War of the Worlds: A Martian Invasion

ON THE EVENING OF SUNDAY, October 30, 1938, people in the United States tuning in to their local CBS radio station around 8:15 p.m. heard an electrifying news bulletin.

“We interrupt this program for a special bulletin from Trenton, New Jersey,” an excited-sounding announcer exclaimed. “At 7:50 p.m. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, 22 miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles, and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth!”

He informed the audience that CBS had dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene, and that CBS commentator Carl Phillips would give a live description of the event as soon as he could reach the site from his present location in Princeton.

Within moments, Phillips reported in from Wilmuth Farm. He had to shout to make himself heard over a background of crackling and hissing sounds. He described a sight that was eerie and unsettling. The object didn’t look much like a meteor—not really, no. It appeared to be an enormous cylinder, about 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter. The cylinder lay partly buried now, in a huge crater, and was sheathed in a strange-looking, yellowish-white metal—maybe some sort of extraterrestrial material...

His voice was briefly drowned out by a burst of static, then rose to overcome the sound of police sirens. A growing crowd of spectators was now pushing in toward the pit, he reported—despite police efforts to hold them back. Some of the people had driven their cars right up to the crater. Their headlights were shining like spotlights on the half-buried object.

Then a strange humming began to rise out of the pit. Could his radio listeners hear it? Phillips moved his microphone closer. There. Could they hear it now? A deep buzzing sound drifted up through radio speakers, as well as faint shouts and commands: “Keep back! Keep back!!”

Suddenly Phillips’s voice rose sharply. The top of the cylinder was beginning to turn! It was rotating—like a screw top! It appeared to be hollow inside. Someone yelled for people to watch out, that thing was red hot; people were going to get burned! Then there was the clank of a large piece of metal falling to the ground, hitting something hard.

Phillips’s voice was now shaking with excitement. Something had begun crawling out of the opened cylinder! Something with two huge luminous disks…were they eyes?…a face? No, it looked like the head of a kind of huge snake, its skin like wet leather…wriggling out…tentacles…a second head, and then a third! Their mouths were V-shaped, with saliva dripping from them…too horrible to look at! People were stumbling back, running…

Now another shape was rising out of the pit, Phillips reported. A humped, mechanical-looking thing, on metal legs…or metal supports of some kind. Phillips didn’t know what to make of it. Suddenly a brilliant ray of light shot out, bouncing against a kind of mirror—a mirror aimed at the crowd. But no, this wasn’t just light, it was…it was flame, a huge jet of flame blasting straight at the crowd, turning them all into flaming torches, a solid mass of flame!

Radio speakers vibrated with the screams of agonized people. Sounds of explosions. Phillips shouted that everything was on fire, everything! The forest, the farm buildings, the cars—it was spreading fast! And it was coming his way! There were more screams, yells, another crash, another stunningly loud explosion that could have blown the cloth out of a radio speaker. Then, abruptly, crackling dead air…

After a few seconds, the station returned. An announcer apologized for the interruption. He regretted to report that CBS had just received word that at least 40 people had been burned to death in a field east of Grovers Mill. One of the bodies was that of CBS reporter Carl Phillips. Four companies of state troopers were being brought in from Trenton to commence military operations, and to help residents of the area evacuate their homes.

The reporter then announced that CBS had received a request from the Trenton militia to make its network available to the military for further communications with the American public. In view of the seriousness of the situation, CBS had agreed, and was handing over its broadcast facilities to Militia Field Headquarters, where a Captain Lansing was standing by.

There was a clatter of microphone sounds, and then a clipped, confident voice identified itself as Captain Lansing of the state militia signal corps, in the vicinity of Grovers Mill. Lansing assured the American public that the situation arising from the appearance of certain creatures of unknown origin on the Wilmuth farm was totally under control. Whatever was in that pit was now completely surrounded, he said. Eight battalions of infantry armed with rifles and machine guns stood ready to blast it to smithereens.

He sounded almost condescending. Whatever they were, these creatures wouldn’t dare raise their heads out of the pit again. No, sir, not with searchlights and hundreds of machine guns focused on them at close range all around the pit’s rim. No, this wouldn’t take much time at all, Lansing said, and it was a good chance for the troops to get a little target practice.

