April Fools' Day is when people try to mislead each other, sometimes the people you’d least suspect. Like how on this day in 1957, one of the world’s most steady and preeminent news outlets reported that spaghetti was growing on trees.
It was probably more elaborate than your standard April Fools Day joke: today in 1906, the Chicago Tribune put together a two page "report," complete with pictures, about swarms of dinosaurs wrecking the city.
Today in 1869, one of the most famous hoaxes of the 19th century began, when workers in Cardiff, New York supposedly uncovered the remains of a 10 foot tall man known as the Cardiff Giant.
Today in 1968, the Soviet Union was launching the Zond 5 mission, orbiting the moon. But on cosmanaut, knowing the US would be listening, decided to pretend he’d landed on the moon's surface.
Here's a story that brought out the worst in everybody: it's the story of Mary Toft, the so-called Rabbit Queen of 18th Century England who claimed she had given birth to countless numbers of rabbits and other wild creatures.
Today in 1854, the end of one of the great hoaxes of its day: a fire in a Philadelphia museum destroyed what people of that time thought was a super-intelligent chess robot.
Today in 1865, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford's Theater, and we all know how badly that ended. But five years later, William Mumler "photographed" the spirit of Honest Abe comforting his widow Mary Todd Lincoln. Here's the story of Mumler and his very controversial "spirit photography."
