40 Fun Facts About Real or Fake News

Australian soldiers armed with machine guns fought a 1932 'war' against which wheat-raiding birds?

Emus won the 'war': the field force withdrew after about a month, leaving most of the flock untouched.

On April Fools' Day 1957, the BBC's Panorama showed a Swiss family happily harvesting what from trees?

Spaghetti was still exotic in 1950s Britain, so hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC, some asking how to grow a tree of their own.

In 1919, a burst storage tank sent a deadly wave of what through the streets of Boston's North End?

Molasses surged through the streets at about 35 miles per hour, killing 21 people and injuring 150.

After 'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 public vote, Britain's polar ship was named after which broadcaster?

David Attenborough got the ship, although the joke name had won with more than 124,000 votes. Boaty McBoatface went to one of its robot submarines instead.

Oregon highway officials made headlines in 1970 by using dynamite to remove what from a beach?

A dead whale, a 45-foot sperm whale, was blown up at Florence, and large chunks of blubber rained down on parking lots and damaged a car.

In 1982, Larry Walters drifted 16,000 feet above Los Angeles in what, lifted by 42 weather balloons?

A lawn chair was all Walters sat in as he drifted into controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. He came down tangled in power lines and climbed off safely.

A 1990s Pepsi commercial led a student to sue the company for which prize, priced at 7,000,000 points?

A Harrier jet cost roughly $23 million by the court's reckoning, and the judge ruled that no reasonable person could have taken the commercial as a serious offer.

Thieves made headlines in 2012 by draining nearly 3,000 tonnes of what from a strategic reserve in Quebec?

Maple syrup worth C$18.7 million vanished over several months from a facility run by a federation that controls most of the world's supply.

Which farm animal named Mike toured US sideshows in the 1940s while living 18 months without a head?

A chicken from Fruita, Colorado, Mike survived a botched beheading because most of his brain stem was left intact.

Which actor narrated the 1938 radio drama 'The War of the Worlds' that some listeners mistook for real news?

Orson Welles told the Martian invasion as a run of news bulletins breaking into an ordinary evening of radio, though the scale of the panic is disputed.

A rumour sweeping US campuses in 1969 claimed which Beatle had died and been replaced by a lookalike?

Paul McCartney supposedly died in a car crash in 1966, and hunting for hidden clues in the Beatles' songs and cover artwork became an international craze.

At the 2017 Oscars, which film was wrongly named Best Picture before Moonlight got the award?

La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz stepped to the microphone himself to announce the error, then held up the card showing that Moonlight had won.

Which satirical paper, founded by two students in Madison, Wisconsin, is often mistaken for real news?

The Onion began as a weekly campus paper, and its straight-faced style has led officials and news outlets abroad to repeat its spoof stories as fact.

The long-running 'dihydrogen monoxide' hoax uses a scary chemical name to make people want to ban what?

Water is simply H2O under an unfamiliar name. The parody lists true but alarming facts about it, such as that it speeds up rusting and can suffocate.

Which email service launched on April Fools' Day 2004 with so much free storage that many assumed a prank?

Gmail offered one gigabyte, far more than its rivals, and Google was already known for April Fools' jokes, so the announcement met with scepticism.

Which pop duo had a Grammy revoked in 1990 after it emerged that other singers had recorded their vocals?

Milli Vanilli danced and mimed while hired singers made the records. Their label later deleted the album from its catalogue and refunded customers.

Which 1999 horror film's promotional campaign listed its three lead actors as 'missing' or 'deceased'?

The Blair Witch Project was shot for well under $100,000 and presented as footage left behind by students who vanished in the Maryland woods.

Which landmark did American developer Robert McCulloch buy in 1968 and rebuild in his new Arizona city?

London Bridge could no longer carry the capital's traffic, so the City of London sold it. Its granite facing blocks were shipped to Lake Havasu City and fixed to a new structure.

Con man Victor Lustig posed as a French government official in 1925 to 'sell' which Paris landmark?

The Eiffel Tower was costly to keep up, so Lustig told a group of scrap metal dealers that the government wanted it sold off quietly.

In 1991, Englishmen Doug Bower and Dave Chorley revealed they had spent years secretly making what?

Crop circles, more than 200 of them across England, were the pair's handiwork, made with little more than a plank of wood and a length of rope.

