![]() ![]() According to the Associated Press there were over a hundred people in the building. The crowd then gathered outside the radio station throwing stones and setting fire to the building. When the station realised that chaos was breaking out, they announced the hoax on radio. Actors immitating well known authority figueres then appeared on radio confirming the crisis. The imaginary invasion was gradually to proceed from the town of Latacunga, 20 miles south of the capital Quito, where a poisonous gas cloud was reported to kill everything in its path. Panic erupted in the streets and police were dispatched to the alleged location of a martian invasion, the town of Cotocollao. Halfway into a song, the news team interupted without warning stating that an attack on Ecuador was underway. Even so, someone had planted bogus UFO reports in the newspaper El Comercio in the weeks before the broadcast.Īt 21.00 the night of February 12’th, the normal musical broadcast began. In an interview with El Dia, Alcaraz later said that he begged Paez to announce at the beginning of the broadcast that what followed was a dramatisation, but that Paez had dismissed him. Leonardo Paez, a native of Quito, was not only a journalist, but also a singer, composer, poet and producer of radio. In both those cases, it was announced ahead of schedule that the broadcast would be a fictional dramatisation. The two had become familiar with the 1938 incident in America and the 1944 incident in Chile, which both caused widespread panic, but which also exposed the power of radio. ![]() The radio broadcast was the brain child of Leonardo Paez (top photo), director of art at Radio Quito and Eduardo Alcaraz, the station’s dramatic director. On the fateful night of February 12’th, writers for Associated Press and Reuters reported back to the US and Britain: «The mob attacked and burned the building of the newspaper, El Comercio, which housed the radio station and killed fifteen persons and injured 15 others.» ![]() Not even the effect of a similar 1944 radio broadcast in Chile could compare when it came to the number of deaths and the level of devestation. It was an incident far more sinister than the panics that followed the 1938 broadcast in America when Orson Welles had first dramatised H.G. Wells and then letting it loose on an unsuspecting public. The method of their crime: creating a radio play based on H.G. In the second week of February 1949, 3 men were charged with provoking the death of over ten people in Ecuador. ![]()
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