Fooling people is tough job: Expert

Los Angeles: As April Fools' Day looms, the curator of the Museum of Hoaxes has a word of caution for those who want to believe the unbelievable – a good hoax is hard to find.

Alex Boese, the curator of the museum which exists online only at museumofhoaxes.com, despite the photographs of its nonexistent headquarters in San Diego, has issued his annual list of 100 top hoaxes and cautioned, in the interest of truth, that none of the items have changed this year before April 1.

"There are no new entries this year. You have to be pretty good to get on it," said Boese, the author of three books on hoaxes including Hippo Eats Dwarf, A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.

“A hoax has to be a rare combination that gets something ridiculous that people will believe,” he added.

Take his Top 10 list – all are examples of faux news stories that people jumped to believe, headed by The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

According to Boese, the BBC news show Panorama announced in 1957 that a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil caused Swiss farmers to enjoy a bumper spaghetti crop.

The show displayed footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.

The British, coming through World War II rationing and never known for their refined palate, called up wanting to know how to grow spaghetti trees.

Also on the worst hoaxes list was a 1962 report by the only television station in Sweden that viewers could convert to color TV by pulling a nylon stocking over their TV screen. Hundreds of thousands of people were taken in.

Then there was the case of Sidd Finch, the make-believe pitcher who wanted to play for the Mets, according to a famous April 1985 Sports Illustrated story by George Plimpton.

The magazine said Finch threw a baseball faster than anyone in the game and had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa."

More recently was the April 1, 1996, hoax in which Taco Bell Corp. announced it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.