[NutBrnHair]

April Fool's Day, 1996:
The Taco Liberty Bell

On April Fool's Day, 1996 the fast food chain Taco Bell took out a full page ad in the New York Times to announce their purchase of the Liberty Bell. The full text of the ad read as follows:

Taco Bell Buys The Liberty Bell
In an effort to help the national debt, Taco Bell is
pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the
Liberty Bell, one of our country's most historic treasures.
It will now be called the "Taco Liberty Bell" and will
still be accessible to the American public for viewing.
While some may find this controversial, we hope our
move will prompt other corporations to take similar action
to do their part to reduce the country's debt.


In a related release, the company explained that people and corporations had been adopting highways for years, and that Taco Bell was simply "going one step further by purchasing one of the country's greatest historic treasures."

Reaction to this announcement was decidedly mixed. Thousands of people called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the Liberty Bell is housed to angrily protest the decision to sell the bell. However, most people seemed to realize that the advertisement was an April Fool's Day joke. Taco Bell revealed the prank at noon on April 1st in a press release describing their earlier announcement as "The Best Joke of the Day."

The White House even got in on the joke when Mike McCurry, the White House spokesperson, suggested that the federal government would also be "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial."

The hoax paid off for Taco Bell. Their sales during the week of April 1st spiked upwards by over half a million dollars compared to the week before.