This episode of Hoax is no fun at all. April Fool's! For our (almost) April 1 episode, we explore the holiday's origins and some of the best pranks of the 20th and 21st centuries: Google's various exploits (Pokemon Go!), that time the BBC produced a piece on Spaghetti Trees, and the Curious Case of Sidd Finch, the Mets pitcher who could throw 168 MPH.

SOURCES:
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-did-april-fools-day-get-started
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/03/april-fools/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/01/king-kugel-an-april-fools-history-lesson/
https://frenchmoments.eu/april-fools-day-traditions-in-france-le-1er-avril/
https://bylines.scot/society/hunt-the-gowk-day/
https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/hunt-the-gowk-april-fools-scotland/
https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-celebrates-april-fools%E2%80%99-day/
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cancels-april-fools-day-pranks-coronavirus-2021-3
https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/15/curious-case-sidd-finch
https://www.si.com/mlb/2014/10/21/si-60-curious-case-sidd-finch-mark-mulvoy-myra-gelband
https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/sports/legendary-sidd-finch-finally-makes-it-to-mets-home-game-40-years-later/
https://niemanstoryboard.org/2014/04/01/whys-this-so-good-no-90-george-plimpton-and-sidd-finch/
https://www.milb.com/news/legend-of-sidd-finch-lives-on-in-brooklyn-145695984
https://sports.yahoo.com/still-curious-catching-those-brought-150800240.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/sports/baseball/an-old-baseball-april-fools-hoax.html
https://www.mlb.com/news/sidd-finch-hoax-recalled-at-sabr-convention/c-133074166
ESPN: Unhittable: Sidd Finch and the Tibetan Fastball
BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/greatest-april-fools-prank-of-all-time-the-story-of-the-bbcs-spaghetti-trees/
https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/09/25/the-spaghetti-trees-of-ticino/
https://ericajurus.ca/2024/04/02/the-tradition-of-pranking-and-fooling/
http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/cucina/when-i-was-a-kid-i-learned-that-spaghetti-grew-on-trees

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Stockmarkets are now battlefields. An aide-de-camp arrived in Dover with the startling, thrilling news that Napoleon had been killed, and the British stock market behaved accordingly. The problem was, Napoleon wasn't dead.

SOURCES:
Napoleon Is Dead by Richard Dale
Trial transcript

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Messages from extraterrestrial visitors? Evidence of strange atmospheric conditions? No one knows where crop circles come from or what they mean. Except, we do know, but for believers, that's the start, not the end, of the story. The history of crop circles is a case study in conspiratorial thinking...plus art in wheat fields!

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P.T. Barnum is famous to movie-going audiences as the charming 'Greatest Showman,' but the reality was far more complicated, and much darker. P.T. Barnum's very first foray into showbusiness was purchasing an enslaved woman named Joice Heth, whom he displayed as a public spectacle, promoting her a 161-year-old woman who once nursed George Washington.

SOURCES:
'The Showman and the Slave' by Benjamin Reiss
'Medical Apartheid' by Harriet A. Washington
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/
“P.T. Barnum and Africa” Bernth Lindfors
The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader, edited by James W. Cook

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Arrested in 1945 for selling a Vermeer masterpiece to high-ranking Nazi Herman Goring, dutch painter Han van Meegeren had an innovative and shocking defense: he was guilty not of collaboration but of art forgery, faking half a dozen "Vermeers" over the previous decade. But under the reign of the Third Reich, where do you draw the line between opportunism and profiteering?

SOURCES
https://museumhack.com/anniversary-forgery-meegeren/
https://www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/27/dutch-master
https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2023/03/16/han-van-meegeren-forgery-nazi-vermeer/
https://www.salon.com/2016/11/27/faking-it-does-the-forged-vermeer-that-fooled-goering-belong-in-a-museum/
The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez
How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnnkuOz08GQ
https://www.npr.org/2008/07/12/92483237/how-mediocre-dutch-artist-cast-the-forgers-spell
https://www.thecollector.com/han-van-meegeren/
Van Meegeren: The Forger Who Fooled The Nazis (BBC)

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In December 1912, Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist at the British Museum, presented something extraordinary to the Geographical Society: a "missing link" fossil, a species he named "Dawson's Dawn-man" after the Sussex solicitor who found the original fossil. It was the find of a lifetime, and a much-needed bit of national pride for the English. The only problem? It wasn't real.

SOURCES:
The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell
Piltdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson by Miles Russell (Tempus, Stroud, 2003)
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-problem-of-piltdown-man/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/23/piltdown-man-remains-exposed-as-fake-1953
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/08/folklore-piltdown-man-hoax/
'The Perpetrator at Piltdown' by J Winslow and A Meyer, Science (September, 1983)
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2016/august/piltdown-man-charles-dawson-likely-fraudster.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/piltdown-man-paleoanthropologys-april-fools-176401927/

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Midcentury New Yorkers who couldn't sleep found a friend in Jean Shepherd, the iconoclastic radio personality whose middle of the night monologues made him a cult comedy figure and leader of the underground Night People movement. When he proposed to prank the book world by demanding a novel that didn't exist, the title became so popular his followers more or less willed it into being.

SOURCES
https://web.archive.org/web/20020427051336/https:/flicklives.com/Articles/Wall_Street_Journel/8-1-56/8-1-56.jpg
https://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-media-hoax-of-i-libertine/
Excelsior, You Fathead! By Eugene B Bergmann
I, Libertine by Theodore Sturgeon
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/handbook-for-mortals-by-lani-sarem-pulled-from-nyt-bestsellers-list
https://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/did-this-book-buy-its-way-onto-the-new-york-times-bestseller-list.php
https://www.vulture.com/2017/09/handbook-for-mortals-lani-sarem-23-hour-new-york-times-bestseller.html
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lani-sarem-blues-traveler-manager-novelist-bestseller-list-7957648/

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During the 18th century, as the industrial revolution picks up.... steam, people are dazzled by expertly constructed mechanical marvels: automatons. But Wolfgang von Kempelen brings something to the royal court in Vienna that people have never seen before: an automaton capable of playing chess.

SOURCES:
The Mechanical Turk by Tom Standage
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/debunking-mechanical-turk-helped-set-edgar-allan-poe-path-mystery-writing-180964059/
Maelzel’s Chess Player by Edgar Allan Poe
Last of a Veteran Chess Player by Silas Weir Mitchell

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