On 30th October in 1938 Orson Welles, in a bid to attract more listeners to his programme, broadcast a special Halloween show designed to startle. It led to hysteria.
I wonder if we are now too ‘sophisticated’ to be taken in by such a ploy. Certainly, my first thoughts on seeing the first plane crash into the World Trade Centre were that it was a hoax. I was quickly and shockingly disabused of that.
Are we now more cynical, or at least sceptical? When I am about to accept that we are, I then remember those sincere but misguided souls who declare that the world was created in six days, that dinosaurs never walked the earth, that evolution is impossible and to believe in it is sinful and wrong-minded.
