Recent news events have made clear just how easy it is for America — or shadowy, undemocratic entities that claim to act in its interest — to panic. This emotion isn’t just the product of 9/11, however. It was always there: fear that the Native Americans would attack; fear that the slaves would revolt; fear of crop failures and bank failures; fear that the country could be invaded or the government infiltrated.
Seventy-five years ago, in the autumn of 1938, Americans had a lot to be afraid of. The Great Depression and Dust Bowl had existed for nearly a decade. Europe had been taken over by political extremists and those who sought to appease them. The world was a harsh and brutal place. To escape from it, Americans went to the cinema or gathered in their living room to enjoy a radio drama.
Mars attacks!
On the evening of October 30, 1938, the CBS network promised them a broadcast of dance music from a big-city ballroom. But the broadcast was interrupted by reports in which an astronomer spoke of strange explosions on the planet Mars. A short time later, the music was again interrupted, this time by a report that a metal cylinder had landed on a farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. A reporter arrived in time to see the cylinder open and a machine emerge. He then witnessed destruction and killing as the machine turned its “heat ray” on everyone who was there. His transmission ended suddenly.
As the presenter in New York tried to understand what was happening, reports arrived of such cylinders landing all over the United States. America was under attack!
At least that’s what it sounded like. The dance music had been preceded at the top of the hour by an announcement that Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre would be performing a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. But not everyone had heard the announcement. Many had been listening to a more popular comedy program on another network and had changed the station after a quarter of an hour.
• Download and listen to the original program
• Listen to a 75th anniversary documentary about it
It was because of the comedy program’s success that The Mercury Theatre on the Air had been unable to find a sponsor, allowing The War of the Worlds to run for an hour without commercial interruption. To someone not listening closely, most of the program sounded like actual news reports, even if the events they described seemed to be happening very quickly.
Frantic calls reached the station and even the president of CBS at his home, where he hadn’t been listening to the broadcast. Police showed up at the studio while the play was still being performed.
Orson Welles, the 23-year-old actor who was directing the play, could not believe the attention it was getting. Newspapers reported in the coming days that thousands of listeners had panicked, some leaving their homes, others putting on gas masks and preparing to fight the Martians.
So great is people’s willingness to believe what is broadcast to them that 45 years went by before anyone attempted this format again. In March 1983, NBC broadcast Special Bulletin, a fictional TV movie about activists who were threatening Charleston, South Carolina, with a nuclear bomb. So real was the possibility of viewers mistaking the film for news that several reminders where shown, indicating it was fiction. In Charleston itself, that message appeared on screen at all times.
Germany’s ZDF followed in January 1988 with a similar story called Die Bombe, about a nuclear bomb in Hamburg; and in 2006, a British director used real news reports, combined out of context, to make Death of a President, a story told in real time about the fictional assassination of George W. Bush in October 2007.
Recently, some have taken a different view of The War of the Worlds, saying that only very few people really panicked. Newspapers, it is claimed, manufactured the panic by overstating it. In this way, radio — which held the advantage of immediacy in news reporting — would be discredited and newspapers could continue to be sold.
In the end, it is not clear what really happened that autumn night, but the idea of what might have happened is part of Americans’ cultural memory — and our deepest fears.
PS In the 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Jeff Goldblum realizes that the aliens really did land in New Jersey in 1938: “They hypnotized Orson Welles into covering it up, so first he says, ‘There’s an invasion from Mars,’ but then he says, ‘No, no, no. It’s just a radio-show hoax.’”
