10 classic April Fool’s jokes

April 01, 2010

Cathal Kelly

The key to a great April Fool’s prank is you and your crushing gullibility.

It’s April 1st, for the love of Pete. It happens every year. How do you keep getting fooled? It’s not like any of this stuff passes the most basic sniff test.

Except for No. 10. Right, you know who? Right? Wrong.

1. Naked Ice Borer: Why is the best? Because unlike all the others, it’s not just baffling. It’s terrifying. In 1995, Discover unveiled a ferocious looking Arctic creature that could move through ice at astounding speeds and fed on penguins. Long before anyone could get Kurt Russell on the phone, the prank was revealed. Sadly for Discover, this is the best known of all their articles. And they were the first people to spot the moon.

2. Circles for Dummies: Since the value of pi is difficult to remember, the legislature in Alabama decided in 1998 to carve off an infinite number of decimal places and reduce the pivotal measure to plain ol’ 3.0. According to physicist Mark Boslough, who authored the article on the change, this also had the pleasant side-effect of reducing pi to its “Biblical” value. The article was meant as a joke, but the Internet gave it life. The state of Alabama still gets stick over this one. Not their fault. However, they haven’t come up with an excuse for inspiring this.

3. Sandwich stupidity: This prank was greeted with widespread mirth. It should have inspired a gang of vigilante vandals to burn down every public school in the Western hemisphere and then demand that they be built again – but functional this time.

Burger King announced in 1998 that it had finally solved that whole left-handed burger problem by moving the condiments 180 degrees. Sigh. It worked. Thousands asked for one — and we let them get away and breed. Many more demanded a right-handed version. Ditto. This is the sort of thing that would prompt a bankruptcy in Japan.

4. The real Kings: Britain’s Daily Mail is the undisputed champion of April Fool’s hoaxes. There’s the time the Queen went to bet the horses, the decision to move Stonehenge and potato chips that make no noise (Hey, why isn’t anyone working on that one?)

Their best? How about the 1982 installment, where they warned readers that a defective batch of bras, made with copper, were interfering with TV signals across the country?

According to legend, the chief engineer at British Telecom was snookered, and demanded that all female employees do a bra check. At least, that’s what he told the disciplinary inquiry later.

Don’t look so smug, Daily Mail. The reason your gags work is that all of your stories read like April Fool’s jokes.

5. Sidd Finch: A British orphan, a yogic guru and a man capable of throwing a baseball so hard it emitted a sonic boom on the way to the batter’s box, Finch was created by George Plimpton for a 1985 edition of Sports Illustrated. Two thousand readers responded, most notably the New York Mets, who were reported to have the inside track to signing Finch and his “168 m.p.h.” fastball. That is, if he agreed to give up his career as a professional player of the French horn.

A week after printing Plimpton’s piece, SI reported that Finch had suddenly lost the ability to hit the plate. A week after that, they admitted Finch was an April Fool – after the Mets gave him a $125 million (U.S.) signing bonus.

6. Gravity temporarily suspended: Proving that radio listeners really should get out more, the BBC’s 1978 audience was told that a temporary realignment of the planets was going to reduce Earth’s gravity for a few moments. Many phoned in to say they’d felt the change — by jumping up and down. One household claimed to have floated around the room. Today, these are the same people cashing out their life savings in anticipation of 2012.

7. Er, radio again: What is it about radio? If there’s something you should take out of this piece, people, it’s that you can’t trust radio. Or TV. Or the Internet. Stick to newspapers. We lie straight to your face, but don’t try to weasel out of it later with the old, “Oh, I don’t think that’s what I said.”

Anyway, San Diego DJ Dave Rickards told listeners in 1993 that the space shuttle was about to make an emergency landing at a local air strip. Thousands showed up because, you know, what’s a space shuttle crash unless it has a large crowd to crash into?

8. Lung buster: It’s 1934. As far as you’re concerned, science makes about as much sense as black magic. The only thing you really believe in is The New York Times. So when The New York Times tells you that a German inventor has created a flying device that he can strap to his body, you believe them. And when they tell you that this device works by blowing into it, you shrug and say, “Okay,” because there’s a picture. Later, you bother people at dinner parties by wondering why the troops aren’t already in Tokyo, since we have those blow-flying thingies.