There was a pause, and then a note of uncertainty crept into his voice. He was seeing something rising out of the cylinder. Just a shadow, perhaps? No, it was moving, all right. Hard to make out…a shield-like thing, rising higher and higher above the cylinder. Looked like solid metal, whatever it was. It was still rising! Now it was higher than the surrounding trees! Lansing’s voice had lost its professional cool. What was going on? This thing was standing up…rearing up on metal legs… “Hold on there!”

There was a rush of air and a thunderous blast that sounded like gasoline exploding. Then the radio transmission went dead again.

When the broadcast resumed, an announcer from New York had replaced the one in Trenton. It was obvious that this man could barely suppress his panic. In a special news bulletin, he informed the American public that the battle in Grovers Mill had resulted in one of the worst military disasters in modern times. The strange creatures that had emerged from a half-buried cylinder at the Wilmuth farm were part of an invading army from Mars; of the 7,000 fully armed troops that had engaged the enemy, only 120 were known to have survived. Dead bodies littered the fields from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, either crushed by the invaders’ machinery or incinerated by the death ray.

The announcer stopped, trying to get a grip on himself. He was breathing heavily. When he resumed, he said the invaders were now in control of central New Jersey, and that telephone and telegraph lines had been torn down from Pennsylvania to New York. Many railroad tracks had been ripped up; most trains had stopped running. Highways in all directions were jammed with fleeing people. Police and army reserves were trying to restore order, but with little success. Martial law had been declared in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

There was a brief pause, during which the audience could hear urgent whispers and the faint sound of shortwave radio squawking. “We take you now,” the announcer continued hastily, “to Washington, for a special broadcast on this national emergency by the Secretary of the Interior…”

What over 5 million CBS radio listeners were listening to—though a surprisingly large number didn’t realize it—was a radio dramatization of War of the Worlds, a futuristic novel about a Martian attack on the planet Earth by the British novelist H.G. Wells. The play’s producer, Orson Welles (the similar name is pure coincidence) was then only 23 years old but already a famous enough veteran of American theater to have appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Welles had teamed up with radio dramatist Howard Koch to adapt the British novel for American radio.

Welles was known for being willing to do almost anything to make his theatrical productions gripping and memorable. He’d found Wells’s novel fascinating, but far too old-fashioned and distant. To make the story more realistic, he had first changed the English locations to American ones, then changed the date to a slightly futuristic 1939 and added powerful modern features such as news bulletins, on-the-spot reporters, and realistic sound effects.

The broadcast was being aired live in a CBS studio, by actors standing in front of microphones with their scripts on music stands before them. When not reading their lines, they all helped produce the sound effects—running on the spot to simulate panicking people, shouting together when the script called for screaming crowds, and banging various objects to produce the other sounds the play required.

Welles stood in the glass-fronted sound booth with his earphones on, cueing the actors as their lines came up. Tall and already quite stocky, he looked like a conductor directing a military band. The studio was a busy clutter of microphone cords, music stands, junction boards, and boxfuls of the strange and unlikely gadgets used for radio sound effects: pots, glass jars, hammers, kitchen cutlery, chunks of wood, bags of cornmeal, and a creaky-hinged miniature door in a door frame.

During rehearsals, Welles and his CBS bosses had waged a constant tug-of-war about the play’s “realism.” The CBS officials believed the play was becoming too realistic, and therefore likely to frighten listeners. That sounded good to both Welles and Koch—in fact, they wanted to increase the realism even more! For example, with audiences already on edge since American radio stations had begun interrupting regular programming with flash news bulletins from Europe (where World War II was about to break out), Welles had nevertheless decided to use that same kind of flash news bulletin in his production. CBS officials had objected, but Welles had refused to budge.

Even so, on the day of the broadcast, Howard Koch had still complained that the play sounded too unlikely. “Nobody’s really going to buy this story,” he insisted. “It’s just too fantastical to believe.”

By 8:30 p.m.—half an hour into the broadcast—it was quickly becoming clear just how wrong he was!

The phones began ringing in police stations all over the American northeast around 8:15 p.m.

