>April fool's gags

>The Museum of Hoaxes lists the 100 best April fool’s hoaxes of all time. It also has the 10 worse which are somewhat distressing. My favourite (though I have yet to read them all) was the discovery of a new fundamental particle: the bigon.

#37: Discovery of the Bigon In 1996 Discover Magazine reported on the discovery by physicists of a new fundamental particle of matter. This particle, dubbed the Bigon, could only be coaxed into existence for mere millionths of a second, but amazingly, when it did materialize it was the size of a bowling ball. Physicist Albert Manque and his colleagues accidentally found the particle when a computer connected to one of their vacuum-tube experiments exploded. Video analysis of the explosion revealed the Bigon hovering over the computer for a fraction of a second. Manque theorized that the Bigon might be responsible for a host of other unexplained phenomena such as ball lightning, sinking souffles, and spontaneous human combustion. Discover received huge amounts of mail in response to the story.

Very amusing!