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Jordanian Mayor Angry Over "Alien Invasion" Prank
krou writes "Jordanian mayor Mohammed Mleihan has taken a dim view of local newspaper Al-Ghad's April Fools prank, which saw a front page story claiming that 'flying saucers flown by 3m (10ft) creatures had landed in the desert town of Jafr.' The paper claimed that communication networks had gone down, and people were fleeing the area. The mayor called the local security authorities, who combed the area, but they were unable to find any evidence of the aliens. Mr Mleihan is now considering suing because of the distress it caused to residents: 'Students didn't go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town's 13,000 residents. People were scared that aliens would attack them.'" I guess they've never heard of Orson Welles in Jordan.
The mayor is a retard!
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
1. Jordanians (and possibly, by extension, all Arabs) have a hilarious sense of humor.
2. Politicians EVERYWHERE are absolute morons
This has to go down as one of the best ever. If they evacuated it would've been insane. This teaches you to be skeptical of "truths" handed to you on a platter by the media.
I tell you what though - they'd never try this in Saudi Arabia. They'd end up executed for sorcery.
When some radio station you normally trust starts reporting a hoax it takes a while to figure out it's a hoax. It's happened several times.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/06/29
The urban legend that sprang up, about ignorant people believing that the radio broadcast of War of the worlds was real, is one of the most pervasive and believed myths in modern times.
It was fuelled by the newspapers and magazines of the era, who didn't like radio much and were keen to portray it in a bad light.
As anyone who has heard the broadcast knows, the show was frequently interrupted by voice overs telling you that you were listening to a dramatisation.
No doubt though, there will be those on slashdot who will also continue to perpetuate this legend as historical fact.
More like screaming that you see Lincoln's Ghost in a crowded theater and causing a panic because of credulousness.
Sure...
"Later studies suggested this panic was less widespread than newspapers suggested. During this period, many newspapers were concerned that radio, a new medium, would render the press obsolete. In addition, this was a time of yellow journalism, and as a result, journalists took this opportunity to demonstrate the dangers of broadcast by embellishing the story, and the panic that ensued, greatly." see Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future By Stanley J. Baran, Dennis K. Davis
Robert E. Bartholomew suggests that hundreds of thousands were frightened in some way, but notes that evidence of people taking action based on this fear is "scant" and "anecdotal".
See - Bartholomew, Robert E. (2001). Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. Jefferson, North Carolina: Macfarland & Company. pp. 217ff.. ISBN 0-7864-0997-5.
And for a slightly more amusing take on the myth :
http://www.cracked.com/article_18487_6-ridiculous-history-myths-you-probably-think-are-true_p2.html
That enough citations for you?
As anyone who has heard the broadcast knows, the show was frequently interrupted by voice overs telling you that you were listening to a dramatisation.
Not quite. Up until last year, my parents had a record (33) of the entire broadcast. There were only three times the announcement was made that this was a dramatisation(sic) and not real. Had someone come in at any other time, they would not have known it wasn't real.
I should have saved the record from the yard sale, but I debated what I would do with it in the ensuing decades other than holding on to it as a curious memento of the broadcast.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Well, if the US ever finds a reason to go to war with Jordan, all they need to do is to carpet bomb the place with old copies of "The Weekly World News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_World_News ."
The Jordanians will be to dazed to put up a fight.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Well, let's see...
You said that it was a "myth" that people believed the War of the Worlds broadcasts were real, and implied that nobody hearing them could possibly believe that.
Your citation only says that some reports of fear were overstated by newspapers with an agenda, and yet it acknowledges that "hundreds of thousands were frightened" (compared to a U.S. population of about 130M at the time).
Nope, not enough citation for your claim.
It also ran without any commercial breaks which also made it seem more genuine to the people who tuned in late. The exaggerated level of panic is the only thing that was an urban legend.
See - Bartholomew, Robert E. (2001). Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. Jefferson, North Carolina: Macfarland & Company. pp. 217ff.. ISBN 0-7864-0997-5.
Please post more citations on Meowing Nuns. I, like, need them for a research project or something . . .
. . . or is this just Hentai stuff, and not real nuns?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What does Citizen Kane have to do with it? Perhaps you meant H.G. Wells?
-josh
You might want to stay off the Internet every April 1. It can be a little confusing (and annoying).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Slashdot, let this be a lesson to you. If your April Fool's day jokes earn you an intervention by authorities, get children out of school for a day, and result in a possible lawsuit against your organization by an official political body, then you are doing it right.
Anything less just falls short.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I heard a Radiolab episode all about War of the Worlds, the original broadcast and repeat performances all over the world. "From Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador." This doesn't surprise me in the least, and it wouldn't be any more surprising if it happened in Kansas or California. The backlash has been worse than the threat of lawsuits--several employees of the news agency in Quito were killed when people realized they'd been tricked and stormed the news building, setting fire to it with them inside.
Welles' point, explained by him in an audio clip during the show, was to get people to realize that they can't automatically believe what they hear on the radio or any form of mass media. It's a lesson that never sank in, which is what makes it possible to continue pulling these stunts.
Your brain is not a computer.
Frenchmen are a bunch of beret wearing, pea-balled wino weenies who spit on American flags. French women are slutty goddess incarnates who seduce every man on the street.
We're a bunch of elephant sized fat asses who smash McD BigMacs into our triple chinned faces.
The main issue for me is that it was on the front page of a newspaper, i.e. a publication that takes quite some time to go from "receiving a story" to "being in print and distributed". That's a long time for such an earth-shattering event to be going on without any other reports.
Then when they read the article, instead of calling the paper and asking where they got their information from (and why the fuck didn't they immediately report it to authorities?!) and to see if they had any additional information that might be helpful, they decided to call in security forces to search the area.
Of course, we don't know all the details. Maybe they did call the paper and they continued/escalated the prank there; in which case they certainly deserve to be in a lot of trouble. Maybe communications with the town in question did actually happen to be down so they couldn't speak to anyone in the town to see if people had started fleeing before the paper was out on the stands. Nothing in the article suggests that either of these is the case, but then it doesn't explicitly state they weren't, either.
And finally, I suppose calling out security forces to sweep an area isn't really that big a deal. If it turns out to be just a hoax, hey, it's good practice for them anyway.