April Fools' Day, Real News that people thought were jokes.

Via wikipedia:

• The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the "April Fools' Day Tsunami" due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools' prank.


• The death of King George II of Greece was on April 1, 1947.


• The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.^[79]


• In 1979, Iran declared April 1 its national Republic Day. Thirty-one years on, this continues to be mistaken for a joke.^[80]


• On April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. Originally, people assumed that it was a fake news story, especially considering the bizarre aspect of the father being the murderer.


• On April 1, 1991, news emerged that David Icke, the British sports reporter, had announced that he was the son of God and that the world was about to end in an apocalypse. Not surprisingly, many people took the reports as an April Fool. Icke has, however, continued to expound his views.


• On April 1, 1993, NASCAR Winston Cup Series Champion Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash involving Hooters of America executives in Blountville, Tennessee near the Tri-Cities Airport. The party were travelling to the Food City 500 qualifying scheduled for the next day.


• The suicide death of Deathrock legend Rozz Williams was on April 1, 1998.


• On April 1, 1999, the Canadian Northwest Territories was split, and the territory now known as Nunavut came to be.


• Gmail's April 1, 2004 launch was widely believed to be a prank, as Google traditionally perpetrates April Fools' Day hoaxes each April 1, and the announced 1GB online storage was at the time vastly more than existing online email services (see Google's hoaxes.) Another Google-related event that turned out not to be a hoax occurred on April 1, 2007, when employees at Google's New York City office were alerted that a ball python kept in an engineer's cubicle had escaped and was on the loose. An internal e-mail acknowledged that "the timing…could not be more awkward" but that the snake's escape was in fact an actual occurrence and not a prank.^[81]


• On April 1, 2008, it was reported that UEFA would require the Swedish fast food chain Max to close their restaurant at the Borås Arena during the European Under-21 Football Championship due to a conflict with official sponsor McDonald's and a requirement that only official sponsors may operate around the arena. The arena was later replaced as a tournament site.^[82]


• On April 1, 2008, Persch announced that the GNOME desktop web browser Epiphany would be switched from Mozilla's Gecko engine to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE's equivalent application Konqueror.^[83]


• Also, on April 1, 2009, a Virus/Worm called Conficker was released in December 2008 but reports about its spread to millions of computers, releasing personal info and deleting files came out on April 1st. This was supposed to be a joke, but random computers throughout America were hit. Before this happened, news media like NBC, Fox News, ABC and CBS told the viewers to install firewalls and updates to their Windows computers before it hit.^{[citation needed]}


• On April 1, 2011, word of Betty White to host a prank show called Betty White's Off Their Rockers hit the news.^[84]