It's April Fools Day all Year Round

Yesterday, my older daughter and I exchanged April Fools texts.  She informed me that she was going to miss her flight home at the same time as I texted her saying that her flight had been cancelled; the annual ritual had been duly observed. While some may be dismissive of such puerile pursuits, I think that it’s a good thing to be reminded not to take ourselves too seriously or to believe that we are immune from gullibility.

A famous April Fools hoax was conducted in 1976, by the BBC presenter and astronomer Patrick Moore.  He informed people, on air, that at 9.47 am precisely the ‘Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect’ would cause a momentary negation of the Earth’s gravity.  If people jumped at precisely the right moment, they would experience a strange floating sensation before returning to the ground.  Subsequently, the BBC’s switchboard was flooded with callers eager to attest that they had experienced the effect.

It was, of course, nonsense, but many people still believed that they had experienced it.  Moore, however, had more than an April Fools trick on his mind.  He had devised the hoax to draw attention to a book called ‘the Jupiter Effect’.  The authors argued that a certain type of planetary alignment, due to take place in 1982, would cause all manner of terrible natural disasters to take place.   In spite of the fact that this alignment occurs every 179 years and no discernible pattern of natural disasters could be found to correlate with it, the book became a best-seller, questions were asked in government and even NASA became involved.  Moore and others protested in vain that the book was nonsense from start to finish; even when 1982 came and went without anything unusual to report, the authors stuck to their guns, revised their theories and published a follow-up.  Only in 1999 did one of the authors admit that it was all rubbish, writing ‘I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.’  It has not been reported whether or not he donated his royalties to charity.

From ‘the Jupiter Effect’ through ‘the Millennium bug’, to countless conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, health fads, political and social theories and our individual quirks and superstitions, time and again we believe what we want to believe simply because we want to believe it.  Some of our beliefs might be true, some of them might be false, but seldom do we adhere to beliefs because we have rigorously pursued the truth.  More often than not we have simply looked for ‘evidence’ to support our existing presuppositions and preferences.  Rarely, are these presuppositions and preferences put to the test…..foolish or what