claims that the bigon might be creditworthy for a host of unexplained phenomena such asball lightning , sinking souffles , andspontaneous human burning , and despite the April 1 publication day of the month , the phoney story generated a Brobdingnagian response from readers .