Breathe
By Edmée Pardo
The British writer Herbert George Wells, four times nominated for the Nobel Prize, is known as the father of science fiction and was the author of, among many other works, The War of Two Worlds (1898). 40 years after the publication of the novel, the then actor and future film director Orson Welles (I love the similarity in their surnames), read a free adaptation of the novel on Halloween night in 1938. The adjustments to the text included a change of location and time, what in the original narration happened in Victorian England, in the radio staging happened in New Jersey, in the current year, at the right time of the broadcast. In a format that simulated the communication of breaking news, it was reported the explosion of the planet Mars from which meteorites were detached that turned out to be spaceships in which strange and drooling beings were traveling, ready to overthrow the American forces with heat rays and poisonous gases. It is said that hundreds of radio listeners, who arrived late to the transmission where it was made clear that a work of fiction would be read, believed that it was a real event and the collective panic caused the New Jersey and New York police station, where the reports had supposedly been generated, to be saturated with people asking to be defended from the alleged attackers. After the fact, a study conducted by Handley Cantril of Princeton University found that more than one million people were affected by the broadcast and concluded on the enormous power of the media. Although many years later Robert Bartholomew of James Cook University has disproved such an impact, reducing it to less than a hundred people and concluding that the recreation of the events was much more shocking than the events themselves. What we would call today in everyday sociology, it was a fake news that generated an urban legend.
