Panic attack - 75th anniversary of Orson Welles' 'War of the Worlds' broadcast
It's 75 years since a radio drama terrified America and launched Orson Welles' career, writes Gary Jones
On October 31, 1938, carried a front-page report describing panic that had spread across the city, the state and the country the previous evening. "Throughout New York families left their homes, some to flee to nearby parks," the article stated. "Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids."
In Newark, in neighbouring New Jersey, the newspaper said, "more than 20 families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid", while in St Louis, Missouri, "men and women clustered in the streets in residential areas to discuss what they should do in the face of the sudden war".
I believe that he set out to create a work of art that was engaging, fresh and edgy
What had caused such terror and pandemonium just three years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour? An earlier sneak offensive from across the Pacific? Aggression by Germany's Nazis, who were steadily growing in military might and belligerence in Europe?
No, the alarm had been created by nothing more malevolent than a radio broadcast. The headline to story read, "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact".
The radio show, broadcast 75 years ago to the day last Wednesday as part of CBS Radio's Halloween programming schedule, was 23-year-old actor and future auteur Orson Welles' mischievous adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel .
The fake bulletins reported that a "huge flaming object" had smashed into a farm near Grovers Mill in New Jersey and, as the production unfolded, news reporters - as well as the state militia and government officials they interviewed - appeared to describe the arrival of an interplanetary invasion force.
Essentially, the Martians had landed, they were not friendly and were advancing on Manhattan with poison gas and death rays. Regular programming quickly appeared to break down as the studio struggled with casualty updates, reports of fires, evacuation instructions and terror on a cosmic scale.
At one point in the broadcast, a supposed journalist, reporting live from the crash site, dramatically described a Martian emerging from its cylindrical spacecraft. "Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a grey snake," he stammered. "Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing's body. It's large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face. It's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate."
Estimates on the extent of the mass hysteria created by Welles' broadcast varied, with some reports claiming only several thousand listeners were hoodwinked, while others insisted more than a million were suckered by the hoax. alone, however, received more than 800 calls on the night of the broadcast.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the offending broadcast, which critics later dubbed "cruelly deceptive" and "dangerously manipulative", began with an unambiguous statement pointing out that what was to follow was a dramatic adaptation of Wells' tale. Also, explanations to the same effect were trumpeted three times during its airing. Those warnings seemed to have been ignored by many listeners, however, and within days a concerned opinion piece in the claimed the broadcast revealed the way politicians could use the power of mass communications to manipulate the public.
Referring to geopolitical events of September 1938, when leaders of Nazi Germany, Britain, France and Italy signed an agreement that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, the article also stated that: "Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr Welles scared thousands into demoralisation with nothing at all."
To this day, nobody knows if Welles had wilfully set out to deceive the public - until his death in 1985 of a heart attack, he was always cagey, and sometimes contradictory, about his original intentions.
"I personally think that Welles did not have a deliberate agenda to create a panic," Cathleen O'Connell, producer-director of a PBS documentary,
"I believe that he set out to create a work of art that was engaging, fresh and edgy.
"That being said, I think he was a very canny entertainer and a brilliant self-promoter, and certainly was not displeased in the publicity and attention that the broadcast brought to him," O'Connell says.
In the aftermath of Welles' , CBS apologised for the furore the show had caused. Within one month, 12,500 articles had been published about the broadcast's impact.
For Welles, intentionally or otherwise, everything was about to change thanks to his . Soon, the cash-strapped Mercury Theatre on the Air snagged a commercial sponsor in Campbell's Soup and then, of course, Tinseltown came knocking. "The national panic caused by the radio drama made my father internationally famous and led to his leaving the theatre and becoming a movie director in Hollywood," Chris Welles Feder, Welles' eldest daughter (who was born in the same year as
"My mother [actress Virginia Nicholson] deplored this move as she believed my father's true genius lay in the theatre, but fortunately he didn't listen to her or we wouldn't have ."