9. Spaghetti Trees: The granddaddy of them all. The BBC tells viewers that the 1957 spaghetti crop has been devastated, then shows a thriving spaghetti farm in Switzerland, complete with rustic pickers removing cannolis and such from trees. Ha, ha. Many later questioned the intelligence of the British. Unfair. This only proves exactly how backward they are about cookery. Sadder still is the fact that the British didn’t learn to boil pasta before 1985. This also explains their teeth.

10. Enright v. Carter: As April Fool’s jokes go, this 2001 prank wasn’t barn-burning stuff. CBC Radio planted host Michael Enright on one side of the mic and comedian Ray Landry, posing as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, on the other. Tepid fireworks over (yawn) softwood lumber ensued, but the joke achieved epic status when one of this nation’s newspapers of record (note: not this one) played the story straight-up on the front page the next day.

Source: San Diego’s http://www.museumofhoaxes.comMuseum of HoaxesEND

Area 51 vets break five decades of ‘alien’ silence

Erik Lacitis

James Noce shows off a medallion he says was given to him by the CIA during a recent convention in Las Vegas, during an interview March 15, 2010, at his Vancouver, Washington home.
DEAN RUTZ/MCT

VANCOUVER, WASH.-After nearly five decades, guys like James Noce finally get to tell their stories about Area 51.

Yes, that Area 51.

The one that gets brought up when people talk about secret Air Force projects, crashed UFOs, alien bodies and, of course, conspiracies.

The secrets, some of them, have been declassified.

Noce, 72, and his fellow Area 51 veterans around the country now are free to talk about doing contract work for the CIA in the 1960s and ‘70s at the arid, isolated Southern Nevada government testing site.

Their stories shed some light on a site shrouded in mystery; classified projects still are going on there. It’s not a big leap from warding off the curious 40 or 50 years ago, to warding off the curious who now make the drive to Area 51.

The veterans’ stories provide a glimpse of real-life government covert operations, with their everyday routines and moments of excitement.

Noce didn’t seek out publicity. But when contacted, he was glad to tell what it was like.

“I was sworn to secrecy for 47 years. I couldn’t talk about it,” he says.

In the 1960s, Area 51 was the test site for the A-12 and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird, a secret spy plane that broke records at documented speeds that still have been unmatched. The CIA says it reached Mach 3.29 (about 2,200 mph) at 90,000 feet.

But after September 2007, when the CIA displayed an A-12 in front of its Langley, Va., headquarters as part of the agency’s 60th birthday, much of the secrecy of those days at Area 51 fell away.

Advance warning to UFOlogists: Sorry, although Noce and other Area 51 vets say they saw plenty of secret stuff, none make claims about aliens.

But on to the secrecy part.

Noce remembers always getting paid in cash, signing a phony name to the receipt, during his several years of working security at the site. It was, in CIA parlance, “a black project.”

Noce says he has no paperwork showing that he worked at Area 51 for the CIA. He says that was common. Others who got checks say they came from various companies, including Pan American World Airways.

But Noce is vouched for by T.D. Barnes, of Henderson, Nev., founder and president of Roadrunners Internationale, membership 325. Barnes is the one who says he got checks from Pan Am, for whom he had never worked.

Roadrunners is a group of Area 51 vets including individuals affiliated with the Air Force, CIA, Lockheed, Honeywell and other contractors.

For the past 20 years, they’d meet every couple of years at reunions they kept clandestine. Their first public session was last October at a reunion in Las Vegas at the Atomic Testing Museum.

Noce was a 1955 Vancouver High grad who went right into the Air Force and was trained in radar.

Leaving the service in 1959, he worked as a produce manager for the Safeway in Camas, 17 miles east of Vancouver.

Sometime in late 1961, Noce got a phone call at the grocery store. It was from a buddy of his from the Air Force days, who now worked for the CIA.

“He knew I had classified clearance from working at the radar sites,” remembers Noce. “He asked me how would I like to live in Las Vegas.”

Noce agreed to drive to Las Vegas and call “a guy” who worked for “the agency.”

And so Noce began doing security.

Most of the time, it was routine stuff.

On Monday mornings, a Lockheed Superconstellation would fly in from the “Skunk Works” in Burbank, Calif., bringing engineers and others who were working on the A-12. They’d stay there during the week and return home on weekends.

