The War of the Worlds was more an example of the mass audience’s gullibility than an actual hoax. There was not a conscious effort by Orson Welles to mislead the listeners, he was merely radio-broadcasting the preexisting book by H.G.Wells.
In any case, I must agree that, as far as effect is concerned, it will be difficult to reproduce the widespread panic induced by Welles.
I also concur with Me!! Joe!!! about Nessie. That is the biggest hoax ever, literally!
And I am pretty sure many people now consider the Y2K bug phenomena to be a hoax concocted by apocalyptic freaks.
Not quite. I’ve got the entire broadcast on vinyl LP. Welles adapted the original book by modernizing it and by formatting the first half as a mock broadcast of newsbreaks cutting into a music show. If you missed the first minute or two of the show, it wasn’t readily apparent that this was a play. And when the Martians wiped out the Army and the “on-site” commentary was chopped in mid-sentence (it still raises the hair on my neck), some people bolted for the hills and never heard the second half which was clearly a radio play.
IMO, it wasn’t a hoax so much as a playful scare. And, yes, the ones who panicked were truly gullible.
Constantine ruled the Roman Empire from 312 until his death in 337. Among his notable achievments was moving the capital of the Empire from Rome to Byzantium (later Constantinople) and making Christianity the official religion of the Empire.
Moving ahead four hundred years, in the 750’s Pope Stephen III was having a disagreement with several local nobles about his authority over the city of Rome. In the midst of this, Stephen produced a document, the Constitutum Constantini, which was supposedly written by the Emperor Constantine and in which he granted secular authority of the western half of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Based on this document, the Pope declared that he was not only the ultimate authority on religious issues but political ones as well.
Despite the suspicious timing of this document being produced, it was widely accepted as legitimate, not only in Stephen’s time but for several centuries thereafter. Even those kings and emperors who opposed Papal authority did so by sidestepping the Donation rather than declaring it an invalid forgery. It wasn’t until 1440, when Lorenzo Valla published a pamphlet showing that the Donation contained references to events that hadn’t occurred at the time the document was supposedly written, that it was openly declared a forgery. Valla’s work was banned by the church until 1517 and it would be several centuries later than that before the church finally acknowledged the document was false.
well, we certainly ** tried** to forget Milli Vanilli.
For my submission (maybe not on the grandest scale bur very interesting, nonetheless) I have:
Mark Hofmann, who created fraudulent documents, then sold them to other Mormans. He kept ‘finding’ new documents, then would present them to church elders who would buy them, the house of cards, tho’ was falling, and two people were killed with shrapnel bombs in packages before another bomb went off in Hofmann’s car, injuring him. He’s doing time in Utah presently. More here
I think the Y2K business was an example of a very real problem being sensationalized out of all proportion by certain people for their own purposes.
Actually, there were a number of Y2K bugs that could have caused some serious problems had not a lot of programmers, myself included, spent a lot of time re-writing a lot of old code to avoid them. But most of us programmers never expected the world to grind to a halt.
Little Nemo, that was fascinating, Thank You!
As far as hoaxes go, does anyone remember when Oral Roberts declared that if he didn’t get 60(?) million dollars in a certain amount of time God was going to ‘call him home’?
I briefly considered shooting the bastard and telling the jury “God made me do it.”
For biggest recent hoax, I nominate Rigoberto Menchu, author of the bullsh-- autobiography “I, Rigoberto,” recounting her “tortured” life in Guatemala. I say biggest hoax because she actually won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts! What other hoaxster can boast that?! Her story was thoroughly debunked (including claims that her brother had been tortured and killed), although her backers claim her fraud was justified because it brought wide attention to the social injustice and other human rights violations in Guatemala.
I wonder about that. In the days when radio was all there was, didn’t people have their regular schedules that they kept to, like we do today? E.G.: knowing that reruns of NYPD Blue are on at 6 pm, and tuning in whenever you get home from work in time? I can imagine a few people turning the dial aimlessly and stopping on the broadcast, not knowing that Mercury Theater was normally on at that time, but people who habitually listened to Mercury Theater would have known the program didn’t start with music, and was generally far-out.
