Poe & Pop Culture, Week Five

On October 15, 2009, a six year old boy allegedly was aboard a helium filled gas weather balloon that had blown away from its moorings, floating away into the atmosphere. The media went crazy, reporting the boy and balloon were traveling at 7000 feet, going a distance beyond fifty miles from where it started in Fort Collins, CO. This was breaking news, gaining worldwide attention as viewers watched the balloon fly across the Colorado landscape, hoping the boy would land safely. #balloonboy was trending on Twitter, all eyes were on the sky. The balloon finally landed some twelve miles from Denver Airport where it was discovered there was no boy on board. Frantic, the manpower and media exposure reached epic proportions in the search for the missing boy. Falcon Heene was found hiding in his parents' attic where he told officials he was "hiding for the show." The Heene parents were taken to court, found guilty of this hoax and tying up resources, were fined, and spent some time in jail.

This is far from the first time a hoax of this magnitude hit the air waves/television broadcast/print. In August 2015, The Guardian produced a Top Ten List of the greatest literary hoaxes. "Literary hoaxes run the gamut of grey areas from misread satires, outright frauds, misappropriated material, and works yet more mysterious..." Poe's The Balloon-Hoax (1844) was listed at number three with this write up: "Poe’s 1844 article for The New York Sun is exemplary of the recursive and proliferating nature of hoaxes. This story, claiming to detail the first trans-Atlantic balloon-crossing accomplished by the explorer Monck Mason (based on the actual balloonist Thomas Monck Mason), may have been conceived in reaction to the Great Moon Hoax published in the same paper nine years earlier, claiming that the astronomer John Herschel had observed winged humanoids on the moon with a radically new and powerful telescope. Poe felt that this hoax report had plagiarised his own short story ‘The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall’. To further complicate matters of actuality, Poe’s hoax may have inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days."

Poe, himself, was quite pleased with the reaction to his piece. He used real people, realistic elements. He is said to have remarked "I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper." One of he less successful stories, he later felt The Sun profited from the writing and he was no rightly compensated.

 A few other frauds/hoaxes from the list by The Guardian are:

• Jonathan Swift- Predictions for the Year 1708 (1708): Writing as the fictional astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, Jonathan Swift forecast the death of the astrologer John Partridge from a “raging fever” in a pamphlet entitled Predictions for the Year 1708. Partridge responded with a denial but on the day predicted, 29 March, ‘Bickerstaff’ followed up his speculation with a black-framed poetic Elegy and a pamphlet confirming Partridge’s death, The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff’s Predictions, apparently authored by an anonymous employee of ‘the Revenue’. Despite repeated denials, Partridge was reportedly plagued by those who insisted he had died.
• Theodore Sturgeon- I, Libertine (1956): In the 1950s US bestseller lists were compiled by newspaper subeditors who would phone around bookstores to ask what was selling. The late night talk radio host Jean Shepherd, in collusion with his listeners, concocted a fake book, I Libertine, a raunchy historical romance by the similarly fictitious author Frederick R. Ewing, a retired Royal Naval officer resident in Rhodesia and expert in eighteenth century erotica. Shepherd urged his listeners to request the title from as many bookshops as possible. Despite its non-existence it was banned in Boston before the publisher Ballantine commissioned Kurt Vonnegut’s friend (and character in Slaughterhouse 5) Theodore Sturgeon to make the hoax text a reality.
• Clifford Irving- Autobiography of Howard Hughes (1971): In 1970 the novelist Clifford Irving and his friend Richard Suskind cooked up a plan to write the ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes, who had completely withdrawn from public life since the late 1950s. Irving had form in these grey areas, having written a biography of the Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory entitled Fake! (1969). Forging documents bearing Hughes’s signature, Irving and Suskind secured large advances before being rumbled post-publication when the reclusive Hughes gave a press conference. Irving served 17 months for fraud. His story was featured in Orson Welles’s final film F for Fake! and he gave his own version of events in his book The Hoax (1981), made into a film starring Richard Gere.
• Benjamin Wilkomirski- Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948 (1996): A case study in trauma narratives, Fragments told the story of Wilkormiski’s childhood experience of the Holocaust as a prisoner in the concentration camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz. Sent to interview Wilkomirski for a Swiss magazine, the journalist Daniel Granzfried, whose own father had been interned at Auschwitz, had doubts about Wilkormiski’s story. Granzfried discovered that the author had in fact been only four at the close of the war and living in comfort with adoptive parents in Zurich. Even as his publisher pulped his book and sympathised with his ‘damaged’ state of mind, Wilkormiski refused to accept the evidence of his untruths.

As we've moved into the section of Poe concerning Science Fiction, it's only right that we include one the better known hoax stories (unintentional, though it was) of the adapted to radio story of War of the Worlds written by H.G. Wells in 1898. Airing on Halloween night, October 30, 1938, the hour long drama, directed and produced by up and coming Orson Welles at Mercury Theater, with a script by Howard E. Koch, unexpectedly became an event no one would forget. Presented as a series of news bulletins that seemingly interrupted the regular programming, the first half of the drama went on for thirty minutes without any breaks. For the many people who missed the first few minutes, they were unaware that this was not actually happening. The "breaking news" of the drama reported explosions on Mars and eventually a Martian invasion of New Jersey. The panic and devastation of "first hand accounts" built up the terror in the listeners, as the alien invasion quickly moved west, encompassing the whole of the United States. By the time the first half concluded, the damage had been done. 

To listen to the broadcast, click here. 

Those who tuned in and were convinced Martians had invaded the United States hit the telephones, desperate for information from the telephone operators (before any type of emergency services, all emergency calls were fielded through an operator). AT&T interviewed several operators in the 1980's about their experiences that night in October 1938. It can be seen here. 

The next day, Orson Welles was called to a press conference by CBS, and took questions from the press:

• Question: Were you aware of the terror such a broadcast would stir up? Answer: Definitely not. The technique I used was not original with me. It was not even new. I anticipated nothing unusual.                                
• Question: Should you have toned down the language of drama? Answer: No, you don't play murder in soft words.

Orson Welles did make a statement and apologized to the public. 

The fallout is disputed to this day in regards to how many listeners it actually caused to panic. It's one of those things lost to time and conjecture. It attained enough hype, however, to have Hitler comment on it a few days later on November 8, 1938, in Munich. He saw the effect on the American people as "the corrupt condition and decadent state of affairs in democracy."

H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, did meet Orson Wells once on October 28, 1940. To hear the interview and their comments about their mutual drama, click here. 

We continue Poe and Science Fiction next week with The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall. This story is not in the book we are using, but as it's public domain, can be read at that link.