by Charles Lear
Happy April! While April Fools’ Day will have passed by the time this blog is posted, the writer thought it would be fun to look at UFO related April Fools’ jokes. While hoaxes have long been a bane to UFO researchers, hopefully researchers can put aside their disdain for such activity at least one day out of the year and get in touch with their sense of humor. In fact, some have argued that a sense of humor is essential when looking into the paranormal.
An April Fools’ joke that ended up embedded in the UFO mythos as evidence for the existence of aliens involved a photo depicting what has become known as the “Silverman.” Isaac Koi (real name withheld to protect his profession as a barrister) discusses this photo at length on his website. According to his (male possessive pronoun used due to antecedent male seeming name) research, the photo first appeared in the German publication Neue Illustrierte “on or about April 1, 1950 with the title ‘Der Mars-Mensch.’” It was admitted to be a joke a short time later, but that didn’t prevent the photo from showing up in literature and on websites with the claim that it depicts a real alien. For instance, this description appeared in Brazilian UFO mag, n.18, p.18, dec 1991:
Above, one of the most impressive photos of an alleged extraterrestrial creature recovered from crashed UFOs. For many years it was thought the photo originated from a crash in the USA, but recently it was found it was captured in Germany, shortly before the Second World War. The officers who hold the being are high-ranking members of the SS.
The FBI got involved in 1967 when a resident (name redacted) sent it a copy of the photo and asked for a comment. A response with J. Edgar Hoover’s name stamped on it was sent with the assurance that “the photograph you mentioned does not represent employees of this Bureau.” The documents can be viewed on pages 138 through 141 in part 14 of the UFO section on The Vault website hosted by the FBI.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is a big fan of April Fools’ Day and likes to pull a prank around that day every year. These include announcing in 2015 that Virgin USA would be relocating to Branson, Missouri; saying in 2011 that trained ferrets had been used by Virgin Media to lay cable that would expand its rural service; and claiming in 2010 to have bought Pluto in order to restore it to its status as a full-fledged planet.
Way back in 1989, at around 4:00 a.m. on March 31, Branson took off from a location in London in a hot air balloon made to look like a flying saucer. With lights flashing, it floated over the M25. Drivers on the road pulled over and got out of their cars to gawk at the craft. Police and the media were shortly overwhelmed by UFO reports and the army was alerted.
The original plan was to land in Hyde Park, but the wind blew the balloon off course, and Branson was forced to land in Surrey Field, a football pitch, instead. As the balloon came down, the police moved in. According to Branson in a blog he posted on World UFO Day July 2, 2013, a single officer was sent to approach the craft. As the officer closed in, a door in the craft opened, fog billowed out, and a little person wearing an E.T. mask emerged. The officer turned around and ran in the opposite direction. When the officers realized that the whole thing was a prank staged by Branson, they threatened to arrest him for wasting their time but then relaxed and saw the humor of it.
The mayor of the Jordanian town of Jafr failed to see the humor of a prank perpetrated by the Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad on April 1, 2010. The front page of the paper that day contained an article informing citizens that UFOs piloted by creatures 3m (10 ft) tall had landed in the desert near Jafr. According to the article, the UFOs caused communications failure as they lit up the town and caused townspeople to run scared into the streets.
The mayor of Jafr, Mohammed Mleihan, spoke to the Associated Press about his reaction and the reactions of his constituents to the story. According to him, parents were frightened enough to keep their children home from school, and he came close to evacuating Jafr’s 13,000 residents. He said he notified local security authorities who then dutifully searched for the aliens. None were found.
BBC News reported that Mleihan was considering bringing a lawsuit against the paper. Al-Ghad Managing Editor Moussa Barhoumeh apologized for the story saying, “We meant to entertain, not scare people.” The BBC article notes that while Egyptians are known in the Arab world as being “big jokers . . . able to easily laugh at just about anything, the Jordanians are considered more serious.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers got into the April Fools’ spirit with an April 1, 2018 posting on their Baltimore District Website. The post is headlined “Corps of Engineers pulls UFO out of DC waters near Reagan National Airport” (odd choices for capitalization theirs) and shows a picture of a salvage vessel carrying a flying saucer. The “alien spacecraft” was reported to have been recovered while clearing debris from the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers during a routine mission and “was taken by Air Force personnel to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.”
At the very bottom of the post is this caution: “(Please note, this is an April Fools’ Day joke).” It was a good thing that this was added because, in the United States, while those in Washington, DC, are known to be big jokers, Virginians living just across the Potomac are considered more serious. Just kidding.