On the evening of Sunday 30 October 1938, the night before Halloween, listeners tuning across the American radio dial could stumble into what sounded like a catastrophe unfolding live. Dance music was interrupted by breathless news flashes: a strange object had crashed near Grovers Mill, New Jersey; something was emerging from it; heat rays were incinerating onlookers; Martian war machines were advancing on New York. The next morning, newspapers across the country reported that the broadcast had triggered mass panic — Americans fleeing their homes, jamming switchboards, praying in the streets. It is one of the most famous stories in broadcasting history. It is also, according to a good deal of later scholarship, mostly a myth.
The programme was an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, the CBS radio series run by a 23-year-old wunderkind named Orson Welles. The script, adapted by Howard Koch from H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, made one brilliant structural change: instead of narrating the Martian invasion as a story, it staged the first half as a sequence of realistic news bulletins breaking into an ordinary evening of music. A fake reporter, stationed at the Grovers Mill crash site, described the tentacled invader in a rising panic before his broadcast cut abruptly to dead air — a chilling touch performed by actor Frank Readick, who had studied recordings of the Hindenburg disaster commentary to get the terror right.
What actually happened
There is no doubt some listeners were frightened. People who tuned in late, missing the clear opening announcement that this was a drama, could hear the mounting bulletins with no context. Some phoned relatives, police stations or the radio station itself; a few were genuinely alarmed. But the image handed down to us — of a whole nation in hysterical flight, of highways clogged with refugees and mobs storming out of their homes — appears to have been enormously exaggerated.
Two things undercut the legend. First, the audience that night was small. The Mercury Theatre had modest ratings and was scheduled opposite the most popular programme in America, the Chase and Sanborn Hour featuring the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Most radios in the country were tuned elsewhere. Second, the evidence for actual mass panic is thin. Surveys taken afterward found that many listeners who heard the show understood perfectly well it was fiction, and researchers have never found records of the deaths, suicides or riots that rumour attached to the night.
Why the newspapers cared
So where did the story of nationwide hysteria come from? Historians such as Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow have argued that the newspaper industry had strong motives to inflate it. In 1938 print was locked in a bitter commercial struggle with radio for advertising revenue, and radio — fast, free and increasingly trusted for news — was winning. A story that portrayed radio as a reckless medium capable of throwing the public into dangerous panic was, for newspaper editors, almost too good to check. The papers splashed lurid front-page accounts, often built on a handful of anecdotes and a good deal of imagination, and the myth calcified into accepted history.
That is not to say nothing was learned. The Federal Communications Commission looked into the broadcast, and radio networks grew more cautious about the simulated-news format. And the episode was a genuine cultural event, endlessly discussed and mythologised, later dramatised and re-broadcast around the world — a 1949 restaging in Quito, Ecuador, reportedly did provoke real and violent unrest, which only fed the original legend.
The making of Orson Welles
For Welles himself, the notoriety was a career-defining gift. Overnight he became one of the most talked-about figures in America, a young man who had apparently frightened a nation with nothing but a microphone and a script. The attention helped bring him a remarkable contract with RKO Pictures, one that gave him extraordinary creative control for a newcomer. Two and a half years later he used it to make Citizen Kane, now routinely called the greatest film ever made. In a neat irony, that film opens with a booming faux-newsreel — the same trick of imitating a trusted news medium that had made his name on the radio.
The enduring lesson of the broadcast is not really about gullible listeners and little green men. It is about how a story about panic can itself spread faster and further than any invasion. The Martians never landed, and the mobs never quite ran; but the legend of the night they did has proved almost impossible to kill — a heat ray of its own, aimed at the historical record.
Quiz nuggets
- Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio drama aired on CBS on 30 October 1938, adapting H.G. Wells' 1898 novel.
- The fictional Martian invasion was set at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and staged as fake news bulletins interrupting music.
- The programme aired opposite the far more popular Chase and Sanborn Hour, so its live audience was relatively small.
- Later scholars argue the "mass panic" was greatly exaggerated by newspapers competing with radio for advertising.
- The broadcast's fame helped Welles secure the RKO contract under which he made Citizen Kane in 1941.