On the evening of 1 April 1957, the BBC current-affairs flagship Panorama broadcast a three-minute film, narrated by the broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, showing a family in the Swiss canton of Ticino plucking strands of spaghetti from the branches of trees and laying them in baskets to dry. It was an April Fools’ Day fabrication conceived by a BBC cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, and produced on a budget of roughly £100. Spaghetti does not grow on trees. The “harvest” was dried pasta draped over branches at a hotel in Castagnola, with additional footage staged at a pasta factory in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Within a day the BBC was acknowledging the segment as a joke.
The film reached an audience estimated at eight million in a country where, in 1957, pasta was an unfamiliar delicacy rather than a pantry staple, and where Panorama and Dimbleby carried immense institutional authority. The segment explained the bumper crop as the product of a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” and noted that growers bred their plants for uniform strand length. Hundreds of viewers telephoned the BBC the following day — some indignant, but many sincerely asking how they might grow a spaghetti tree of their own. The corporation reportedly advised them to “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
Unlike most entries in this file, the Spaghetti-Tree Hoax injured no one and was never meant to last beyond the joke. It is remembered not as a fraud but as a benchmark: the moment a respected news institution proved that authoritative narration and moving pictures could persuade a mass audience of something botanically impossible. Decades later CNN called it “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”
The lasting interest of the case lies in why the joke worked at all. It exploited a precise gap between the audience’s trust in the medium and its knowledge of the subject. Britons knew Dimbleby and they knew Panorama; what most of them did not know was how spaghetti was actually made. Into that gap a plausible-sounding film could pour almost any nonsense, provided it was delivered in the sober register of the early-evening news.
In 1964, the Swedish journalist Åke “Dacke” Axelsson of the Gothenburg tabloid Göteborgs-Tidningen staged a hoax to test whether art critics could tell genuine avant-garde painting from work made by an animal. Four abstract canvases were hung at the Gallerie Christinae in Gothenburg under the name of a previously unknown French modernist, “Pierre Brassau.” The paintings were not by any Frenchman. They had been made by Peter, a four-year-old common chimpanzee at the Borås Djurpark zoo, who had been handed brushes and oil paints by his teenaged keeper. The deception was deliberate, the artist invented, and the result, by Axelsson’s design, a public test of the critics’ eye.
The critics largely passed the test in the wrong direction. Several reviewers from Swedish papers treated Brassau as a serious new talent. Rolf Anderberg of the Göteborgs-Posten wrote that “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination,” and praised brushwork that twisted “with furious fastidiousness.” One reviewer was unconvinced and remarked that “only an ape could have done this” — a verdict that was, unknown to him, literally correct. A private collector, Bertil Eklöt, was sufficiently persuaded to buy one of the canvases for about ninety dollars.
When Axelsson revealed that Pierre Brassau was a chimpanzee named Peter, the exposure was instant and self-administered; there was never any mystery to unravel, because the hoaxer announced his own trick. The most-quoted critic did not retreat. Anderberg maintained that Peter’s work remained “still the best painting in the exhibition,” a response that preserved his judgment by detaching it from the question of who or what had made the art. The episode caused no financial harm and ruined no careers. Peter went on living at the zoo and was transferred to Chester Zoo in England in 1969.
The case is remembered as a clean experiment in the sociology of taste. It did not prove that modern art is worthless, nor that critics are fools. It demonstrated something narrower and more durable: that when judgment depends on context — a gallery, a foreign name, the assumption of human intention — the context can carry the verdict, and a confident eye can read meaning into marks that were never meant to mean anything at all.
In November 1967, The Dial Press published Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, presented as a suppressed government study and accepted by a great many readers as exactly that. The book was a satire. It was written by the American author Leonard C. Lewin, at the suggestion of the editor Victor Navasky, and Lewin acknowledged sole authorship in The New York Times Book Review on March 19, 1972. There was no Special Study Group, no secret panel convened in a bunker, and no leaked report. The entire document was invented to provoke argument about war, peace, and the mentality of Cold War think tanks.
The framing was meticulous. Lewin wrote himself in only as the author of a foreword, presenting the body as the genuine work of an anonymous government panel — a fictitious “Special Study Group” said to have been quietly commissioned around 1963 and to have deliberated in an underground facility called Iron Mountain. Its deadpan conclusion was that permanent peace, though achievable, would be so destabilizing to the economy and the social order that it was not in fact desirable, and that war performs functions — economic, political, social — for which planners would need to engineer substitutes. The prose mimicked the affectless, systems-analysis voice of the era’s defense intellectuals so closely that the parody read as the real thing.
It worked. The book became a New York Times bestseller, was translated into some fifteen languages, and ran as a long excerpt in Esquire. To reinforce the illusion, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed it under the pseudonym “Herschel McLandress,” claiming to vouch for the report’s authenticity — a flourish that fed speculation he might be the author. Officials and journalists debated whether the leak was genuine; by some accounts President Johnson was furious. Lewin’s 1972 confession ended the central deception but not the story. Over the following decades the book was adopted as supposed proof of a globalist conspiracy by militia and far-right groups, who insisted Lewin’s admission was itself the cover-up, and the dispute spilled into a copyright suit against the Liberty Lobby.
The case is unusual among media hoaxes because its author wanted to be understood and could not fully succeed. Lewin meant the book as transparent satire of a real intellectual culture; the satire was so faithful that it became indistinguishable from its target, and a confession could not retrieve it from the believers it had recruited. It stands as a study in how parody, executed too well, stops functioning as parody.