The first day of April, is April Fools' Day, the traditional day for playing pranks and hoaxes on unsuspecting people: the victim is called an April Fool.
April Fools' Day, is an odd celebration: what other holiday asks us to play tricks on our unsuspecting friends? Pranks succeed because the trickster causes his victims to believe - temporarily - in a false news. And when the trickster uses the gullybility of mass media, to he can make millions of people believe absurd informations.

The most incredibles pranks of this sort are of course the ones played through major TV networks or newspapers: in the past journalists created hundreds of hoaxes about unusual animals, monsters. or natural phenomena. Moreover when journalists create a hoax, no matter how incredible, some readers will believe it and other journalists will notice and reprint the story: thus, a good hoax may continue to appear and reappear for 50 or even 100 years.

Mark Twain
Stories about petrified men were such popular topic in American newspaper in the 19th century that American novelist Mark Twain decided to stop them, writing his own hoax, in orther to ridicule : his article A Petrified Man appeared a few weeks after he began to work for a newspaper in Nevada; Twain reported that a petrified man, about 100 years old, had been found, with every feature was perfectly preserved, he wrote, even the man's left leg, which had evidently been a wooden one.
Twain failed: many readers actually believed the story and it has reappeared dozens of times since then, often as a factual account of a true event.

Orson Welles
In 1938, Orson Wells created one of the most famous pranks of all times. Welles was preparing the adaptation of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds for a radio broadcast; the book was a science-fiction masterpiece about a Martian invasion of Earth.
Orson Welles included in the dramatization a news bulletin, that interrupting a music program, announced that aliens had landed in New Jersey: the result was that the announcement sounded completely true and caused widespread panic across the country. Most americans believed that Martians had landed on Earth and had begun invading it.

On that day the United States experienced mass hysteria in response to the radio broadcast and the public reaction has prompted decades of research into mass psychology. Were people in the '30s exceptionally gullible, or was Orson Welles a real genius? Or both? listen to an audio excerpt of the program and decide yourself.

Sibuxiang Decades after Orson Welles' hoax, Jing Huiwen, who owns an advertising agency in China, did a similar trick. In 1994 he ran a 15-second commercial on a small local TV station: the ad warned of a mythical beast, the "Sibuxiang". A text message explained that the Sibuxiang might soon break into people's homes and that its bite was fatal. Citizens were warned to keep their doors and windows locked: after the warning many people refused to leave their homes. Many of them called the police during the night and after police stations switchboards were jammed, the Communist Party ordered an investigation of Jing and his company.

Within 24 hours, however, the ad was revealed to be a hoax: the commercial was created to advertise a new brand of liqueur, named "Sibuxiang"; most people simply didn't read the commercial's tell-tale signoff: "Plotted by Jinxing Advertising." Jing was only fined for violating China's Advertisement Law, but China's media lined up behind him, since he did something remarkable in a country of any size: he established a nationwide brand name in just one night.