The War of the Worlds

On Oct. 30, 1938, the world came to an end. At least a whole lot of folks thought so after hearing a radio broadcast that informed them that Martians had landed in New Jersey. Looking back, of course, this seems pretty funny, but to the people who lived through it, the now-famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast was anything but laughable.

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater Players thought the idea of a Halloween broadcast of H. G. Wells’ story, “The War of the Worlds,” would be both clever and highly entertaining.

For a few, perhaps it was. For many, it turned into one of the most frightening nights of their lives.

The problem was simple: Most listeners didn’t realize it was a joke.

At 8 p.m., on 1938, the night before Halloween, Americans listened to the “Mercury Theater on the Air,” as it presented its version of “War of the Worlds.” What followed was fiction that sounded as authentic as any radio news broadcast. What first began as a broadcast of the Ramon Raquello orchestra from New York’s Hotel Park Plaza suddenly became a horror show headlined by Martian creatures invading earth. Breaking away from the “regular” show, actors playing International News Service newsmen reported an invasion from Mars that at first appeared to be a meteor strike but in fact was a Martian spaceship.

At the scene of the meteor landing near Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, CBS’s Carl Philips reported on events before suddenly going off the air, apparently killed by a ray beam from an alien machine. As Martian ships began landing everywhere, events continued with the Army being defeated, followed by the unnamed U. S. Secretary of the Interior telling listeners how grave the situation was.

As Robert Brown writes in “Manipulating the Ether,” “After the speech of the ‘secretary,’ Americans had every reason to believe that the end of the world was at hand.”

Before the show ended, the damage was done, even though Welles introduced as the director at the show’s opening, explained the fictional setting to the audience.

At the end of the broadcast, Welles told the audience that the presentation was a Halloween present. Four announcements explaining that the program was fictional were made during the broadcast.

Nonetheless, many Americans panicked, partly because much of the audience had tuned in to Welles when a competing show with a huge audience had paused for a commercial.

According to Brown, of the 6 million people (approximately 12 percent of the national audience) who heard the broadcast, 1.7 million believed it to be true. Public reaction certainly seems to support that.

For example, traffic in Trenton, N.J., became severely congested as people tried to escape the city. Churches conducted end-of-the- world services. People reported either seeing the machines, or the fires the machines caused, or the poison gas they emitted.

Although reaction was strongest in the Northeast where the supposed invasion was taking place, other parts of the country reacted. Some Montgomery, Ala., residents thought a low flying aircraft was a Martian cylinder. In Washington state, a power failure was thought by some to have been caused by the Martians. Rumors that New York had been destroyed had southerners from Atlanta to Richmond gathering in churches, while others fled into the Appalachian Mountains to hide.

George M. Mawhinney of the Philadelphia Inquirer was working the night of the broadcast. What follows are snippets of his story about the results of the broadcast.

“In Philadelphia, women and children ran from their homes, screaming. In Newark, New Jersey, ambulances rushed to one neighborhood to protect residents against a gas attack. In the deep south men and women knelt in groups and prayed for deliverance. …

“Hundreds of motorists touring New Jersey heard the broadcast over their radios and detoured to avoid the area upon which the holocaust was focused, the area in the vicinity of Trenton and Princeton.

“In scores of New Jersey towns, women in their homes fainted as the horror of the broadcast fell on their ears. In Palmyra, some residents packed up their worldly goods and prepared to move across the river into Philadelphia. …

“An anonymous and somewhat hysterical girl phoned the Princeton Press Club from Grovers Corners and said: “You can’t imagine the horror of it! It’s Hell!” …

“Fifteen persons were treated for shock in one Newark hospital. …

“In Indianapolis, Ind., a woman ran screaming into a church. ‘New York is destroyed; it’s the end of the world,’ she cried. ‘You might as well go home to die.’ …”

In some places mass hysteria grew so great that witnesses to the “invasion” could be found.

It’s the power of the media, folks. And our vivid imaginations.