Today in History—October 30: The Day New York Did Not Fall to Martian Forces

8 pm Eastern Time, October 30, 1938: In CBS’s New York studios, the young sensation of stage and radio Orson Welles is beginning a new episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Like many other Mercury Theatre episodes, it’s an adaptation of a literary classic. This week it’s H.G. Wells’s story of Martian invasion, The War of the Worlds.

Orson and scriptwriter Howard Koch moved the story from 1890s London to contemporary New York. Orson begins the show by reading the famous opening of Wells’s novel about Earth being observed by Martian “intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic.”

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The novel’s action is fully adapted for radio. After Orson’s reading from the novel, the broadcast cuts in on a weather report that is then followed by a dance music concert, but the smooth tango music is interrupted by breaking news of strange explosions on Mars.

The news grows more worrisome. A Martian craft lands in New Jersey. A Martian war machine annihilates the army sent against it. New York City falls to the Martians.

Good time for a commercial break.

This broadcast has become legendary for the nationwide panic it induced, with Orson’s use of radio news tropes convincing America that Mars had invaded. But just how pervasive was the panic?

Recent reexamination of the historical record, particularly letters written to the FCC about the broadcast, suggests: not very.

Few listeners claimed that they were convinced. Mercury Theatre was also up against the much more popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. The presentation of fiction as news was nothing new. Radio programs already blurred the lines between fact and fiction by having actors portray newsmakers.

Because the Sudetenland crisis in Europe had happened the previous month, some listeners thought they were listening to an account of a German invasion. The few instances of panic were magnified by newspapers eager to discredit the new medium of radio.

Orson delivered an apologetic news conference the next day and went on to even greater fame and success. Hollywood came calling, and studios offered him more and more lavish contracts, until he finally accepted. But that is another story…