The news flash came right after the evening news on Belgian state television Wednesday: the Flemish Parliament had voted for Flanders' secession from the Kingdom of Belgium. Over the next hour and a half, the trusted TV anchors fielded a spectacular special report: They cut to live footage from the Royal Palace, where an emotional crowd had gathered to protest for the survival of their country. A reporter in Kinshasa, capital of the Congo, commented on rumors that King Albert II had fled to the former Belgian colony. A crowd waved Flemish flags behind the live reporter at the Flemish Parliament. The ring road around the capital, Brussels, was blocked, NATO headquarters on red alert, and police controls thrown up along the border between Flemish-speaking and French-speaking regions. A parade of prominent politicians and public figures opined on the grave development, and there was even a report of julbilation among Catalans keen to separate their region from Spain.
And it was all fiction, the culmination of two years of secret planning by television journalist Philippe Dutilleul and his colleagues at the French-language public broadcaster. The ensuing panic didn't quite approach that created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds — acknowledged as the model for the Belgian prank — but more than 30,000 phone calls flooded the broadcaster's switchboard, and the channel's website crashed as concerned viewers sought confirmation. The reason for the hubbub, of course, is that although the events described in the fake "news" broadcast had more than a dash of melodrama, they were eminently believable.
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