Skunk Works was the nickname for Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects, which had the A-12 contract.

The routine stuff included checking badges and making sure nobody had weapons or cameras. Security workers also made sure only those with proper clearance would witness a test flight.

And what a sight it was.

According to the CIA, its late former chief Richard Helms recalled visiting Area 51 and watching a midnight test flight of an A-12.

“The blast of flame that sent the black, insect-shaped projectile hurtling across the tarmac made me duck instinctively. It was as if the devil himself were blasting his way straight from hell,” said Helms, according to former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden.

Other times, the routine got very exciting.

Noce remembers when “Article 123,” as one of the A-12s was called, crashed on May 24, 1963, after the plane stalled near Wendover, Utah. The pilot ejected and survived.

Noce says he was among those who flew to the crash site in a giant cargo plane loaded with several trucks. They loaded everything from the crash into the trucks.

He remembers that a local deputy had either witnessed the crash or had quickly arrived at the scene. There also was a family on a vacation car trip who had taken photos.

“We confiscated the camera, took the film out,” says Noce. “We just said we worked for the government.”

He says the deputy and the family were told not to talk to anybody about the crash, especially the press.

“We told them there would be dire consequences,” Noce says. “You scared them.”

As an added incentive, he says, the CIA arrived with a briefcase full of cash.

“I think it was like 25 grand apiece, for the sheriff and the family,” says Noce.

About the aliens.

Noce and Barnes say they never saw anything connected to UFOs.

Barnes believes the Air Force and the “Agency” didn’t mind the stories about alien spacecraft. They helped cover up the secret planes that were being tested.

On one occasion, he remembers, when the first jets were being tested at what Muroc Army Air Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base, a test pilot put on a gorilla mask and flew upside down beside a private pilot.

“Well, when this guy went back, telling reporters, ‘I saw a plane that didn’t have a propeller and being flown by a monkey,’ well, they laughed at this guy—and it got where the guys would see (test pilots) and they didn’t dare report it because everybody’d laugh at them,” says Barnes.

Noce says he quite liked working at Area 51.

He got paid $1,000 a month (about $7,200 in today’s dollars). Weekdays he lived for free at the base in admittedly utilitarian housing—five men assigned to a one-story house, sharing a kitchen and bathroom.

Something that all Area 51 vets remember about living at the base, he says, was the great food.

“They had these cooks come up from Vegas. They were like regular chefs,” Noce remembers. “Day or night, you could get a steak, whatever you wanted.”

Lobster was flown in regularly from Maine. A jet, sent across the country to test its engines, would bring back the succulent payload.

On weekends, Noce and other contracted CIA guys would drive to Las Vegas.

They rented a pad, and in the patio plumbed in a bar with storage for two kegs of beer. It was a great time, barbecuing steaks and having parties, Noce says.

Noce has two pieces of proof from his Area 51 days: faded black-and-white snapshots taken surreptitiously.

One shows him in 1962 in front of his housing unit at Area 51. The other shows him in front of what he says is one of two F-105 Thunderchiefs whose Air Force pilots overflew Area 51 out of curiosity. The pilots were forced to land and were told that a no-fly zone meant just that.

Noce worked at Area 51 from early 1962 to late 1965. He returned to Vancouver and spent most of his working life as a longshoreman.

Noce remembers once in recent years talking with fellow retired longshoreman pals and telling them stories about Area 51. When they didn’t believe him, he says, “Well, there was nothing I could do to prove anything.”

Mary Pelevsky, a University of Nevada visiting scholar, headed the school’s Nevada Test Site Oral History Project from 2003 to 2008. Some 150 people were interviewed about their experiences during Cold War nuclear testing. Area 51 vets such as Barnes also were interviewed.

The historian says it was difficult to verify stories because of secrecy at the time, cover stories, memory lapses and—sometimes—misrepresentations.

But, she says, “I’ve heard this cloak-and-dagger stuff, and you say, ‘No way.’ Then you hear enough and begin to realize some of these stories are true.”

In October, Noce and his son, Chris, of Colorado, drove to Las Vegas for that first public reunion of the Area 51 vets. He and his old buddies remembered the days.

“I was doing something for the country,” Noce says about those three years in the 1960s. “They told me, ‘If anything should ever come up, anyone asks, ‘Did you work for the CIA?’ Say, ‘Never heard of them.’ But (my buddies) know.”

