War of the Worlds

During the time when Orson Wells War of The World was first broadcast people were used to hearing news broadcasts break into their radio programs. There was fear of war breaking out in Europe and people were on edge, worried about what would happen. Wells took advantage of that fear by making his program sound like it was another news alert breaking into the regular scheduled programming. This made it seem like real news to a lot of people. There was an introduction of the show before it started but many people missed hearing that and it wasn't repeated during the broadcast. Many people panicked, thinking it would be the end of society. I think it wouldn't be quite as easy to make the same kind of broadcast believable today because there are too many avenues of information to consult before making a judgment. But, people can easily be influenced to believe things that aren't true and to spread rumors. It would be fairly easy to put something out on the internet and have it spread around the world as long as it wasn't something so blatantly false that it would become obvious right away and be disproved before it gained momentum. I couldn't find any information on something that happened when I was a kid but I can relate the incident from personal experience. My older teenage sister was seriously upset and worried when she heard the rumor that was circulating in the northeastern US in the early 70's. The story that was going around was that aliens had communicated by radio transmissions that they were on the way to earth to collect teenage girls to take back to their home planet to help repopulate their dwindling population. It was just believable enough that a lot of teenage girls were worried. Of course, parents laughed it off. I wasn't old enough to qualify as a teen, but I remember that upset me since I thought it'd be a great adventure to go off in an alien spaceship and live on a different planet. I'd have probably changed my mind if it'd actually happened, but I was pretty amused about the whole thing and kind of disappointed when they didn't show up to claim my sister. I can't remember what day it was supposed to be but there was a specific date that it was supposed to happen and once that date passed all the teenage girls stopped worrying. That kind of rumor could easily be spread around on the internet now and spread all over the world but maybe teenagers are a bit more sophisticated these days and wouldn't buy it.