Orson Welles causes a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds”—a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.
Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novelWar of the Worldsfor national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.
The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”
Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.
Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.
Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”
The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth.
Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”
When news of the real-life panic leaked into the CBS studio, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was just fiction. There were rumors that the show caused suicides, but none were ever confirmed
The story that mass panic broke out because of an Orson Welles radio show became part of modern folklore. The idea that hysteria swept America on October 30, 1938, when a 62-minute radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds, remained unchallenged for nearly eight decades. Even those who had never heard Welles reading the HG Wells story about invading Martians wielding deadly heat-rays later claimed to have been terrified. Welles, who was born on May 6, 1915, used simulated on-the-scene radio reports about aliens advancing on New York City to pep up the story by Wells, who died on August 13 1946. But what is the truth about that historic Halloween eve CBS Radio show from the Mercury Theatre in New York?
DON'T PANIC . . .
According to popular myth, thousands of New Yorkers fled their homes in panic, with swarms of terrified citizens crowding the streets in different American cities to catch a glimpse of a “real space battle”. In 1954, Ben Gross, radio editor for the New York Daily News, wrote in his memoir that New York's streets were "nearly deserted" that October night in 1938. In the Orson Welles broadcast, part of the hoax involved the town of Grover’s Mill, near Princeton in New Jersey, being taken over by aliens. Welles and scriptwriter Howard E Koch (who went on to co-write the film Casablanca) skillfully ratcheted up the tension with fake radio reports from the US infantry and air force. The true extent of the panic seems to have been that a small band of Grover's Mill locals, believing the town's water tower on Grover's Mill Road had been turned into a “giant Martian war machine”, fired guns filled with buckshot in an attack on the water tower. In 1998, residents held a tongue-in-cheek "Martian Ball" to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the incident.
WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE JUMPING OFF BUILDINGS AND HAVING NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS?
In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, analysts in Princeton’s Office of Radio Research, working under the direction of Professor Hadley Cantril, sought to verify a rumour that several people had been treated for shock at St Michael’s Hospital in Newark, NJ after the programme. The rumour was found to be false. In addition, when they surveyed six New York City hospitals in December 1938, they found that “none of them had any record of any cases brought in specifically on account of the broadcast”. A Washington Post claim that a man died of a heart attack brought on by listening to the programme was never verified. Police records for New Jersey did show an increase in calls on the night of the show. However, in the preface to his textbook Introduction to Collective Behaviour, academic David Miller points out that: "Some people called to find out where they could go to donate blood. Some callers were simply angry that such a realistic show was allowed on the air, while others called CBS to congratulate Mercury Theatre for the exciting Halloween programme".
AND IN FACT NOT MANY PEOPLE HEARD THE SHOW . . .
On the evening of October 30, 1938, most people tuning into radio were in fact listening to the highly popular Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy variety show hosted by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergin, which was airing at the same time as War of the Worlds on competing radio station, NBC. The radio ratings survey firm CE Hopper Company were, coincidentally, conducting a telephone poll that night of approximately five thousand households. They asked: "To what programme are you listening?” Only two per cent of people said they were listening to The War of the Worlds. In addition, several key CBS affiliate radio stations (including Boston’s WEEI) decided to carry local commercial shows rather than Welles's programme, further shrinking its audience. Frank Stanton, later president of CBS, said that CBS were never censored for The War of the Worlds, admitting: "In the first place, most people didn't hear the show."
AND THE SHOW HAD CARRIED A WARNING THAT IT WAS MADE UP . . .
Welles, who went on to have such a glittering career as a film director (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello) and actor (The Third Man, Compulsion) knew what he was doing with such artful radio mischief-making. He played recordings of Herbert Morrison's radio reports of the Hindenburg disaster for actor Frank Readick and the rest of the cast, to demonstrate the mood he wanted. He said: "We wanted people to understand that they shouldn’t take any opinion predigested, and they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through the tap whether it was radio or not. But as I say it was only a partial experiment, we had no idea the extent of the thing." To mitigate any possible fallout from the hoax, CBS made him carry warnings that it was a fictional show at the start of the show and again at 40 and 55 minutes into the broadcast.
ANY YET THE MYTH OF MASS PANIC TOOK HOLD?
Research published six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion was skewed. They later admitted that figures of one million people listening to the programme were wildly inaccurate. In addition, where people surveyed had said they were “frightened”, “disturbed”, or “excited” by show, these terms were conflated into the description that they had felt “panicked” by The War of the Worlds. Such was the initial publicity that Adolf Hitler even got in on the act, citing the supposed panic as "evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy".
War of the Worlds sequel coming for HG Wells anniversary in 2016
MAINLY BECAUSE IT WAS FUELLED BY NEWSPAPER COVERAGE
Newspaper headlines about the event were lurid. 'Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact' was the front page headline on The New York Times. 'Radio Fake Scares Nation', said the Chicago Herald and Examiner. 'US TerrorisedBy Radio's Men From Mars' said the San Francisco Chronicle. There were also front page stories in the The Boston Daily Globe and The Detroit News. One repeated claim was that within a month, 12,500 articles had been published throughout the world on the alien mass panic. Yet in his comprehensive analysis of contemporaneous reporting in a book called Getting it Wrong, American University professor W Joseph Campbell found that almost all newspapers swiftly dropped the story. “Coverage of the broadcast faded quickly from the front pages, in most cases after just a day or two," he wrote.
WHICH GAVE NEWSPAPERS THE CHANCE TO ATTACK RADIO
The newspapers had a clear agenda. An editorial in The New York Times, headlined In the Terror by Radio, was used to censure the relatively new medium of radio, which was becoming a serious competitor in providing news and advertising. "Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities. It has not mastered itself or the material it uses,” said the editorial leader comment on November 1 1938.In an excellent piece in Slate magazine in 2013, Jefferson Pooley (associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College) and Michael J Socolow (associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine) looked at the continuing popularity of the myth of mass panic and they took to task NPR's Radiolabprogramme about the incident and the Radiolab assertion that “The United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we’ve never seen before.” Pooley and Socolow wrote: "How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’s programme, perhaps to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalised the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted."