It was sixty-nine years ago tomorrow--on October 30, 1938--that Orson Welles caused a national panic with his broadcast of "War of the Worlds"--a tale of an ugly Martian invasion of Earth. Click here to
download an MP3 of the entire hour broadcast. It's great radio, and truly horrifying. It is such great radio that it changed radio forever. I probably listen to the whole show several times a year.
Welles was 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company updated H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds for national broadcast. Welles had already been in radio for several years, in "The Shadow." Mercury Theatre had no idea of the uproar "War" would cause. They did not intend to create a panic.
Millions of Americans had their radios on--but they were listening to Edgar Bergen (Candice's dad) and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. When that show ended at 8:12, the masses tuned to Welles's drama. By then, the Martian invasion was well underway. An announcer reports that "Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory" had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer's field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.
A reporter at the crash site describes a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder:
"Good heavens," he declared, "
something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me ... I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it ...it ... ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."
The Martians rode walking war machines and fired "heat-ray" weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They killed 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon "Martian cylinders" landed in Chicago and St. Louis.
Across the eastern seaboard, panic broke out, including massive traffic jams in New Jersey of people trying to escape the martians. When news of the real-life panic leaked into the CBS studio, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was just fiction. There were government investigations but no one was ever reprimanded or arrested.
Orson Welles went on to make great movies, including Citizen Kane, surely one of the greatest American movies ever, A Touch of Evil, the Magnficent Ambersons, and a handful of other great movies.
Click here to visit a page with a downloadable MP3 of the entire hour broadcast. It's a great show. And an early piece of Alien Lore.
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