The mighty roar of the little ice borer.

Illustration: Cheryl Gross

I am a fanatical woodpusher, and I’ve devoted a staggering number of hours not just to playing chess but also to reading and writing about the game. A few months ago I stumbled on a curious report on ChessBase.com that the 19-year-old Norwegian phenom Magnus Carlsen, currently ranked No. 1 in the world, had recently been found to be related to Matt Damon. The actor’s mother had seen a picture of Carlsen and noted the physical resemblance to her son, 20 years his senior. A little genealogical investigation proved that the two men were second cousins who had never met. ChessBase posted a series of paired photographs of Carlsen and Damon in which their facial features and gestures were remarkably similar. The report concluded by saying that Damon had invited Carlsen “to visit him on the set of his next film about a shogi champion [shogi being a Japanese version of chess] who inspires a nation to put aside its differences and unite in celebration of his sport.” I’m a fan of Carlsen’s, and I e-mailed the story to a few fellow chess nuts. The only problem was that the story wasn’t true—I hadn’t noticed the April 1 dateline.

My gullibility was particularly embarrassing because I myself have a history of perpetrating hoaxes. I was the editor in chief of DISCOVER when, in 1994, the magazine embarked on a five-year run of publishing a sham news article every April. I had gleefully followed the venerable BBC’s periodic science pranks—my two favorites were a televised report on the defeat of the destructive pasta weevil (accompanied by images of Swiss workers harvesting spaghetti from trees) and a radio interview with an astronomer who urged listeners to jump into the air to experience a once-in-a-lifetime diminution in gravity as Pluto passed behind Jupiter. I wondered if the British are particularly credulous (after all, they still believe in princesses and queens), or if hard-boiled Americans would also fall for fake science stories. DISCOVER was my laboratory, and as a result of a half-decade of rather unscientific experimentation, I can report that Americans are pretty gullible too.

Senior editor Tim Folger was enlisted to write four of the April Fool’s stories that appeared in the magazine. In 1996 he described an extraordinary new evanescent particle called the bigon, a bowling-ball-size object whose existence might account for ball lightning, migraines, collapsed soufflés, spontaneous human combustion, and earthquakes. The following year, Tim wrote about the discovery of Neanderthal musical instruments—a mastodon-tusk tuba and rhinoceros-bladder bagpipe—and speculated that the hominids’ love of oom-pah-pahing through the forest may have scared prey away, resulting in their starving themselves to extinction. In 1998, the final year of the ersatz stories, Tim described the ambitious plan of Justin Vorfun, the hot-tub-loving CEO of a Hollywood Hills engineering firm, to install 300 building-size bellows around Los Angeles to blow the city’s famously bad smog out to sea.

It was Tim’s 1995 report, on Aprile Pazzo’s discovery of a strange little mammal called the hotheaded naked ice borer, that became the most celebrated hoax at DISCOVER. Packs of these hairless, molelike creatures, which lived in tunnels in the Antarctic ice shelf, were said to melt the ice below unsuspecting penguins with their red-hot heads and then devour the sinking birds with bites of their sharp incisors. Pazzo speculated that her discovery could explain the sudden disappearance of the polar explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837.

The article was quickly reprinted and widely distributed by newswires. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! reported it as true, as did The Unofficial X-Files Companion. DISCOVER received a record amount of mail from people who believed the story and from readers who wanted us to know that they got the joke (Aprile Pazzo is Italian for “April Fool”). A zoo asked for our help in acquiring one of the creatures for its collection. I remember replying that the animals could not be shipped because their heads would melt the packing crate—and that even if we could find a way to transport them, the zoo would need to feed them live penguins, and wouldn’t that be rather disturbing to the zoo’s younger visitors?