“The Martians are coming!”
“Martians have landed …”
The phones started ringing at CBS’s New York headquarters as soon as the creature emerged from its cylinder. Callers were hysterical. “The Martians are invading! What do we do?”
The Mercury Theatre on the Air was being carried that night by dozens of stations throughout the United States, and the calls came from all over. The CBS telephone operators were soon overwhelmed. They politely told people that they were listening to a dramatic show, not news. “Don’t panic,” they said. “There are no invaders.”
William Paley, the president of CBS, was home playing cards when his office phoned him. “A terrible thing has happened,” he was told. “The whole country [is] bursting wide open.”
CBS headquarters wasn’t the only place that anxious listeners called. In 1938, there was no 911. To get help in an emergency, people contacted their local telephone operator. Those who had dial phones dialed zero. Customers still without a dial picked up their phone’s receiver, and an operator answered.
In Princeton, New Jersey, operators responded to screaming and crying callers. Had they’d seen the Martians? How bad was the destruction? Were bodies lying around the streets?
A man told a New York City operator that people were planning to kill their children before the Martians could get them.
In Missoula, Montana, an operator handled calls from customers begging her to connect their phone to family members. They wanted to say “I love you” one last time before the world ended.
Because they were on duty, the operators hadn’t heard the radio program and didn’t know what was happening. But they had been trained to stay calm and help the best they could. As soon as operators learned the truth, they reassured callers that the crisis was just part of a radio show.
Telephone operators at the switchboard in 1937. This photograph was taken in the United States Capitol, where thirty-seven operators answered thousands of calls every day.
In one South Dakota community, however, the local operator believed the Martians had invaded. She felt it was her responsibility to call as many homes as possible, warning that the extraterrestrials were on the way.
Rumors spread as friends and family shared news of the attack, alarming people who had not been listening to the broadcast. To confirm the story, some phoned their local newspapers, radio stations, or the police. At first, callers asked whether there had been a meteor strike in New Jersey. As the broadcast continued, the inquiries became more fearful and mentioned Martian heat-ray attacks, explosions, and mass casualties.
Before the night ended, the New York Times received nearly nine hundred calls about the invasion. The New York Daily News reported more than one thousand.
The real Grovers Mill was a rural area too small to have a post office. Several local farmers heard the Mercury Theatre broadcast. Ready to defend their community, they grabbed their shotguns and drove to the pond near the mill. When they arrived, they found no hundred-foot Martian tripods. Only a few other curious people.
Two miles from Grovers Mill, sixteen-year-old Lolly was playing the piano at a youth church meeting. Someone came in, yelling, “Martians have landed in Grover’s Mill.” The group scattered, and Lolly ran down the road to her home. When she burst in, frightened and upset, her mother had no idea what was wrong.
Ingeborg was doing the dishes in northern New Jersey when she switched on the radio. Not long after 8:00 p.m., she heard a newscaster say that a Martian cylinder had landed in Grovers Mill. The lights in her house had flickered at 7:30 that evening … and wasn’t the announcer talking about towns she knew well? Gathering up her photograph albums, Ingeborg told her husband to drive them to safety—if that was even possible!
At Saint Elizabeth College, in Morristown, New Jersey, a woman raced down a dormitory hall screaming, “A rocket is coming from Mars. We’re all going to be killed!” Students became hysterical. One group gathered to pray. Others froze, unable to decide what to do.
Panicked students in Georgia and North Carolina rushed to phones to call home. In Oregon, university fraternity brothers gathered around a radio, “spellbound” and “scared to death.”
At West Virginia University, students cried in each other’s arms, phoned their parents to say good-bye forever, and hid in the dormitory basement. One student ran to warn the town of the Martian attack.
At Oberlin College in Ohio, a young woman watched the people in her dorm become unglued as they listened to the program. She wondered why they didn’t have the sense to verify the newsflashes by switching to a different station.
A college student and his roommate were driving south from New York State to their home in New Jersey. Suddenly, they heard about the destruction on the car radio. Certain that their “friends and families were all dead,” the driver steered the car around and sped north as fast as it would go. “All I could think of was being burned alive,” he admitted later. “I thought the whole human race was going to be wiped out.”
Soon after eight o’clock, the telephone rang at Frederick’s home in Watervliet, New York. Turn on your radio, his friend said. Something horrible is happening in New Jersey. The family put on CBS. When they heard President Roosevelt (or so they believed) speak about the emergency, Frederick and his wife knew they had to protect their children. They lived close to New Jersey and had to get away, though they had no idea where they’d go.
In East Douglas, Massachusetts, John tuned to NBC’s variety show The Chase and Sanborn Hour and listened for a while. But he didn’t like the singing, so he twirled the dial through the stations, searching for a more entertaining program. When he settled on CBS, Carl Phillips was interviewing Farmer Wilmuth. As John listened, the situation became more dire. The country was in danger. He hurried to tell the other families in his building. Then he ran outside to look for the Martian attack machines.
Dean and his wife of Highland, Wisconsin, were listening to dance music on their radio when it was interrupted by the newsflash about a Mars disturbance. As the reports continued, their concern grew. “I sat on the edge of the davenport and began to shake all over,” Dean later recalled. The couple was sure that the Martians would soon land in Wisconsin.
It was shortly after five o’clock in Centralia, Washington, when Edith turned on The Mercury Theatre, live from New York City. She knew something was wrong as soon as she heard the first news bulletin. Her newspaper listed The Pickwick Papers as the Mercury’s presentation that evening (evidently a misprint). What she heard on her radio was definitely not the Charles Dickens story. The description of the destruction horrified her. Edith had relatives in New Jersey, and she was worried about their safety. Remembering the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hindenburg catastrophe, she thought with dismay, “So much has happened in N.J.”
A Michigan couple listens to a radio broadcast in 1939.
S. L. and his wife of Los Angeles, California, tuned to The Mercury Theatre in time to hear the newsflash about the meteor. They were shocked when the Martians killed so many people. They never imagined it was possible. Yet here were statements by “Professors, National Guard Officers, Scientists and the Secretary of the Interior.”
In Sanford, Florida, a group of friends—alerted by a neighbor who was listening to the program—gathered together to follow the awful news. One woman’s daughter lived in New York. What would happen to her? As the chilling reports continued, everyone was astounded. How can this be happening—Mars defeating us!