Posted August 10, 2017 at 09:37 AM | Updated August 10, 2017 at 09:37 AM
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By Tom Deignan | Star-Ledger guest columnist
Even Orson Welles would probably be astonished by the bizarre state of the country these days.
Fake news in the Radio Age
It was Welles who pulled off the infamous "The War of the Worlds" hoax 79 year ago, frightening radio listeners into believing space aliens had launched a hostile takeover from, of all places, Grover's Mill in New Jersey.
This past Friday, a new indie movie "Brave New Jersey" opened in theaters and online, looking back at the improbable events that unfolded on that October night in 1938.
Welles — just 23 years old, and still a few years from directing his masterpiece, "Citizen Kane" — produced a startlingly realistic radio broadcast of the classic H.G. Wells novel. Legend has it that millions of Americans fell into a state of mass panic as they listened to aliens unleashing deadly lasers and poison gas on unsuspecting Jersey crowds.
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