[Aztlan] Flashback to "War of the Worlds" Panic

[Elaine Schele]

MSNBC

2012: THE END IS NOT NEAR
Posted: Thursday, October 01, 2009 7:03 PM by Alan Boyle

Marketers are escalating the media blitz for the "2012" disaster movie
to Defcon 2 tonight with a TV teaser that touts the coming apocalypse.
If you watch the two-minute scene, here are two words of advice:

DON'T PANIC!

The teaser is due to run on major broadcast networks as well as scads
of cable channels and local stations sometime between 10:50 and 11
p.m. ET/PT, and it's sure to get viewers whipped up in advance of the
movie itself, which premieres on Nov. 13.

The flick's premise is that there really is something behind the
speculation about an apocalypse supposedly due in 2012. An earlier
viral marketing campaign highlighted the fictional "Institute for
Human Continuity," which was said to be setting up a lottery for spots
in an underground refuge from doomsday.

Unfortunately, not everyone immediately saw through the IHC's TV
commercials (or the Facebook group or the Twitter postings or the
YouTube channel...).

"The ads seemed very real," Cosmic Log correspondent Darrell
Messbarger wrote in an e-mail, "and some of my daughter's friends were
in a dead panic over them. Even their parents."

Messbarger figured out that the ads were a hoax, but that didn't make
him feel any better about it.

"There has been too little indication that this is just movie
advertising," he wrote. "We have many survivalist businesses that are
using it as a cue to keep ramping up the anxiety of their terrified
patrons. People are actually signing up for the 'lottery,' many of
whom, I am sure, believe this is real. I personally don't know whether
it is or isn't, or to what extreme this is actually being taken. If it
is just advertising, it has produced a lot of fear among many people,
reminiscent of the 'War of the Worlds' radio program of the '30s."

The worries about 2012 go back way before "2012" was even a gleam in a
Hollywood producer's eye. The cornerstone of the apocalyptic claims is
the idea that the ancient Maya devised a 5,126-year calendar system
that ran into a blank on Dec. 21, 2012. For the doomsayers, that
implied that the end date would mark the end of the world as we know
it.

For the rest of the story:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/01/2086189.aspx
-- 
Elaine Schele
PhD Candidate
University of Texas
http://gispalenque.blogspot.com/
http://volunteermayameetings.blogspot.com/