Media Panic

On October 30, 1938 the American radio drama anthology series aired an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds directed and narrated by Orson Welles.  The first two thirds of the broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins with no commercial breaks.  With the tension and anxiety leading to World War II, many listeners thought that an actual Martian invasion was in progress.  This created quite a panic.

I’ve found some similarities between this radio broadcast and the video below.  In the UK there are Closed-Circuit Television cameras all over the city.  In the same spirit of Orson Welles, James Sanger decided to create a type of Alien invasion that when seen through the media would appear real and thus require further investigation.

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