On October 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing panic among American listeners after converting the old novel into fake news.
By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles was on the front pages of newspapers along with headlines about the panic his CBS broadcast had caused.
Welles had been working in radio for several years; his most famous role was the voice of “The Shadow” in the mystery program of the same name.
The War of the Worlds chaos began when Welles introduced his radio play, followed by an announcer reading a routine local weather report forecasting little temperature change for the next twenty-four hours. Then, shifting away from the storyline, the announcer took listeners to a different place, saying, “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.”
The music played for some time, then the spooky time began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars; then it was cut again, and the dance music came back on. Another interruption followed in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.
The story continued as an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. He said “Good heavens… something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”
Listeners were terrified when told Martians mounted walking war machines and fired heat-ray weapons at people gathered around the crash site.
Then, an announcer reported that panic had broken out in the sites, with thousands of people desperately trying to flee.
The panic was real. In New Jersey, terrified people gathered, trying to escape the aliens. People called police for help and sought gas masks to save themselves from the toxic gas.
When news of the real-life panic got into the CBS studio during the broadcast, Welles went on the air to tell listeners that it was a play and that there were no Martians.
After that, CBS agreed to be more cautious in the future. Welles, fearing that the War of the Worlds would ruin his career, got a contract with a Hollywood studio, and in 1941 he directed, wrote, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane.
In an interview after the broadcast, Welles answered whether he knew how much terror he caused during the broadcast. He said, “Oh no, of course not. I was frankly terribly shocked to learn it did. You must realize that when I left the broadcast last night I went into a dress rehearsal for a play that’s opening in two days (Danton’s Death) and I’ve had almost no sleep. So I know less about this than you do. I haven’t read the papers. I’m terribly shocked by the effect it’s had. The technique I used was not original with me, or peculiar to the Mercury Theater’s presentation. It was not even new. I anticipated nothing unusual.”
In the following years, Welles directed a number of films such as The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil. He also had some acting roles, such as his role in The Third Man and A Man for All Seasons.
Orson Welles died on October 10, 1985, at the age of 70, at his home in Hollywood, California, after having a heart attack.
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