On October 30, 1938, 23-year-old Orson Welles and his radio program, Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast “War of the Worlds.” Their fictional radio news bulletins about a Martian invasion panicked many and made Welles famous.
(Click here to watch the entire PBS American Experience documentary about the “War of the Worlds” broadcast.)
“It was the day before Halloween, October 30, 1938. Henry Brylawski was on his way to pick up his girlfriend at her Adams Morgan apartment in Washington, D.C.
As he turned on his car radio, the 25-year-old law student heard some startling news. A huge meteorite had smashed into a New Jersey farm. New York was under attack by Martians.
‘I knew it was a hoax,’ said Brylawski, now 92.
Others were not so sure. When he reached the apartment, Brylawski found his girlfriend’s sister, who was living there, ‘quaking in her boots,’ as he puts it. ‘She thought the news was real,’ he said.
It was not. What radio listeners heard that night was an adaptation, by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater group, of a science fiction novel written 40 years earlier: The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.
However, the radio play, narrated by Orson Welles, had been written and performed to sound like a real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars.”
— “‘War of the Worlds’: Behind the 1938 Radio Show Panic”
National Geographic News, June 17, 2005
The day after the program reporters interviewed Orson Welles about his radio broadcast.
Many Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper readers lived near the radio drama’s Martian landing spot at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Here is an excerpt from the Inquirer’s report:
“Terror struck at the hearts of hundreds of thousands of persons in the length and breadth of the United States last night as crisp words of what they believed to be a news broadcast leaped from their radio sets — telling of catastrophe from the skies visited on this country.
Out of the heavens, they learned, objects at first believed to be meteors crashed down near Trenton, killing many.
Then out of the meteors came monsters, spreading destruction with torch and poison gas. It was all just a radio dramatization, but the result, in all actuality, was nationwide hysteria.
….In reality there was no danger. The broadcast was merely a Halloween program in which Orson Welles, actor-director of the Mercury Theater on the Air, related, as though he were one of the few human survivors of the catastrophe, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.”
And here is what you would have heard the evening of October 30, 1938. It took the Martians about 57 minutes to invade Earth.
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