7. War of the Worlds 1938
On Halloween in 1938, legendary director Orson Welles directed a radio play inspired by H. G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds,’ the iconic story of violent alien invasion. The night it aired over the CBS radio network is one that many people never forgot. It was a brilliant performance – so brilliant, in fact, that people took to the streets, fleeing their homes in fear of their lives. The air of tension created by the second world war gets only some of the credit for the uproar, in which almost two million people were convinced that ‘War of the Worlds’ was a news broadcast, rather than a work of fiction.
Although this example of human gullibility almost doesn’t count as a hoax – after all, the station did warn listeners repeatedly that the story was fictional, it’s just that people missed it while channel-surfing – the sheer immense number of fooled and panicked people makes its inclusion onto this list.