By 8:20 p.m. people began pouring into the streets, many with wet cloths and towels held over their faces. Sirens wailed, and ambulances jammed emergency entrances at hospitals with people suffering from shock, hysteria, and heart attacks. Militia headquarters in Essex and Sussex counties were swamped with calls from national guardsmen. “When should we report?” they shouted into their telephones. “Should we come down right now?!”

In Indianapolis, a woman ran into a church where a service was going on, screaming, “New York is being destroyed by Martians—it’s the end of the world! I just heard it on the radio!” Hospitals received hundreds of calls from doctors and nurses offering to volunteer their services. Somebody pulled the emergency elevator bells at the Hotel Montague in Brooklyn, and patrons poured out of the hotel shouting, “The Martians are coming! The Martians are coming!”

At the Dixie Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, people jammed the ticket counters. “Gimme a ticket! Where to? Anywhere! North! South! West! Anywhere but east!” Traffic on all the main highways rose sharply, as heavily loaded cars and trucks scrambled to get out of town. By 9:00 p.m. parts of Trenton, Newark, New York, and Atlantic City were gridlocked, with car horns blaring and thousands of police trying desperately to unsnarl the traffic.

The reaction was less intense in the more western parts of the U.S., but there, too, people were unnerved. Chicago’s police and its radio stations were deluged with calls. In San Francisco, newspaper switchboards were jammed. Hysteria gripped the campus of Brevard College in North Carolina—some students fainted; others fought for access to telephones to call their parents. Gas stations everywhere did a roaring business as millions of drivers filled their gas tanks in preparation to flee.

All over the United States, people poured into the streets to watch the night sky for signs of the Martian attacks.

As the hysteria gathered momentum, people even began to see what they had heard on the radio. Police started receiving reports of actual sightings. “Yeah, I saw them! Spaceships, Martians! Thousands of them! They bombed Mercerville and they’re burning Dutch Neck! You guys got to get out here fast!” Firehalls received calls about explosions—houses, streets, entire villages on fire.

More alarming, a lot of people armed themselves and began shooting at anything that looked even vaguely Martian—people, deer, trees, clouds. The mayor of a city in the Midwest called up CBS in New York City, demanding to speak to Orson Welles. “There are mobs in my streets! There are women and children crowding into my churches!” he shouted into the phone. “There’s violence, looting, rioting! If this is some crummy joke, I’m coming to New York to give him one helluva punch in the nose!”

Telephone operators on the CBS switchboard tried their best to calm their callers down. “No, of course it’s not really happening—it’s just a play. Yes, really. No—didn’t you hear the announcement at the beginning of the show? Yes, and there were two more during the show. Honestly! No, no, there aren’t any Martians. It’s just an adaptation of a... it’s just an imaginary... it’s just a...” No matter how often they repeated them, their assurances didn’t seem to have much effect.

At some point a group of New York City policemen entered the CBS building, thinking to stop the broadcast, but when an officer tried to enter the studio (ignoring the lit-up “ON AIR” sign above the door) an actor, not realizing what was happening out there in the real world, quickly pushed him out and locked the soundproof door.

By the end of the broadcast, the hallways around the studio were crammed with police, reporters, photographers, and gawkers. Finally informed about the situation outside, a delighted Welles and his crew escaped out a back door.

It appeared that his production had been every bit as gripping and memorable as he’d hoped.

The next day, the story of the radio play’s effect was headline news in newspapers and radio broadcasts all over the country.

“Nation in Panic from Martian Broadcast,” read one headline.

“Not since the Spanish fleet sailed to bombard the New England coast in 1898,” the New York Herald Tribune stated, “has so much hysteria, panic and sudden conversion to religion been reported to the press.”

Many people were indignant at Welles’s recklessness. “Radio ought to act promptly to prevent a repetition of the wave of panic in which it inundated the nation,” fumed the New York Times. Iowa Senator Clyde Herring called Welles a “Hallowe’en bogeyman” who had been more interested in theatrical success than concerned about its potential for damage and distress. He called for a law to curb such performances.

But columnist Dorothy Thompson, in the New York Herald Tribune, called it “the story of the century.” She felt that the broadcast had demonstrated some hard truths about the American public’s gullibility.

