The Great Spaghetti Harvest

On April 1, 1957, BBC broadcast the story of the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. Due to the magic of YouTube, you can watch the actual broadcast at the link below:

the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland

Since spaghetti wasn’t popular in England at the time, BBC received a number of calls from its viewers asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called the spaghetti harvest story “the biggest hoax that any reputable establishment ever pulled”.

The origin of the spaghetti harvest story goes all the way back to 1700, when pranksters in England first popularized the annual tradition of playing practical jokes on each other on April 1, but some elements of the merry making extend back to the times of the Roman Empire.

Virtually no one is immune to April 1 jokes, as evidenced by the Time magazine cover of April 1, 2012:



Although it looks pretty authentic, you need to be aware of the fact that Time magazine didn’t actually PUBLISH an issue on April 1. Their cover of April SECOND looked like this:



If you’d like to see more work by the cover’s creators, just click on the link below:

freaking news.com

Whatever you do, though, be careful tomorrow. After all, you don’t want to get fooled again.