When it comes to telling a joke, timing matters, and uh… that should have been obvious to the producers of the show highlighted below. — Dan

The image above is from a British TV show called “Science Report” that debuted on June 20, 1977. The man sitting on the stool is Tim Brinton, a former news presenter for the BBC and ITV. The episode, titled “Alternative 3,” was described in the Daily Telegraph that day “an Anglia Television investigation which is being screened simultaneously in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Iceland, and Denmark.” Anglia’s investigators, per the Telegraph, were exploring the “scientific brain drain from Britain” and had previously thought it to be “regrettable rather than sinister — until it became apparent that some scientists have totally disappeared since leaving the country.” Vanished, entirely, from the planet, as far as anyone could tell.

If you watch the 52-minute program — and you can, here, via YouTube — you’ll quickly find out what apparently happened. Anglia’s journalists discovered that some scientists hadn’t simply left England for better opportunities. They had left the Earth entirely. Climate change was dooming humanity, a secret that governments of developed nations had known perhaps for decades. The United States and the Soviet Union, bitter Cold War rivals, had secretly teamed up to expand space exploration, and a joint US-USSR effort to colonize the Moon and Mars was well underway. Some of the top minds in England and beyond had been quietly relocated to another world.

Nearly fifty years later, we are still here on Earth, and — absent some sort of conspiracy that I’m not aware of — there’s no Martian or lunar colony. So what actually happened?

Well, there was a scheduling issue. No, not with some planned mission to Mars, but with Anglia’s programming. This episode of Science Report — the only episode of Science Report — was supposed to air 80 days earlier, as seen at the start of the closing credits, below.

Yep, “Alternative 3” was supposed to air on April Fool’s Day. It was a prank.

Unfortunately, it was a very realistic-looking prank. The studios looked like real news magazine show sets. The host was a real newscaster. And all the press coverage leading up to the show’s airing made it sound real. As the Birmingham Evening Mail reported the next day, other than the easily-miss-able date above, “no indication that it was originally a hoax, originally planned to go out on April 1, was given in the [newspaper].”

And as a result, people got scared, and dramatically so. The broadcaster was inundated with phone calls from people afraid the world was about to end. The Birmingham Post shared that one local company called the paper “to say that none of his staff had turned up for work because they were so worried.” According to the Museum of Modern Art, “Alternative 3 is said to have caused panic not seen since Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.”

The producers didn’t apologize for the chaos — they were proud that the joke went over as effectively as it did, and thought that their viewers should have caught on to the joke. But just to be on the safe side, Anglia decided not to re-air the program.

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Today’s Bonus fact: On October 31, 1992 — Halloween — the BBC ran a show called “Ghostwatch,” mockumentary purporting to “prove” that ghosts and other paranormal phenomena were real. Like Alternative 3, Ghostwatch had a real newscaster leading the show, had high production values, and tricked a lot of people. According to the Independent, “Ghostwatch had the dubious accolade of being the BBC’s most complained-about show – estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000 complaints.” The producers, in this case, ultimately did issue an apology for tricking so many people.

From the Archives: The Spaghetti Tree Hoax: Another British TV prank for April Fool’s Day.

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And thanks! — Dan