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Mars Attacked, 65 Years Ago Today
Jodrell writes "Forget solar flares, and the upcoming Halloween festivities - tonight marks the 65th anniversary of the broadcast of Orson Welles' radioplay version on The War Of The Worlds."
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The Martian Government has determined that the people of Earth are harboring biological weapons. Prepare to be liberated.
I wonder what sort of panic would ensue if someone were to do a similar broadcast now?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
They could have just checked Snopes
That's because they only issued a warning saying it was fictional at the beginning and the end of it. There were no warnings while it was playing, so of course people thought it was real.
Just thinking about Mars Attacks makes War of the Worlds seem Utopian.
You can get the audio for the show here. Not the best fidelity, but still...
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... can't we just go to Starbuck's for coffee?
John Bigboote points out:
"It's not my goddamn planet, understand, monkey boy?"
Where are we going?
Planet 10!
When?
Real soon!
You can find an MP3 version of the original broadcast at http://www.unknown.nu/mercury/. (Be nice -- the server is slow even when not being slashdotted.)
It reminds me of an april fools documentary which seemingly had evidence and proof that the moon landing was faked. It had all sorts of high profile people finally coming out and stating that it was faked. Even Buz Aldrin was in on it.
The documentary gets sillier and sillier until in the final credits, the interviewees start asking to see the script again etc. etc. Had me going for a while too.
Then isn't it about time for some payback?
I am sick of living on a planet so full of peaace lovers.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
You were fooled by our insidious language, which makes it virtually impossible to distinguish between simple past tense and passive voice.
What the headline said was:
Mars attacked [Earth], 65 years ago today.
What you thought it said (and what it actually might have said if Slashdot were a newspaper) was:
Mars attacked [by] Earth, 65 years ago today.
Bloody hell..and they call this a language?
From my grandfather, who worked at a gas station about 20 miles from the "landing site" He said of all the people that stopped at the station that night, half were leaving to get away from the aliens, and the other half were driving towards it!
I've heard parts of the original Orson Welles broadcast. With all the media we're exposed to, there is absolutely no way we'd be fooled by it today.
Even with good editing and falsified television footage, I still doubt such a thing would fool us. We've seen way too many alien movies and such to be fooled. Something more believable and fear-inducing, such as falsified terrorist threats and terrorist attacks might do it.
I would also point out that it would make it even more difficult to pull such a hoax now due to the fact that we have so many more media sources now. Back then there were only a few radio stations. Now we have the Internet, radio, television, etc. It would certainly look strange if one channel/station was covering it and everyone else seemed oblivious to it.
I believe it was first broadcast on American radio on Sunday, October 30th just after 8pm EST. Interestingly, from the "It can't happen again" department, an adaptation of the show played in Quito, Ecuador in 1949 and caused riots. The radio station building was set on fire after citizens discovered it was a fraud. More recently, it cause problems in northen Portugal in 1988. For more details see this csicop page.
the farmer who took his rifle and fired shots at the town water tower, thinking it was a spacecraft.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Something that contributed to this was the fact that most of the people who missed the beginning did so for the same reason that advertisers try (at times) to make their comercials entertaining.
This night of the week was popular on the radio for a couple of shows on competing networks. People would listen to the begining of the program, which was nearly always entertaining, decide the next part was dull, and retune to another station.
If you have not listened to the radio drama, there are a few segments where there is some so-so ballroom dance music being played, that apparently was just good enough that people decided to listen. This got interupted with what sounded at the time like a very reasonable public service anouncement that got them.
Personally I think this would be the equivalent of tuning in to the latest episode on Survivor, deciding watching the first segment, deciding to see what else is on, see that a couple of well known stars are being interviewed, and seeing the interview be pre-empted by what appears to be a news story about the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, and the George Washington Bridge's all being hit by simultaneous terrorist strikes. If your first move isn't to check CNN, or HNN to see if they are covering these stories, you might be forgiven for believing that you were seeing real events.
-Rusty
You never know...
Instead today, the public is often manipulated not by what they see/hear through the media, but what they are kept from seeing/hearing. Through censorship or spin, you are told what you need to be told so that your opinions and beliefs about what is "true" match what the teller has in mind, and you are not told things that will counter those goal beliefs.
ONe has only to compare the major U.S. news outlets with news reporting throughout the world to see examples. Not that news reporting in other countries is any less censored/spun to advance THEIR goals.....
My grandfather, for one, welcomed our new Martian overlords.
A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.-Mark Twain
Well, he is if you think about it. I wonder if at the end of the radio script was the line "By the way, listening audience, 'YHBT. HTH. HAND.'"
A fews years ago, a few friends and I decided to mark this occasion in what we thought was a pretty interesting manner. We, being native Jerseyites, took a trip out to the location where the "meteor" (sparking the invasion and spooking the local population) originally impacted - Browns Mills, NJ - and making some of our own "crop circles". We were drunk and not very skilled at this endeavor, but the end result turned out pretty nicely we thought. We kept at it while too and make them farily large and noticable. We did this in the dead of night, and whether or not the farmer in question caught the meaning of what we did, I'm fairly certain we gave him something to scratch his head over and ponder the next morning.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
You could just order the CD online at Amazon. The CD is great.
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