On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio Network decided to do something a little spooky for Halloween: an adaptation of HG Wells’ sci-fi horror novel War of the Worlds, written and directed by Hollywood legend Orson Welles.
The radio adaptation likely would not have become noteworthy if it wasn’t for the decision to present the first half as sort of a “breaking news” segment that reported aliens with heat ray guns had landed in New Jersey and were headed to New York City. Urban legend has it that most viewers switched over after a much more popular show went to a musical interlude, missing the part where Welles explains that the following program is a work of fiction.
Welles, who was 23 at the time, used the medium of radio to his advantage. At one point, a “reporter” was burned alive by the aliens, and the radio was filled with six seconds of silence, a revolutionary new way to make a story scary. Legend has it that listeners were so convinced by Welles’ performance that they believed the program to be real, especially with the looming threat of Hitler and World War II; they ran out of restaurants, movie theaters, weddings, hid in basements or the countryside, and began arming themselves. Or did they?
Modern Historians Believe the Reaction May Have Been Exaggerated
New evidence suggests that only a small fraction of the supposed “million” listeners were actually fooled into thinking their alien-caused doom was near. How did such a specific urban legend come to be so well known? The answer is a war of different worlds: newspaper vs. the radio.
Slate reports that radio, growing massively in popularity, was taking money from newspaper institutions, and they felt the need to fight back. Papers like The New York Times exaggerated the reaction to discredit radio as a news source and paint broadcasters as irresponsible. In reality, only roughly 2% of listeners were tuned into The War of the Worlds, and most were aware it was a “prank”. As the years passed, the legend grew, and it remains one of the most famous radio broadcasts of all time nearly nine decades later.
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