Aliens have landed
April 6th 2010 03:58
It is April 1 and people awake to the news, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, that aliens have invaded their city. The aliens are three metres tall. They came in flying saucers which lit up the whole town, interrupted communications and sent fearful residents streaming into the streets.
The mayor of the city says, “Don’t panic”, but the people do panic, many gathering their children and a few belongings and preparing to flee.
The mayor notified security authorities, who started combing the area looking for the aliens.
Emergency services call emergency meetings to plan an emergency evacuation.
Now we all know what happened next, don’t we? This is America, 1938, isn’t it? The voice on the radio was that of Orson Welles reading a Chapter from The War of the Worlds. Wasn’t it?
No, it wasn’t.
The year was 2010, the place was Jafr, a desert town in Jordan about 300km from the capital, Amman, and the date was April 1.
The story in the newspaper was a fairly elaborate April Fool’s Day joke which got out of hand. The people really were panicking; frightened parents kept their children home from school; the emergency services really were planning to evacuate the 13,000 residents of the town.
The main reason the story was so widely believed is that April Fool’s Day is not a big thing in Jordan. Whereas newspapers and other media in the west are forever coming up with new ways to fool us on April 1, Jordanian newspapers have no history of doing so.
And after the mess in Jafr, they are not likely to start.
bbc.co.uk
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