About a year and a half ago I made a post to the board about an April fools hoax that the billionaire Richard Branson pulled in 1989.

Seeing as how we have lots of new members, and that it was a pretty good April Fools joke, I thought I'd paste the text of that story into a thread again.


In 1989 British billionaire Richard Branson pulled a pretty good UFO hoax.

Branson had a hot air balloon outfitted to look like an enormous flying saucer outfitted with flashing lights and everything. He then hired some midgets to get made up like aliens and landed the thing outside of London and caused a major panic.
What a great stunt! Ranks right up there with the guy from Illinois who flew a lawn-chair with a bunch of helium balloons tied to it, all the way up to 10,000 feet and into the commercial air-traffic space, and ended up having a couple air national gaurd fighter planes scrambled to go up after him.

Anyhow, here's an article about Branson's UFO stunt:

April Fool's Day, 1989

UFO Lands Near London
On March 31, astonished British policemen were sent to investigate a glowing flying saucer that had settled down in a field in Surrey. As the policemen approached the craft with their truncheons held out before them, a door opened in the bottom of the ship and a small figure wearing a silver space suit walked out. The policemen immediately took off in the opposite direction. The alien turned out to be a midget, and the flying saucer was a hot air balloon that had been specially built to look like a UFO by Richard Branson, the 36-year-old chairman of Virgin Records. Branson had taken off in the balloon the day before, planning to land in London's Hyde Park on April 1. However, a wind change had blown him down a day early in the Surrey field. The police reported that they received a flood of phonecalls from scared motorists using roadside emergency phones as the balloon passed over the highway. One lady reportedly called a radio station to describe the UFO that she was looking at, not realizing that she was standing in front of her window stark naked. One of the policemen who had to approach the craft later admitted that, "I have never been so scared in 20 years of being a policeman."



Any one know of any other good April fools jokes or hoaxes??

I had a good one done to me yesterday.

I get to school at 6am every morning to workout. Two of my best friends also do this. Well, they both finished earlier than usual. Anyway, when I went back out to my car to get my bookbag, my car was gone! My friends had taken my keys and moved it across the parking lot. I have to give them credit, it was a good one.

Speaking of cars...I got my dad a good one. He is obessed with his car so i took white thread and I placed a long peice of it right up the side of the car and it looked like a big scrach shuda seen his face!!

I wanted to have something ready for school yesterday with it being April Fools. I didn't have anything too original, but I was able to get a couple of people, so it was worth it. My cousin helped me out on some, so that was cool. We got one girl in our pre-cal class with a whoopie cushion which was hilarious. We got a guy sitting behind her to put it on her seat, and she fell for it. I also had some disappearing ink, and I introduced that in Band class. I didn't personally do it to anyone, but after a couple of people saw it, they were all passing it around throwing it on unsuspecting people. We also used the ink in pre-cal, and my cousin put it in a pen and shook the pen to make it look like the ink had ran out...one guy was quite angry at us. heh Finally, my personal favorite, I brought a fake roach (somewhat revived from last year; I got a teacher with it) with clear fishing line-type string tied around it and placed it near people then pulled the string. We got the custodian at lunch the best. We placed it just inside the trash can as he came by, and when he was getting our trash, we pulled it...he jumped backwards! He laughed, though, so it was cool. My goal is to get some more roaches so that I can just drag them down the hallway without worrying about people stepping on them or something...then I'd have enough to replace any I lose.

Really though, I'm terrible at thinking up creative pranks, which is why I'm stuck with the stuff above. My brother, however, became somewhat of a legend with the teachers he had. Some of the stuff he did:
- Threw gummy bears on the ceiling so that they stuck; he was later forced to scrape them off...
- Brought a remote control to school that was able to turn on/off the Channel 1 TV in the room
- Brought live mice to school and placed them on the teacher's desk
- His friend put Alka-Seltzers in his mouth and fell on the ground, and they both pretended he was having a seizure

I've got a lot to live up to...

I faked my own death. Haha, you should have seen my parents faces. I thought they were ACTUALLY going to die.