October 30: On This Day in World History
Despite several reminders that the gripping radio dramatisation of HG Wells’s ‘The War of the Worlds’, presented by Orson Welles for CBS, was pure fantasy, and that New Jersey was not really being invaded by giant green men from Mars, thousands of New Yorkers panicked.
1938 – Orson Welles causes a panic in America
‘The War of the Worlds’ is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of HG Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898).
It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for causing panic among its listening audience, but the scale of that panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.
The one-hour program began with the theme music for the Mercury Theatre on the Air and an announcement that the evening’s show was an adaption of The War of the Worlds. This was followed by a prologue read by Orson Welles which was closely based on the opening of HG Wells’s novel.
The next half hour of the broadcast was presented as typical evening of radio programming which was interrupted by a series of news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of dance music and describe a series of odd explosions observed on Mars. This is followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an unusual object falling on a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.
Another brief musical interlude is interrupted by a live report from Grover’s Mill, where police officials and a crowd of curious onlookers have surrounded the strange cylindrical object. The situation quickly escalates when Martians emerge from the cylinder and attack using a heat-ray, abruptly cutting off the panicked reporter at the scene. This is followed by a rapid series of increasingly alarming news updates detailing a devastating alien invasion taking place around the world. This portion of the show climaxes with another live report describing giant Martian war machines releasing clouds of poisonous smoke in New York City, after which the program took its first break.
During the second half of the show, the program shifts to a more conventional radio drama format and follows a survivor dealing with the aftermath of the invasion and Martian occupation of Earth. As in the original novel, the story ends with the discovery that the Martians have been defeated by microbes rather than by humans.
The illusion of realism was furthered because the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show without commercial interruptions, and the first break in the program came almost 30 minutes after the introduction.
Popular legend holds that some of the radio audience may have been listening to The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen and tuned in to ‘The War of the Worlds’ during a musical interlude, thereby missing the clear introduction that the show was a drama; however, contemporary research suggests that this happened only in rare instances.
In the days after the adaptation, widespread outrage was expressed in the media. The program’s news-bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the broadcasters and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. Nevertheless, the episode secured Welles’s fame as a dramatist.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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