The War of the Worlds

war of worlds cover
On October 30, 1938 CBS Radio was broadcasting the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra live from the Meridian Room at the Park Plaza in New York City. Suddenly a reporter from Intercontinental Radio News interrupted the broadcast to deliver an important announcement. Astronomers had just detected enormous blue flames shooting up from the surface of Mars.

The broadcast returned to the music of Ramon Raquello, but soon it was interrupted again with more news. Now a strange meteor had fallen to earth, impacting violently on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. A reporter was soon on hand to describe the eerie scene around the meteor crater, and the broadcast now switched over to continuous coverage of this rapidly unfolding event.

To the dismay of the terrified audience listening to the broadcast, the events around the Grovers Mill meteor crater rapidly escalated from the merely strange to the positively ominous. It turned out that the meteor was not a meteor. It was, in fact, some kind of spaceship from which a tentacled creature, presumably a Martian, soon emerged and blasted the on-lookers with a deadly heat-ray.

The Martian sunk back into the crater, but reemerged soon afterwards housed inside a gigantic, three-legged death machine. The Martian quickly disposed of 7,000 armed soldiers surrounding the crater, and then it began marching across the landscape, soon joined by other Martians. The Martian invaders blasted people and communication lines with their heat-rays, while simultaneously releasing a toxic black gas against which gas masks proved useless.

At this point, many listeners began to panic. Some people loaded blankets and supplies in their cars and prepared to flee the Martian invaders. One mother in New England reportedly packed her babies and lots of bread into a car, figuring that "if everything is burning, you can't eat money, but you can eat bread." Other people hid in cellars, hoping that the poisonous gas would blow over them. One college senior drove forty-five miles at breakneck speed in a valiant attempt to save his girlfriend.

Orson Welles
Orson Welles in the CBS studios during the broadcast
By the time the night was over, however, almost all of these people had learned that the news broadcast was entirely fictitious. It was simply the weekly broadcast of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, and that week, in honor of Halloween, they had decided to stage a highly dramatized and updated version of H.G. Wells' story, The War of the Worlds.

The broadcast reached a huge audience, demonstrating the enormous reach of radio at that time. Approximately six million people heard it, and out of this number it was long thought that almost one million people panicked. More recent research, however, suggests that the number of people who panicked is probably far lower. In fact, the idea that the broadcast touched off a huge national scare is probably more of a hoax than the broadcast itself, which was never intended to fool anyone (At four separate points during the broadcast, including the beginning, it was clearly stated that what people were hearing was a play). The idea that hundreds of thousands of people panicked arose because the media eagerly pumped up the story in the weeks following the event.

war of the worlds farmer
In this famous photo Bill Dock, a New Jersey farmer, prepares to fight off the invading Martians. The image was actually posed by a Life Magazine photographer a few days after the 'panic broadcast'.

Nevertheless, some people undeniably did panic. Therefore, what might have caused them to believe that the broadcast was real?

First of all, many people tuned in late and missed the announcement made at the beginning of the broadcast that what followed was merely a staged dramatization. By the time a second disclaimer was made, the most alarming portion of the play had already been broadcast.

Second of all, the global situation in 1938 provided a context which allowed many to believe that such a series of events could be unfolding. Tensions in Europe were rising, and it had been very common during the previous three months for radio broadcasts to be interrupted by reporters delivering ominous news from Europe. Many who panicked later said that they had assumed that the Martian invasion was actually a cleverly disguised German attack.

Interestingly, most of those who panicked were middle-aged or older. Younger listeners tended not to panic because they recognized Orson Welles's voice as the voice of the hero in the popular radio series, The Shadow.

Strangely enough, this was not the last time that a dramatized broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds would be mistaken for an account of real events. In November 1944 the play caused a similar panic when it was broadcast in Santiago, Chile, and in February 1949 it once again stirred up unrest when it was performed by a radio station in Quito, Ecuador. The situation in Ecuador unfortunately turned ugly when an angry mob surrounded the radio station and burned it to the ground.

The original 1938 Mercury Theatre broadcast of the War of the Worlds has been archived and can now be heard on the internet at EarthStation1.com.

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1914-1949

Text copyright © 2002 Alex Boese