San Serriffe (main islands Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse) is a country people first noticed on 1 April 1977 after the Guardian published a seven-page supplement on it complete with advertising. Philip Davies, the person who had the original idea, apparently said, “The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I’d never heard of. I was thinking about April Fool’s Day 1977 and I thought: why don’t we just make a country up?” One special feature about the islands of Sans Serriffe is that they are migratory, therefore the map on the left no longer gives their exact position.
Other 1 April facts and reports are listed, described and documented in great detail at Museum of Hoaxes, including the masterful Swiss Spaghetti Harvest, Alabama changing the value of Pi to 3.0, the left-handed hamburger, the temporary closure of the Internet for Spring Cleaning and the distribution of powdered water in Hong Kong.
Sideways Station 