We're so excited to be welcoming Rhum + Clay's The War of the Worlds to the Everyman from Tue 19 Oct to Sat 23 Oct 2021. The show explores the events of the 'original fake news story', where a radio play from 1938 incited panic among the American public, leading them to believe there had been a Martian invasion in New Jersey. We thought what better time to share some other instances of people being too quick to believe what they read (or hear!) ...

1) On 21 August 1835, The New York Sun printed a series of articles with ground breaking news. Life had been discovered on the moon. The pioneer responsible for the discovery was (purportedly) Sir John Herschel, a well known astronomer. We were no longer alone in the universe. Bipedal beavers strolled the craters on two legs. Unicorns grazed in the forests. Most excitingly, leathery winged humanoid creatures, with their own temples seemed to promise intelligent life. Readers must have wondered how it took us so long to stumble over these exciting features of the moon. The hoax caused a huge upsurge in readers of the paper, which was of course the goal all along. Herschel found the whole thing amusing until he grew tired of fielding questions about the unicorns and beaches of the moon. 

2) 1957, April. A cool day in Ticino, Switzerland. The family gathers to harvest the trees in their garden. The crop? Spaghetti. Panorama broadcast the hoax on April Fool’s Day, and viewers were thrilled to realise that they could grow spaghetti in their own backyards. The report used the voice over of respected broadcaster Richard Dimbledy to sell the story. Eight million people watched it, hundreds phoned in. The BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

3) Dick Smith, adventurer, millionaire, showman had long held a dream to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to Australia. So the Sydneysiders were not entirely surprised on April 1st, 1978 day to see a barge towing an iceberg into harbour. Dick Smith planned to moor the Dickenberg 1 (no really) by the opera house and sell off ice for 10 cents per cube. Not entirely surprisingly, he called the ice cubes 'Dicksicles.' Hundreds of phone calls poured into radio stations and people gathered by the shore to see the phenomenon. Then it rained. The shaving foam fell away, revealing the plastic sheeting beneath. The proud ruin of the Dickenberg 1 floated past the opera house. Dick Smith later said that he had intended to tow in a real iceberg, but on realising how unrealistic that would be, enjoyed the idea of the prank too much not to do it.

4) It’s the smallest species of penguin, and yet it is also the angriest. The Adelie penguin has been known to fight seabirds, seals and even humans. Already rather frightening, considering that the Adelie penguin can swim at speeds of 9.3 mph when it wants to, few would have been happy to imagine the bird becoming airborne. In 2008, the BBC’s Miracles of Evolution trailer showed Adelie penguins, sick of the icy conditions of Antarctica, taking flight and nesting down in the jungles of South America. While it was of course a hoax, the trailer is incredibly convincing. Watch the skies...

5) Maths can be baffling, none of it more so than Pi, a number which continues past its decimal point in a way that some find almost aggressive. So there were ragged cheers from the classroom when The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter declared that Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of pi to 3. It has the elemental simplicity of tidying up a number that had lost all control of itself, like a mathematical haircut. The article found its way onto the internet and before you could say 3.14159, the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation.