The War of the Worlds (1938)

DIRECTED AND NARRATED BY Orson Welles

WRITTEN BY Howard Koch and Anne Froelick Taylor (adaptation), and H.G. Wells (original novel)

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN USA

In the 1930s there was an ongoing drama series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which put on live radio dramas and theatrical readings. For the Halloween episode on October 30, 1938, young author and director Orson Welles, then twenty-three, narrated an adaptation of H.G. Wells's popular 1898 novel about alien invasion, The War of the Worlds.

The radio show appeared at first to be a live broadcast of a musical orchestra performing in New York City's Hotel Park Plaza, but within a couple of minutes, a fictional “news reporter” (Frank Readick) broke in with information about a disturbance on planet Mars. The radio station soon returned to the orchestra, but news updates continued to break into the music saying first that a meteor had crashed into a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and then that the object that had crashed was actually an alien spaceship. People were heard screaming in the background.

Soon a number of alien hatchlings reportedly emerged from the object, and the live reporter described the appearance of repulsive-sounding creatures before the transmission stopped suddenly. Next another reporter broke in, saying that more than forty people were now dead at the Grovers Mill site. Soon, the Secretary of the Interior (portrayed by actor Kenny Delmar in a voice that sounded like then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt's), came on to advise the nation to stay calm despite the seriousness of the situation.

More Directed By Orson Welles

Citizen Kane (film, 1941)

The Trial (film, 1962)

Don Quixote (film, 1992)

UNFORGETTABLE MOMENT

A news reporter says that the Martians have released a poisonous gas that is drifting over New York City and killing everyone. As the smoke draws closer to him, he says that it's “a hundred yards away” and then “fifty feet.” Then he goes silent. Finally a radio operator is heard calling, “2X2L calling CQ. Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone?”

The Inspiration

H.G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds is the obvious inspiration for the broadcast. Wells's original novel described an alien invasion in England in the beginning of the twentieth century. Orson Welles adapted it for his radio show, placing it in New Jersey and in modern times.

EALITY FACTOR

It is possible that life exists beyond Earth. After all, there are estimated to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. But the chances of an alien species having the super-advanced technology needed to even get here—and then to invade our planet and take it over—is relatively low.

The Impact

• The show was done so realistically that people thought the world was really coming to an end. Even though it was announced before, during, and after the show that it was a fictional program, terrified listeners (who didn't hear those announcements) deluged radio headquarters, newspaper offices, and police stations with calls for information about how to evacuate their cities and shield themselves from gas raids. Some people even required medical treatment for shock and hysteria. Orson Welles had to apologize to the public the following day, though he maintained that the show was never intended to cause a scare. When the program later aired in 1944 in Chile, and in 1949 in Ecuador, mass panic was unintentionally incited again.

• The panic was later studied as an example of mass hysteria. In 1940, Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril used the radio broadcast listeners’ reactions to try and determine what had caused the panic, incorporating his findings into a book about the broadcast and its resulting chaos, called The Invasion From Mars.

• The War of the Worlds inspired large-scale future hoaxes. In 1977, the British TV program Alternative 3 was aired in the United Kingdom. The fictional show was designed to look real, and it fooled many viewers. It pretended to be an investigation into secret government attempts to make the Moon and Mars habitable; “scientists” claimed the Earth's surface wouldn't be able to support life for much longer. Another more recent hoax happened in 1996, when, on April Fool's Day, Internet giant AOL published a fictional news flash that announced there were signs of life on Jupiter. Not surprisingly, a number of AOL's five million subscribers freaked out when they learned they'd been duped. And tech giant Google has a long history of pulling April Fool's Day pranks to confuse and disorient users. In 2004, for instance, the company posted fictitious job opportunities for a research center on the moon.

QUOTABLES

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have—I've ever witnessed. Wait a minute! Something's crawling out of the hollow top. Someone or something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks. Are they eyes? It might be a face.

The “reporter,” describing what he sees at the scene of the alien invasion