King’s ransom needed for Queen’s upkeep

Debra Black Staff Reporter

The monarch will be looking for extra money to run the family business, despite tales of overspending and free accommodation for minor relatives

The Queen will once more go cap in hand this year, begging for extra money to run the family business of the monarchy.

But she may find herself stymied as details of her financial life are revealed to critics and citizens.

Just released documents in London paint a picture of a monarch with rumoured private wealth of £90 million (or $138 million), who allows her relatives and courtiers to live for free on the public purse, who expects the state to pay for the repair of her crumbling palaces and who has rented out the apartment of Diana, the late Princess of Wales, to Prince Charles’s charities.

The documents also show an overspending of about $62,000 in the refurbishment of the kitchen and coffee room in Windsor Castle where workmen found spaces under the floors that might provide “rat runs” and overspending of $153,000 in the refurbishment of St. James’s Palace.

The look into the Queen’s finances was reported Wednesday in The Independent as part of a Freedom of Information request. Some of the “so-called most sensitive and embarrassing documents” still remain secret, however, as the British government goes to court to keep them sealed. About 100 letters, emails, memos and documents were released to the newspaper. with more expected to be released soon if the case goes in its favour.

As the drama plays out in the British courts, the Queen will be preparing for a drama of perhaps the proportions of King Lear. This year she and her aides plan to make a case for an increase in her annual payment of about $12 million. Under the terms of a constitutional agreement from 1991, the Civil List, which pays the Queen to perform her royal duties, must be renegotiated at the end of 2010.

The documents released to the Independent show that as early as 2004 Sir Alan Reid, the Keeper of the Privy Purse had unsuccessfully asked the British Department of Culture, Media and Sport for a substantial increase in the $23 million a year funding for the maintenance of the Queen’s crumbling palaces. The request was made at the same time minor royals and courtiers were being allowed to live rent-free in various palaces.

By 2005, according to the Independent, there was mounting pressure from a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee for the Queen’s aides to come clean about the free accommodation schemes.

Documents show that among the royals living rent free in Kensington Palace and St. James’s Palace are the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandria. What’s more, six members of the Royal Household, including the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and the Mistress of the Robes, were identified as not paying rent on their accommodation at the time.

More documents reveal that the Palace planned to refurbish and rent out Diana’s apartment at Kensington Palace (referred to as “Apartment 8” by palace aides). After debate between the Palace and the government over the use of the apartment, money to refurbish it and the potential for bad public reaction, it was eventually rented out to Prince Charles’s charities.

A series of emails also show that had the Royal Household acted sooner to switch to “a wholesale provider of gas and electricity,” the Palace could have saved the equivalent of almost $219,000 between 2004 and 2006.

In September 2005 the Queen’s advisers complained to the government about an untenable price rise in utilities of more than 50 per cent. The switch to a wholesale provider was eventually approved by the government, which acknowledged the Queen had been “hard hit” by the cost of energy.

The Independent also reports there was a tussle between the Department for Culture and the Royal household over who was to receive proceeds from the sale of land from the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington.

It seems that if the $3.8 million from the sale went to the Royal Household, it might affect any increased allocation that the Secretary of State could approve in a spending review. In short, the state said the proceeds belonged to it. Buckingham Palace argued it was the Queen’s.

Other documents show that the British Treasury and the Department of Culture rejected requests for an increase to the grant-in-aid – taxpayers’ money used to upkeep the occupied palace. Royal aides say property repairs to the palace currently could run $49 million, but by the next decade that figure could rise to $61 million.

Royal aides have said that the Queen’s accommodation is in “parlous” condition. In 2007, Princess Anne had a narrow escape after some loose masonry was dislodged from the roof on Buckingham Palace. Last year another piece of the roof fell on a police officer who was on duty.

The financial arrangements of the Royal Family are a complex series of government grants and Civil List payments agreed to by Parliament. And oddly, things like the Crown Jewels, or the paintings by Titian and Caravaggio are not the Queen’s, but rather are held in trust by her for the state.

Palace aides are quoted as saying that the escalating costs of the Royal Family will mean extra money is needed to offset the expenses of maintaining the palaces and for increased staffing costs. The deal for the $23 million to maintain the upkeep of palaces is a second deal that is not due to be upgraded until 2011.