New Statesman and Nation, 26 OCTOBER 1940
Nearly two years ago Mr. Orson Welles1 produced on the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York a radio play based on H. G. Wells’s fantasia The War of the Worlds. The broadcast was not intended as a hoax, but it had an astonishing and unforeseen result. Thousands mistook it for a news broadcast and actually believed for a few hours that the Martians had invaded America and were marching across the countryside on steel legs a hundred feet high, massacring all and sundry with their heat rays. Some of the listeners were so panic-stricken that they leapt into their cars and fled. Exact figures are, of course, unobtainable, but the compilers of this survey (it was made by one of the research departments of Princeton) have reason to think that about six million people heard the broadcast and that well over a million were in some degree affected by the panic.
At the time this affair caused amusement all over the world, and the credulity of ‘those Americans’ was much commented on. However, most of the accounts that appeared abroad were somewhat misleading. The text of the Orson Welles production is given in full, and it appears that apart from the opening announcement and a piece of dialogue towards the end the whole play is done in the form of news bulletins, ostensibly real bulletins with names of stations attached to them. This is a natural enough method of producing a play of that type, but it was also natural that many people who happened to turn on the radio after the play had started should imagine that they were listening to a news broadcast. There were therefore two separate acts of belief involved: (i) that the play was a news bulletin, and (ii) that a news bulletin can be taken as truthful. And it is just here that the interest of the investigation lies.
In the U.S.A. the wireless is the principal vehicle of news. There is a great number of broadcasting stations, and virtually every family owns a radio. The authors even make the surprising statement that it is more usual to possess a radio than to take in a newspaper. Therefore, to transfer this incident to England, one has perhaps to imagine the news of the Martian invasion appearing on the front page of one of the evening papers. Undoubtedly such a thing would cause a great stir. It is known that the newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude and anyone seeing huge headlines in their paper announcing the arrival of a cylinder from Mars would probably believe what he read, at any rate for the few minutes that would be needed to make some verification.
The truly astonishing thing, however, was that so few of the listeners attempted any kind of check. The compilers of the survey give details of 250 persons who mistook the broadcast for a news bulletin. It appears that over a third of them attempted no kind of verification; as soon as they heard that the end of the world was coming, they accepted it uncritically. A few imagined that it was really a German or Japanese invasion, but the majority believed in the Martians, and this included people who had only heard of the ‘invasion’ from neighbours, and even a few who had started off with the knowledge that they were listening to a play. Here are excerpts from one or two of their statements:
‘I was visiting the pastor’s wife when a boy came and said, “Some star just fell.” We turned the radio on—we all felt the world was coming to an end …. I rushed to the neighbours to tell them the world was coming to an end.’
‘I called in to my husband: “Dan, why don’t you get dressed? You don’t want to die in your working clothes.” ’
‘My husband took Mary into the kitchen and told her that God had put us on this earth for His honour and glory and that it was for Him to say when it was our time to go. Dad kept calling “O God, do what you can to save us.” ’
‘I looked in the icebox and saw some chicken left from Sunday dinner …. I said to my nephew, “We may as well eat this chicken—we won’t be here in the morning.” ’
‘I was looking forward with some pleasure to the destruction of the entire human race …. If we have Fascist domination of the world, there is no purpose in living anyway.’
The survey does not reveal any single all-embracing explanation of the panic. All it establishes is that the people most likely to be affected were the poor, the ill-educated and, above all, people who were economically insecure or had unhappy private lives. The evident connection between personal unhappiness and readiness to believe the incredible is its most interesting discovery. Remarks like ‘Everything is so upset in the world that anything might happen,’ or ‘So long as everybody was going to die, it was all right,’ are surprisingly common in the answers to the questionnaire. People who have been out of work or on the verge of bankruptcy for ten years may be actually relieved to hear of the approaching end of civilisation. It is a similar frame of mind that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Saviour. This book is a footnote to the history of the world depression, and in spite of being written in the horrible dialect of the American psychologist, it makes very entertaining reading.