War of the Worlds

Residents of the small town of Concrete, Wash., jumped into their cars and fled town after a power outage led them to believe that Martians were advancing down the streets.

    In Newark, NJ, residents ran out of their homes, covering their faces with wet handkerchiefs to protect against the poison gas.

    Sailors on shore leave were summoned back to their ships.

    Catholics streamed to church for confession, and one man who had left his wife and was on his way to Reno to marry his girlfriend heard the news over the radio, turned back and reunited with his wife.

    Enraged residents of Quito, Ecuador, burned down the radio station after learning the broadcast was a hoax.

    The Oct. 30, 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, based on H.G. Wells’ popular novel, proved the power of a truly mass medium. Commercial radio was less than 20 years old in 1938, and there was no precedent to such a pervasive medium. Networks linked radio stations nationwide for simultaneous broadcast. The far-reaching, emotional impact of radio’s spoken word and its ability, through special sound effects, to create an illusion of reality for millions of people shocked even the shocker himself, Orson Welles, on a scale greater than anything America’s greatest newspaper tabloid editors ever could have dreamed of.

    In October of 1938 the nation was still suffering from the devastation of the Great Depression. War seemed imminent with Japan while Fascism was sweeping across Europe. The Soviets were making a pact with the Nazis who, only one month earlier, had invaded Czechoslovakia. The nation feared an impending second world war.

    The mood of the times often dictates the interpretation of the unknown. Science fiction was a popular subject of the day. Probes, rockets and manned flights to the moon were still things of the future, so speculation ran unchecked about life beyond Earth — particularly on Mars. “Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century” had been one of the most popular comic strips in U.S. newspapers since 1929. Fear of poverty, fear of Fascism, and fear of Communism fed the fear of the unknown — a fear Welles was able to exploit on the most fearful day of the year: Halloween Eve, Oct. 30, 1938.

    Tense, anxious Americans had returned home, hoping to escape “hard times” with some light entertainment on the radio. Many tuned into CBS’s “Mercury Theater on the Air” at 8 p.m. At first, listeners heard only the soothing music of an orchestra broadcasting “live from the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City.”

    Suddenly, the music was interrupted with the urgent, rapid-fire voice of the radio announcer reporting “several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars” and that the gas was moving toward Earth “with enormous velocity.”

    For the next hour, successive bulletins continued to interrupt the musical program. First, the gas proves to be a meteor-like object from Mars that shatters into the Earth at Grover’s Mill, near Princeton, N.J. As a newsman investigates the strange object, it begins to hum. An opening appears and the radio newsman describes “two luminous disks” peering out of the black hole. Then something snake-like slithers out. It is a tentacle, then many tentacles of something the size of a bear. The Martian is hideous, with black eyes “that gleam like a serpent” and a V-shaped mouth dripping saliva.

    The monster shoots out a beam of flame, destroying the newsman, six state troopers and 40 others at Grover’s Mill, “their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.”

    More Martian ships land. The monsters walk the Earth in great, stilt-like machines, destroying everything in their path with heat rays and poison gas. Those they don’t destroy they capture for food. No force or power made by man can stop them, until, finally, they are destroyed by simple bacteria in the Earth’s atmosphere.

    Orson Welles ends the broadcast by assuring listeners that “the ‘War of the Worlds’ has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theater’s own version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo!'”

    The broadcast proved to have considerable significance. The FCC launched an investigation and banned fictional news bulletins from the airwaves.

    The broadcast proved that a truly mass medium had the power to perpetrate a hoax simultaneously to communities across the world, and to do so with such rapidity that listeners could be fooled before the vetting could begin. With the ability to transmit messages instanteously to millions via social media, could another such hoax create even more panic and havoc today?

Michael Parks teaches a course on the impact of mass media on society.