If it didn’t look beliveble for the time, why did so many people fall for it?
I was more likely to fall for the Blair Witch story they had a special on telling the “history and true story” of what happened on the sci fi channel than I was to fall for that.
Young people didn’t fall for it- Orson Welles was well known to most young radio listeneres as ‘The Shadow’ so they knew it was a play. Older people…well they were idiots. They do mention several times it’s a play.
But it’s like Ghostwatch, the fake documentary screened ‘live’ on the BBC some years ago (just out on DVD and adorning my collection). It mentioned in the TV guides that it was fiction and even had a screenplay writer’s credit at the beginning (which the writer actually fought against in case it detracted from the atmosphere but it didn’t matter anyway it seems). Since it aired, the British Medical Assosciation recognises it as the only case of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a TV show in children, and it produced thousands of complaints from people who’d soiled themselves, or parents whose kids wouldn’t sleep anymore.
But it’s bloody good.
I’ve never heard of Ghostwatch. I should find it/get it/etc.! Sounds neat!
Young people didn’t fall for it- Orson Welles was well known to most young radio listeneres as ‘The Shadow’ so they knew it was a play. Older people…well they were idiots. They do mention several times it’s a play.
But it’s like Ghostwatch, the fake documentary screened ‘live’ on the BBC some years ago (just out on DVD and adorning my collection). It mentioned in the TV guides that it was fiction and even had a screenplay writer’s credit at the beginning (which the writer actually fought against in case it detracted from the atmosphere but it didn’t matter anyway it seems). Since it aired, the British Medical Assosciation recognises it as the only case of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a TV show in children, and it produced thousands of complaints from people who’d soiled themselves, or parents whose kids wouldn’t sleep anymore.
But it’s bloody good.
I’ve never heard of Ghostwatch. I should find it/get it/etc.! Sounds neat!
I think that this is supposed to be a remake hoax of the real thing, but apparently the real thing is in reeealy bad condition so it’s hard to see whats going on and not many people are aloud to see it as it’s “Top Secret.”
Anyway weather the original is real or not, i still believe that there is other life. Think about go somewhere away from the city at night and look at the stars, there are millions of them, you cant even see all of them, and thats just in our galaxy, there are probably millions of other galaxy’s containing millions of those stars. Each star is a sun similar to our own and about 95% of those stars have a solar system with planets, one of those planets has to have life, if not then we must be very special.
IMHO the best Hoax of all time was the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
The weirdest thing about that one is that if you listen to a rebroadcast, they tell you it’s fake multiple times. They also do it at the very start of the program.
But apparently the night they aired it, it aired at the same time as the nation’s top radio show. But the top radio show didn’t air that night. So, what happened was people tuned in to listen to their favorite show and it wasn’t on. Then, they started flipping channels and found the War of the Worlds broadcast. But, by then, they had missed the initial notice that it was fake.
Young people didn’t fall for it- Orson Welles was well known to most young radio listeneres as ‘The Shadow’ so they knew it was a play. Older people…well they were idiots. They do mention several times it’s a play.
I think there’s a certain amount of legend about how much panic was caused. (I’ve got a recording of it—the Mercury Theater broadcasts—and I don’t think too many people would’ve taken it as other than fiction. Orson Welles’ voice is quite distinctive, for one thing.)
Here’s what the venerable Museum of Hoaxes has to say on the subject:
The broadcast reached a huge audience, demonstrating the enormous reach of radio at that time. Approximately six million people heard it, and out of this number it was long thought that almost one million people panicked. More recent research, however, suggests that the number of people who panicked is probably far lower. In fact, the idea that the broadcast touched off a huge national scare is probably more of a hoax than the broadcast itself, which was never intended to fool anyone (At four separate points during the broadcast, including the beginning, it was clearly stated that what people were hearing was a play). The idea that hundreds of thousands of people panicked arose because the media eagerly pumped up the story in the weeks following the event.
