Otherworldly Sunday readings

Alien Invaders!

Orson Wells’ 1939 “War of the Worlds” was probably the best hoax in the radio age. Too good to pull off once, the joke was tried again in Santiago, Chile in 1944, and in Quito, Ecuador in 1949… which led to serious consequences (Erwin C., The Latin Americanist):

…[O]n February 12, 1949 listeners to Radio Quito were interrupted from an evening of music and told that Martians landed 20 miles outside the capital city.[Radio Quito Drama Director Leonardo] Páez acted as a reporter and claimed that the aliens overran a military base and were on their way to Quito.

Predictably, word of mouth spread over the spoof alien landing and panicked citizens took to the streets. Quito’s mayor was fooled and called on people to “defend our city” while priests tended to flocks of repentant parishioners. Some didn’t believe that aliens had landed but instead blamed neighboring Peru …

Eventually, Radio Quito staff were informed of the panic and publicly admitted to the hoax. Mass fear quickly changed into collective anger as all hell would break loose:

El Comercio, the largest and most respected paper in the country, owned radio Quito and the station was housed in the same building as the newspaper. It was to this location that the mob advanced, and in what might have seemed an ironic act by the crowd, set fire to copies of the El Comercio newspaper and hurled these (and other objects) at the building. The main entrance was blocked and a fire swiftly broke out…

Francisco Franco meets the Aztec Mummy

From Inexplicata, the Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy:

Generalissimo Francisco Franco… would issue a slight cough whenever he watched a movie – a sign of his discomfiture at what he was seeing. His iron legion of censors would then get to work on a persecution that the author describes as “one of the most ruthless, extensive and arbitrary” of the 20th century…

As could only be expected, the marauding zombies, mummies, wolf people and vampires that plagued B-movies for generations were not only enemies of the state, but also of the Church…

The censors sharpened their scissors, however, not for an American B-movie but a Mexican production straight out of Churubusco Studios: Director Rafael Portillo’s La Momia Azteca (The Aztec Mummy, 1957). This time they did not bother attacking the subject of the film, but the intelligence of an entire nation, rejecting it as “a mixture of confusion and errors for the uncultured masses, which represent the majority” and “suitable to the cultural childishness of the Mexican people,” chock-a-block with reincarnation, transmigration and other “shenanigans”…

And still dead…

Chris Hawley (USA Today) in Aguascalientes:

“Mexicans have death imprinted all over their art and culture,” museum director Jose Antonio Padilla said. “So why not a museum about it?”

The museum came about because a Mexican art collector had a lot of skeletons in his closet: dozens of tiny calaveritas, or skeleton dioramas, along with hundreds of other death-related artworks he had acquired over 50 years.

The owner, Octavio Bajonero Gil, was looking for a museum to take his collection. Meanwhile, the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, a state college, was looking to found an art museum and wanted something different, Padilla said.

The museum, with Bajonero’s donation as its core collection, opened in 2007 in two buildings owned by the university in downtown Aguascalientes. Admission is 20 pesos, about $1.53.

…

About one-third of the museum’s 70,000 annual visitors are from other countries, mainly the United States.

“It’s definitely kind of bizarre,” said Spencer Garcia-Stinson, 24, of Gilford, N.H. “In the United States, we don’t like to talk about death, but here they’re dealing with it so openly. … It’s amazing.”