The War of the Worlds Broadcast of 1938: What Orson Welles Did and Whether Anyone Panicked

The program was the Halloween episode of a struggling anthology. The Mercury Theatre on the Air, an unsponsored CBS series in which the 23-year-old Orson Welles and his stage company adapted novels for radio, aired on Sunday evenings against NBC's Chase and Sanborn Hour, the most popular show in the country; for October 30 Welles had assigned the writer Howard Koch to update H.G. Wells's novel to the present and move it to New Jersey. Koch's script opened as a dance-band remote from a hotel ballroom, interrupted by bulletins about explosions on Mars, then by a reporter at a farm in Grover's Mill where a cylinder had landed, then by the reporter's death on air as the heat-ray swept the crowd. Within the first half hour the Martians had destroyed the state militia, released poison gas over Newark and reached Manhattan, and the announcer on a rooftop described the tripods wading the Hudson before the microphone went dead.

The second half of the hour was a conventional radio play, with Welles as an astronomer wandering a ruined New Jersey, and a closing announcement in which Welles, as himself, called the whole thing the Mercury's way of dressing up in a sheet and saying boo. Station identifications had been given at the top of the hour and at the forty-minute mark, as required. Anyone who listened from the beginning knew what it was; anyone who tuned in during the first act, after switching from the ventriloquist on NBC, heard what sounded like the end of the world.

Fewer people than the headlines said, and the headlines said millions. The C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned about five thousand households during the broadcast and found that two percent were listening to the Mercury Theatre, and none of them said they were hearing a news report; the program had no sponsor because it had no audience. Some listeners were frightened. Police switchboards in New Jersey and New York took calls, a few families in Grover's Mill loaded cars, a Princeton geologist drove out to look at the crater, and hospitals reported people treated for shock. What no one has ever documented, in eighty-seven years of looking, is a death, a suicide, a traffic pile-up or a stampede attributable to the program.

The scholarly figure came from Princeton. The psychologist Hadley Cantril's The Invasion from Mars (1940), funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, estimated that about a million of six million listeners had been frightened; his numbers were built from a small survey conducted weeks later, from the newspapers' own estimates, and from a definition of listener that Cantril's critics, then and since, have called generous. In 2013 the media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow reviewed the ratings, the police logs and the newspaper morgues and concluded that the panic had been, in the main, a story about a panic, and that the audience of the hoax was the readers of the next morning's papers.

The newspapers had a reason to believe it. Radio had been taking advertising from print for a decade, and the morning of October 31 gave the press a chance to show what the new medium could do to an unsupervised public: the New York Times ran "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact" across the front page, and papers in every city followed with stories of fleeing families and fainting women that were, on inspection, often the same three anecdotes retold. Editorials called for regulation. The FCC received several hundred letters, most of them praising the program, and declined to act, and the affair was over as news within a week; as a story it never ended.

Welles made sure of that. He was filmed the next morning looking stricken, apologizing and insisting he had never imagined anyone would believe it, and within a year he was in Hollywood with the contract that produced Citizen Kane; he told the story for the rest of his life, and each telling made the panic larger. Cantril's book gave it academic standing; textbooks in journalism and psychology repeated it; and by the 1960s the broadcast was the standard example of mass hysteria, taught to students who had never heard the program. It is one of the best-documented cases of a myth outgrowing its evidence, which is why it belongs in a UFO archive.

The panic that never quite happened has shaped policy for the arrival that never has. When Radio Quito staged a Spanish-language version on February 12, 1949, the Ecuadorian capital did riot: a crowd that learned it had been fooled burned the station, and at least six people died, which gave the myth its one real body count. Four years later the CIA's Robertson Panel, convened in January 1953 after the Washington flap, wrote that the danger of the flying-saucer reports was less the saucers than the public's reaction to them, recommended a campaign to strip the subject of its aura, and cited the fear that a real crisis could be hidden inside a wave of false ones. In 1960 a report to NASA by the Brookings Institution on the societal consequences of space activity discussed how a discovery of extraterrestrial life should be handled, and its authors' worry about panic came, by their own footnotes, from Cantril.

The Martians themselves have their own entry, the Martians of The War of the Worlds, which follows Wells's invaders from Lowell's canals through the broadcast to the films; the life on Mars article covers what the planet has actually turned out to hold. The history of UFOs begins in the same decade the broadcast's source was written, and the lesson the two share is the one Grover's Mill teaches every Halloween: what people are told they believed is often a better story than what they believed.