The 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph', bought by the Daily Mail and later exposed as a hoax, claimed to show what?

The Loch Ness Monster in the picture was reportedly just a toy submarine, and one of the men behind it admitted decades later that the photo was a hoax.

Which famous painter was brought in for questioning after the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911?

Pablo Picasso was implicated by his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had been arrested first. The real thief was a museum worker who had helped build the painting's glass case.

Who found the stolen World Cup trophy wrapped in newspaper beside a parked car in March 1966?

A pet dog called Pickles, a four-year-old collie, came across it on a walk with his owner. When England won the tournament, Pickles was invited to the celebration banquet.

Arthur Conan Doyle championed photographs, taken by two young English cousins, that claimed to show what?

Fairies copied from a children's book and cut out of cardboard were posed for the camera; the cousins only admitted the trick in the early 1980s.

Which American author told a New York newspaper in 1897 that reports of his death had been exaggerated?

Mark Twain was fine: a journalist had been sent to ask after his health when it was really his cousin who was very ill.

The term 'yellow journalism', coined for sensational 1890s New York newspapers, takes its name from what?

Comic strip star the Yellow Kid ran first in Joseph Pulitzer's World and then in its great rival, while the two papers fought a circulation war.

Which agency's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' operation tried to use cats to spy on Soviet embassies?

The CIA spent about $20 million on the scheme, a former officer later said, before it was cancelled in 1967.

Which leader did China's People's Daily Online hail as 'Sexiest Man Alive' in 2012 after falling for a spoof?

Kim Jong-un was given a 55-page photo gallery in tribute, because the Communist Party newspaper's site had taken an American satirical article at face value.

Which term did Oxford Dictionaries name its 2016 Word of the Year?

Post-truth took the title after its use soared during the Brexit referendum and that year's American presidential election.

The word 'deepfake' comes from the username of someone who shared face-swapped videos on which site in 2017?

Reddit hosted both the user 'deepfakes' and a forum of the same name; the handle blends 'deep learning' with 'fake'.

Which New York newspaper ran the 1835 'Great Moon Hoax', a series about bat-winged people on the Moon?

The Sun credited the discoveries to the real astronomer Sir John Herschel, and it never retracted the six articles.

Which West German magazine paid millions in 1983 for 'Hitler diaries' that proved to be forgeries?

Stern paid the equivalent of $3.7 million for sixty volumes that a forger, Konrad Kujau, had written himself between 1981 and 1983.

Which British newspaper's 1977 April Fools' supplement profiled the made-up island nation of San Serriffe?

The Guardian gave the islands seven straight-faced pages, with most place names and characters punning on fonts and printing terms such as sans-serif.

A woman digging for scrap copper in Georgia in 2011 cut off the internet to all of which neighbouring country?

Armenia got 90% of its internet through Georgia, so the 75-year-old's spade left 3.2 million people offline for up to five hours. Local media dubbed her the spade-hacker.

Journalist H. L. Mencken's 1917 spoof, later repeated in reference books, invented a history for what?

The bathtub, in his telling, won America over after Millard Fillmore tried one and became a fan. Many newspapers took the joke gravely, and Mencken confessed more than once.

Teenagers in Veles, North Macedonia, ran more than 100 fake news websites in 2016 mainly to do what?

The teenagers are thought to have wanted to earn advertising money, so they pushed sensational American election stories that spread widely on Facebook.

In the 'dancing plague' of 1518, people in which city danced uncontrollably in the streets for weeks?

Strasbourg's outbreak began with one woman, Frau Troffea, and grew to somewhere between 50 and 400 dancers. Physicians prescribed more dancing as the cure.

Which of these did the Olympic Games really award medals for as part of art contests held until 1948?

Town planning became a category in 1928, alongside architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. The contests ended because most entrants were professional artists.

Canada and which country spent decades leaving flags and bottles of liquor on tiny Hans Island?

Denmark and Canada took turns planting flags and leaving schnapps or whisky until 2022, when they settled the dispute by drawing a land border across the island.

Which magazine's 1985 April Fools' story invented Sidd Finch, a Mets rookie with a 168 mph fastball?

Sports Illustrated had asked George Plimpton to write about April Fools' jokes; short of examples, he was allowed to invent his own, a pitcher who learned yoga in Tibet.