The line between "ingenious prank" and "random, petty cruelty" is always extremely thin, and on April Fools' Day we collectively decide to just ignore it altogether. But in a world where most pranks are just random pointless lies, it's nice to sit back and acknowledge the ones that people actually put some effort into.
NOTE: Many of these will still get you arrested.
#6. A Billionaire Terrifies London With an Inflatable UFO
Virgin Group
Shopping for wallets big enough to hold his obscene wads of cash (and pants big enough to hold the obscenely bulging wallets) apparently gets boring for Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Everything. So he combats that boredom by tormenting the people around him with a never-ending series of pranks. Usually it's low-level stuff, like calling Virgin customer service and demanding to speak to Richard Branson. On one such call, his own assistant put him on hold for an amount of time that would turn Comcast green with envy before coming back to say, "Sorry, Richard, but you appear to be out of the office at the moment; can someone else help you?"
Mario Tama/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"Only if they work for New Fucking Assistants, Inc."
Then there's the time he invited his business partner to dinner and staged a fake burglary of said partner's house, only to earn himself an overnight stay in the slammer when his guest left the dinner early and called the police before Branson had time to come clean. But the top spot on his list of achievements goes hands-down to the time he convinced London that it was being visited by aliens.
Virgin Group
Hordes of Englishmen immediately ran outside in their bathrobes
to lie down in front of bulldozers.
On March 31, 1989, the space-obsessed Branson and a co-pilot took off in a hot air balloon designed to look like a flying saucer, otherworldly flashing lights and all. Their plan was to take a short flight and land in Hyde Park as a promotional stunt, but uncooperative winds transformed their short flight into a War of the Worlds-style public panic. As they hovered over highway M25 the traffic stopped cold, with scores of panicked motorists bailing from their cars to ring the local constabulary from emergency roadside phones. One woman was so taken aback by the "invasion" that she stood in front of the window of her apartment describing the slow-moving craft to a radio station while completely forgetting that she was nude.
via disclose.tv
"Wow, Earth girls really are easy."
Either in hopes of finding additional confusedly naked females or the possibility of breaking out their best one-liners while fending off an alien invasion with their billy clubs ("I guess you won't be ... sticking around."), British police kicked into immediate action. As the UFO came to its eventual landing spot, bobbies timidly approached, truncheons drawn and ready to give E.T. a jolly good whack on his elongated noggin. That's when an honest-to-goodness E.T. did pop out -- accompanied by plumes of smoke -- and the police promptly shat themselves and ran away.
That isn't a joke, by the way. In addition to his co-pilot, Branson had dragged aboard a dwarf in an alien costume (along with shit-tons of dry ice) for the express purpose of scaring the hell out of whoever happened to be nearby after their landing. When your prank checklist includes "hire a dwarf" and "rent a dwarf-sized alien costume," you know you've hit the level of either true genius or horrible, horrible person.
Virgin Group
Either way, Branson ran with the "Evil E.T." thing way more than Spielberg ever did.
#5. MIT Students Prank the Same Building Again and Again
Michael Bauer / Eri Izawa
Anachronistically founded in 1861 (because technology hadn't even been invented yet in 1861), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology didn't truly step into the nation's eye until the construction of its fancy-pants campus on the banks of the Charles River over half a century later, the centerpiece of which is the ultra-recognizable Great Dome:
John Phelan
But history is not why you'll remember the Great Dome. Nope, you'll remember it because it's that building MIT students once dressed up as R2-D2.
Gabor Csanyi
Not Pictured: Its neighboring structure, the Fabulously Golden Dome.
Over the years, students have somehow managed to sneak everything from Doctor Who's TARDIS (psh, nerds) to small airplanes onto the building in the middle of the night. The MIT campus never knows when it'll wake up to find, for example, a police car complete with flashing lights just, you know, chillin' on top of the dome.
Michael Bauer / Eri Izawa
It had just ticketed a pilot for going 550 mph in a 35 zone.
The police car found its way up there and onto international news in 1994. And the prank deserved each and every bit of that worldwide attention, because the students went all out on this one: The cop car, numbered pi because of course it was, came complete with a license plate reading "IHTFP" (MIT's unofficial slogan), a uniformed dummy occupant holding a box of donuts, and a parking ticket on the windshield.
Greg Kuhnen
Reciting fewer than 75 digits of pi automatically gets you thrown in the drunk tank.
So how the hell did a bunch of students manage to lug an entire car to the top of a building while cheap beer is a thing that exists? Well, the trick was that it wasn't an actual police car. Instead, the pranksters had gotten themselves a Chevy Cavalier, slapped a convincing police paint job on it, deconstructed the entire body, lugged it up a goddamn building in the middle of the night, and then reconstructed it over a wooden frame on the roof. All without being seen or heard.
Today each of those students is probably running a Fortune 500 company, and that's still less impressive to us than the "police car hack."
#4. The Yes Men Give a Speech on Behalf of the World Trade Organization (With a Giant, Shimmering Erection)
The Yes Men
We've previously mentioned a famous stunt by the activist duo the Yes Men, in which they successfully posed as a representative of Dow Chemical on BBC News and caused Dow's stock to go down quicker than your mom on $2 Shot Night at the Moose Lodge. But when you've made it your express mission in life to fuck with people by impersonating other, more powerful people, you've pretty well earned yourself a prominent spot on any estimable pranks list.
This time, let's look at the time they presented to a roomful of textile experts while sporting a gigantic, LCD-screen-equipped, golden dong.
The Yes Men
Later officially licensed by HBO as the only appropriate way to binge-watch Game of Thrones.
It all started when the Yes Men put up gatt.org, a website proclaiming to be an official publication of the World Trade Organization. Thanks to the infinite infallibility of Google, the website was soon taking over the searches of people looking for the actual WTO and, before you know it, the guys were receiving requests to attend speaking engagements as the organization's official representatives.
So they had a priapistic Oscar statue costume whipped up -- you know, as one does -- and hopped on a plane for a textile conference in Finland. There, after giving a presentation to a large group of "textiles scientists, engineers, and managers" on subjects such as the Civil War ("fought over the textile cotton"), Andy the faux WTO-man ripped off his velcro-equipped suit and tie to reveal his golden getup and the gloriously inflatable "Employee Visualization Appendage," a hi-tech contraption allowing managers to keep track of their employees.
The Yes Men
Never has a close-up been more warranted.
The best part? No one -- no one -- got the joke. The purposely offensive speech received resounding applause, and the leader of the conference sat Andy at the table of honor ... with the conference leader's daughter. No word on whether she had to scoot and share her chair with the Midas dong.
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