Jordanian Mayor Angry Over "Alien Invasion" Prank 217
krou writes "Jordanian mayor Mohammed Mleihan has taken a dim view of local newspaper Al-Ghad's April Fools prank, which saw a front page story claiming that 'flying saucers flown by 3m (10ft) creatures had landed in the desert town of Jafr.' The paper claimed that communication networks had gone down, and people were fleeing the area. The mayor called the local security authorities, who combed the area, but they were unable to find any evidence of the aliens. Mr Mleihan is now considering suing because of the distress it caused to residents: 'Students didn't go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town's 13,000 residents. People were scared that aliens would attack them.'" I guess they've never heard of Orson Welles in Jordan.
Best prank ever (Score:3, Interesting)
This has to go down as one of the best ever. If they evacuated it would've been insane. This teaches you to be skeptical of "truths" handed to you on a platter by the media.
I tell you what though - they'd never try this in Saudi Arabia. They'd end up executed for sorcery.
Re:Let's remember : The Orson Wells story is a hoa (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite. Up until last year, my parents had a record (33) of the entire broadcast. There were only three times the announcement was made that this was a dramatisation(sic) and not real. Had someone come in at any other time, they would not have known it wasn't real.
I should have saved the record from the yard sale, but I debated what I would do with it in the ensuing decades other than holding on to it as a curious memento of the broadcast.
Re:Is common to have these kinds of reactions (Score:1, Interesting)
What? You have to ask if that's real?
No! Of course it isn't real.
But there's no shortage of idiots who believe it to be true anyway.
Re:Two important revelations ... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I don't know why I take the time to reply to obvious, anonymous trolls
Re:Not all that fair. (Score:3, Interesting)
The main issue for me is that it was on the front page of a newspaper, i.e. a publication that takes quite some time to go from "receiving a story" to "being in print and distributed". That's a long time for such an earth-shattering event to be going on without any other reports.
Then when they read the article, instead of calling the paper and asking where they got their information from (and why the fuck didn't they immediately report it to authorities?!) and to see if they had any additional information that might be helpful, they decided to call in security forces to search the area.
Of course, we don't know all the details. Maybe they did call the paper and they continued/escalated the prank there; in which case they certainly deserve to be in a lot of trouble. Maybe communications with the town in question did actually happen to be down so they couldn't speak to anyone in the town to see if people had started fleeing before the paper was out on the stands. Nothing in the article suggests that either of these is the case, but then it doesn't explicitly state they weren't, either.
And finally, I suppose calling out security forces to sweep an area isn't really that big a deal. If it turns out to be just a hoax, hey, it's good practice for them anyway.