Where does April Fool’s Day come from? When did it originate? And why do we love to prank and goof on people - even our friends and family? Alex Boese runs the Museum of Hoaxes and is an expert on spoofs, tricks and high jinks. He joined Jimmy Church (email) to discuss his museum and April Fool's Day (related article). "Unless you have a completely have a closed mind where you're not going to accept anything new or out of the ordinary is possible, you've opened yourself up to the possibility of being hoaxed," Boese said.
He reported on several infamous hoaxes, including the BBC's Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax from 1957 when the British network aired a story about spaghetti trees in Switzerland. Many people in that time in England, including a top executive at the BBC, did not know how spaghetti was made and fell for the hoax, he noted. Another high-profile hoax was perpetrated by Sports Illustrated in 1985 when the magazine published an article on a rookie baseball player named Sidd Finch. According to the article, the young man had been recently signed to the New York Mets and could reportedly pitch a ball at 168 mph (fastest previous recorded pitch was 103 mph) though he had never previously played baseball, Boese explained.
He recounted Taco Bell's great hoax from 1996 when the fast food giant announced they had purchased the Liberty Bell to help reduce the national debt and would be renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. "The best hoaxes manage to tell us something or express something about life in a humorous way, and capture the spirit of the times," Boese suggested, pointing out the Taco Bell hoax was believable because of people's fear of creeping corporatization. He also covered the Canine Collection hoax from 2016 when fashion retailer Lyst advertised they would be selling dogs as fashion accessories, as well as some things which sounded like hoaxes but are actually true. Among the strange-but-true facts are one can obtain a dinosaur haunting license in Vernal, Utah, and men with hairy chests are less likely to get cirrhosis of the liver.
UFO Disclosure Update
First hour guest UFO historian Richard Dolan provided an update on disclosure developments. "Any situation where there could be a disclosure of this UFO-ET reality... is going to include a new future in terms of the technology we're dealing with," Dolan said about our rapidly transformative world. He pointed out the people in charge of keeping the secret about UFOs are not the only factor anymore, and it's possible President Trump could play a role in disclosure. "We have a president really for the first time in our modern history who's not on board... with mainstream reality," Dolan suggested, noting Trump's war with the intelligence community and affinity for Alex Jones. Dolan thinks disclosure could happen within 20 years, and possibly even by the hand of Trump in a tweet.
The final hour was devoted to Open Lines.