Come 1st April, and many minds begin to work extra hard to design devious schemes to fool their friends, colleagues, and even strangers. 1st April is that one day of the year where you can make fun of people, and get away with it without risking any grievous physical injury.  At the same time, you need to be careful about believing what you hear or read on this day, because you never know when you might be taken for a ride.

Following is a list of some of the pranks played on the world by institutions we can usually trust on any other day of the year.

In 2000, Google announced a new service for smarter and faster searching – The Google Mentalplex. The service even came with simple, but detailed instructions on how to use it:

Remove hat and glasses.
Peer into MentalPlex circle. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HEAD.
Project mental image of what you want to find.
Click or visualize clicking within the MentalPlex circle.

That was not all. Google had set up an FAQ page and an illustrations for correct usage page too.

Again in 2007, Google announced a new service called Gmail Paper. A service where you could request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and Google would send it to you in the mail. Was there a limit on how many mails you could get printed. The Answer from the Google people was:

You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.

I don’t know about how many people actually believed that, but I remembering opening the Gmail home page, reading about Gmail Paper and wondering: “Could this be for real?”

BBC is one of the most trusted News service in the whole wide world, yet even they have not hesitated from fooling their audience on April Fool’s day every now and then.

In 1967, BBC Radio 2 made an announcement through the British Astronomer Patrick Moore about a once in an lifetime event where Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, and at 9:47 the planets would be so aligned that they would lessen the gravitational force of the Earth. If someone were to jump in the air at that moment, BBC claimed, they would be able to feel the effect of this planetary alignment. BBC later received many calls from people claiming to have felt the effect. It is reported that one woman even claimed that she and her eleven friends actually rose form their chairs and floated in the air.

On April 1, 2008 BBC reported that Filmmaker and Writer Terry Jones had made the remarkable discovery of penguins that could fly. The news was aired as a part of BBC’s new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. The report came complete with a video footage that showed the penguins flying. The presenter, Terry Jones, described the event as, “It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.”

The penguins were reportedly flying to the rain forests of South America where they would ” spend the winter basking in the tropical Sun.”

On 31st March, 1989 people driving on a highway outside London reported seeing an UFO. Police were called and they dutifully came to investigate. The UFO finally landed in a field on the outskirts of London and a small man emerged from the craft. The man turned out to be Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Records. He had planned the prank in such a way that he was supposed to land in London’s Hyde Park on April 1. A rowdy gust of wind, however, blew him off track and he ended up in Surrey.

In 1982, The Daily Mail ran a report about how a local manufacturer had managed to sell 10,000 “rogue bras” to women. The support wire in these bras was made out of a kind of copper that was originally meant for use in fire alarms. This copper, when it came into contact with nylon and body heat, produced static electricity that interfered with television and radio broadcasts. The news resulted in quite a bit of inconvenience to many female employees of broadcasting stations.

(Sources:
Information: http://wikipedia.com, http://www.museumofhoaxes.com
Images : Internet)