The War of the Worlds Broadcast: The Night America Thought Martians Had Invaded
It was the night before Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles broadcast The War of The Worlds live from a CBS studio at 485 Madison Avenue in New York City. Despite several notices that the broadcast was not real, some listeners didn’t realize it was fictional, and thought that aliens were actually invading Earth.
The radio drama was based on the 1898 novel The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The program was structured as a series of breaking news bulletins. The production was the 17th episode of a CBS radio series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
The program was designed to interrupt music and other “regularly scheduled programming” with fictional news bulletins reporting on an alien invasion in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and myself made the eleven miles from Princeton in ten minutes. Well, I . . . I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes.”
“…The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the . . . object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of . . . what would you say, Professor Pierson?”
And finally, the creatures emerge from the craft.
“Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . Ladies and gentlemen, 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. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It seems weighed down by . . . possibly gravity or something. The thing’s raising up. The crowd falls back now. They’ve seen plenty. This is the most extraordinary experience. I can’t find words . . . I’ll pull this microphone with me as I talk. I’ll have to stop the description until I can take a new position. Hold on, will you please, I’ll be right back in a minute.”
In the days following the broadcast, newspapers strongly criticized Welles and CBS, accusing them of being irresponsible and deceptive. The newspaper reaction was not simply a response to listeners' fear. Radio was becoming a serious competitor to print journalism, particularly as a source of breaking news. Some historians argue that newspapers seized on the broadcast as an opportunity to question radio's credibility and responsibility. The resulting coverage helped turn a real but limited public reaction into a story about nationwide mass hysteria.
Research revealed that not all listeners even realized the subject matter was extraterrestrials. Other listeners assumed the broadcast was describing some sort of natural disaster or a German invasion.
In September 1938, just a month before the broadcast, radio listeners had followed the Munich Crisis, when European leaders negotiated over Nazi Germany's demands concerning Czechoslovakia. Radio news bulletins about an international crisis were therefore familiar to American audiences. The fictional reports of explosions, military activity, and emergency announcements borrowed the style of news coverage that listeners had recently heard in real life.
The extent of the public reaction has been debated ever since. In the weeks following the broadcast, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril and his research team interviewed 135 people about their responses, publishing their findings in The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic in 1940. Later researchers have questioned both the scale of the reported panic and the methods used to document it. Contemporary newspapers described widespread fear, but subsequent examinations of the coverage found that many reports relied on anonymous accounts and stories that were difficult to verify.
The broadcast did frighten some listeners, but the familiar story of an entire nation believing that Martians had invaded New Jersey is not supported by the evidence as firmly as its enduring reputation might suggest.
Welles ended the broadcast by reassuring listeners that the program was indeed make-believe “If your doorbell rings and there's nobody there, that was no Martian; it's Halloween."
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