“It has shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands,” she declared. “It has proved how easy it is to start a mass delusion, [and has] uncovered the primeval fears lying under the thinnest surface of the so-called civilized man.” She didn’t think Orson Welles ought to be blamed at all. In fact, she suggested he be given a congressional medal or a national prize!

CBS eventually apologized to the public, promising “not to use the technique of a simulated news broadcast within a dramatization when the circumstances could cause immediate alarm to numbers of listeners.”

This pledge didn’t stop several hundred listeners from suing the network for damages as high as $50,000 for “mental anguish” and “personal injury.” However, all of the suits were denied—except for a claim for a pair of black shoes, size 9B, by a man from Massachusetts, who explained that he’d had to spend the money he’d been saving to buy those shoes to escape the invading Martians!

Orson Welles got such a kick out of this claim that he insisted the man be paid—despite the protestations of CBS’s lawyers.

But Orson Welles’s CBS production of War of the Worlds wasn’t the only time Howard Koch’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel was broadcast—and some subsequent productions had remarkably similar effects.

Only six years later, in 1944, a radio station in Santiago, Chile, broadcast the play in Spanish, also using local place names and the names of local politicians.

Once again, despite a disclaimer at the beginning of the show warning listeners that it was just a play, a general panic ensued, with people pouring into the streets and traffic becoming snarled. The governor of one of Chile’s provinces telegraphed Chile’s Minister of the Interior at government headquarters in Santiago to inform him that provincial troops had been placed on alert and the artillery was ready to repel the Martians by any means at their disposal!

The most serious outcome resulted from a 1949 airing of the play by a radio station in Quito, Ecuador. In this case, the station’s artistic director, Leonardo Paez, went so far as to plant fake stories in local newspapers about flying saucers being seen near Quito in the days leading up to his broadcast.

Like his predecessors, Paez also used local place names and the names of real Ecuadorian politicians, but unlike them, he made no announcements alerting his listeners to the fact that the broadcast was a play.

“The town of Latacunga has been destroyed!” a reporter shouted into the microphone. “The air base at Mariscal Sucre has been captured, and thousands have been killed! The Martian invaders are rapidly closing in on Quito! The Minister of the Interior is appealing to Quito’s women and children to flee to the mountains, so that the men will be free to defend the city!”

Total hysteria broke out in Quito’s streets, as people rushed out to obey the Minister’s order.

When the radio producer was told about the panic his broadcast was causing, he stopped the play and appealed to his listeners for calm.

But when Quito’s citizens realized they had been deceived, panic turned to fury. A mob gathered in front of the three-story building that housed the radio station. Stones and bricks began to fly. Windows and doors were smashed.

Someone shouted, “Let’s set the building on fire!” and several men rushed to the entrance with newspapers and matches.

Within minutes, flames were licking their way up the wooden paneling around the doors. When firefighters arrived, the crowd surged around them, refusing to let them beat down the flames. When the firemen persisted, hooking up their hoses to a nearby fire hydrant, the crowd changed direction and smashed the hydrant. Water gushed out of the broken pipe and flooded the sidewalk. The firemen called the police, but when the police arrived the crowd swarmed the police cars and attacked the officers. One officer was severely beaten and several attackers were shot.

Authorities finally had to call in the army, which used tanks and tear gas to restore order.

The radio station was burned to the ground. In all, six people lost their lives. The actors were arrested and jailed, and Leonardo Paez, afraid for his life, fled the country.

Although Orson Welles (1915–1985) went on to become one of America’s most widely known actors, directors, and filmmakers, directing or acting in over 100 plays and films (Citizen Kane, Moby Dick), his production of War of the Worlds remains his most famous and notorious achievement.

That notoriety has proven so tempting to radio producers that War of the Worlds has never stopped being broadcast—despite (or perhaps because of) its tendency to produce panic. Two broadcasts of the play in 1968 (New York and San Antonio) went off without a hitch, but a broadcast on Halloween in 1974 (Providence, Rhode Island) caused considerable disturbance and some lawsuits. A 1981 production in Germany barely raised eyebrows, but a 1988 production by Radio Braga in Portugal provoked such terror among its listeners that over 200 of them stormed the radio station after learning they had been duped.

Orson Welles would have approved. He never regretted the uproar his famous production caused. He said later in his life, about this production as well as others: “Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan. I have always tried my best to be both.”