Furthermore, didn’t the people who merely stumbled upon it think to turn to another station to hear their report? If such a thing did happen, every penny-ante station would send a crew out there. My mom’s story about 12/7/41 always centers around her father’s hand freezing on the dial, then turning it slowly up and down the band, and the stunned faces around her as everyone realized, yes, this was for real. But my grandpa checked it out first. As did many others. Although, to be fair, that instinct may have been inspired by the WOTW incident.
Wells got a lot of threats after that broadcast, BTW.
Well here’s a good recent hoax. In fact I was thinking of bringing this up in GD. And it contradics the idea that “hoax” should be perjorative; he certainly intended to decieve but for a good reason.
The Sokal Affair
I can’t get the link to work but if you search for Sokal and Hoax you should get his web site.
In brief, this physicist (Alan Sokal) was so disgusted by various deconstructionist, literary theorcists, social critics etc. refering to “reality” only in quotes and banding about scientific term (quantum whatever, paradigm) is such a way that they have no meaning, that he decided to see if he could write some total gibberish (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Garavity”) and get it published in a noted journal of social criticism (Social Text). He could.
Almost simultaniously, he admitted to his hoax in Linga Franca. Followed by dozens of articles by the editorial staff of Social Text trying to prove they’re not total idiots. Pretty much unsucessfully.
Speaking of him, I realize nobody’s mentioned Joey Skaggs
Somewhat related to the Sokal affair: not long ago there was an Australian book purporting to be the autobiography of an Aboriginal woman. After it won a major award, the author revealed that “she” was actually a struggling male author who made it all up, in order to reveal the left-wing bias in literary circles (or something.) I don’t remember the guy’s name but I think the book was called My Own Sweet Time. I bet it’s a hilarious read!
Haitian zombie powder (a la Serpent and the Rainbow) also turned out to be a hoax.
You’re right, Rilchiam. People did have favorite shows which they tuned to at specific times, and in this case (I haven’t verified this story) the highly popular Charlie McCarthy Show was on on another station. But that night the C.Mc. show was unusually slow or dull, and listeners began to sweep the dial for something else. That’s supposedly why so many people missed Welles’ introduction and caught only the fake newscast portion of the show.
I’m sure most people did have the sense to verify WOTW before breaking out the suicide Koolaid, but only the nutjobs make the news. We don’t hear much about the folks who kept their heads.
Back in the Eighties in Seattle, the local SNL competitor/companion, “Almost Live,” did a WOTW-type spoof in which they faked the collapse of the Space Needle. They used special effects to make it look as if the Space Needle had toppled over, and they had reporters on the scene of the “disaster.” Numerous police, hospital and other emergency-service switchboards were overwhelmed. The calls tailed off a bit when the reporters interviewed a witness whose response was simply, “Bummer about the Space Needle, man.”
I’m sure a good number of the people calling the police could’ve stepped out into the street and noticed the Sapce Needle was still standing.
Ah. Fortunate for Welles and his crew; unfortunate for many others.
Back in the '80s, I saw a TV movie about the WOTW broadcast. It intercut scenes at the radio station with scenes of the public’s reaction: mostly running around like headless chickens, like the guys who shot the water tower, thinking it was a Martian. There was also a scene where some housebreakers were skulking around a neighborhood that people were vacating, then going into the empty houses and looting them. Presumably, they were shrewd enough to know that there was no emergency.
Wow, in a page and a half worth of posts about hoaxes. I’m the first one to mention The Hitler Diaries. When Gerd Heidemann paid out 3.8 Million dollars on behalf of Stern Magazine (The German version of Time or Newsweek.) He thought he’d hit upon a journalistic goldmine. It wasn’t until AFTER Stern published the first of the diaries that they were proven to be fakes. Stern fired Heidmann and he was eventually sent to jail, along with the writer of the diaries Konrad Kujau, for conspiracy to commit fraud. It has taken Stern quite a long time to live down the disgrace.
(perhaps it’s time to move back to the Burgh!)