We were pleased to see so many airports and airlines – and the National Railroad Passenger Corporation – Amtrak – having so much fun on April Fools Day.
Aviation museums also got in on the fun.
Here are some of the April Fools Day “news items” we encountered. Let us know if we missed some your faves.
UFO Displayed at Seattle’s Museum of Flight
In an April 1 release, the Museum of Flight in Seattle announced it would put on display an unidentified flying object (UFO) recently recovered from a crash site in a remote area in Washington state.
Here’s what it looks like:
Clearly, it’s an April Fools Day joke. But we love that the museum created a full backstory for this UFO:
Following a rash of inexplicable UFO sightings worldwide, the wreckage and debris field from a small disc-shaped object were discovered at a remote desert location near the decommissioned Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state. The UFO was initially detected by NORAD as it raced through the restricted airspace of Hill Air Force Base in Utah. The phenomena continued erratically on a northern flightpath and fiery descent to an impact zone in the remote desert hills of Benton County, Wash.
Military officials quickly removed tons of topsoil from the crash site to preserve any toxic fluids or alien biological matter that may have exited the disc. The object has displayed no signs of hostile intent, but extra security measures will be in place while it is on display at the Museum.
Plenty of airports and airlines got in on the fun. And many ‘announcements,’ such as Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s notice that it was removing the rocking chairs to make more room, no doubt made readers look twice.
But others, like KLM’s recline alert system and Geneva Airports’ ski-through-the-terminal updates aren’t totally silly ideas.
