April Fools! 5 Fake Scientific Breakthroughs

#2 Flying Penguins

On April 1, 2008, the BBC played footage of a colony of flying penguins that it claimed had just been discovered on King George Island near Antarctica. In the "mockumentary," former Monty Python star Terry Jones played the David Attenborough-esque guide.

"We'd been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come," Jones said. "But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do." [See the BBC footage here]

Though penguins can't actually get airborne — not even when Terry Jones is around — the mechanics of how they swim are remarkably similar to how birds fly.



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Pretty good list. I'm sure there are many more interesting "hoaxes" out there.