It was Halloween night 1938 when Orson Welles infamous radio play The War of the Worlds was broadcast to millions of Americans. Some listeners didn’t realize it was fictional, and thought that aliens were actually invading Earth, despite several notices that the broadcast was not real.
The radio drama was based on the 1898 novel The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The program was skinned as a breaking news broadcast, a very convincing one. The production was the 17th episode of a CBS radio series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The beginning of the program was formatted as a series of breaking news reports that interrupted music and other “regularly scheduled programming.” The War of the Worlds tells the story of an alien invasion that starts in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and myself made the eleven miles from Princeton in ten minutes. Well, I . . . I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes.”
“…The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the . . . object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of . . . what would you say, Professor Pierson?”
And finally, the creatures emerge from the craft.
“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighed down by . . . possibly gravity or something. The thing’s raising up. The crowd falls back now. They’ve seen plenty. This is the most extraordinary experience. I can’t find words . . . I’ll pull this microphone with me as I talk. I’ll have to stop the description until I can take a new position. Hold on, will you please, I’ll be right back in a minute.”
More so than the actual public panic, newspapers took a firm stance against Welles’ in the following days. Some outlets calling CBS and Orson Welles irresponsible and deceptive.
A study conducted by Radio Research Project revealed that of the scared listeners, only about a third of them realized the subject matter was extraterrestrials. The other two thirds assumed the broadcast was describing some sort of natural disaster or a German invasion. This is a very important point to pause on, because leading up to Halloween night 1938, the American public had become dependent on radio news for the first time. Not only were they able to access more real time information than ever before, everyone knew that the tides were turning towards a World War. Less than a year later, on September 1st 1939, the Nazi’s would invade Poland. And two days after that, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany.
Despite the rumored panic caused by the War of The Worlds broadcast, modern research suggests that it was mostly exaggerated by the newspapers reporting on it. The number of angry letters directed at CBS and Welles was actually quite low compared to other controversial radio broadcasts at the time.
Welles ended the broadcast by reassuring listeners that the program was indeed make-believe “If your doorbell rings and there's nobody there, that was no Martian; it's Halloween."