<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The War of the Worlds panic broadcast took place on Halloween Eve (October 30, 1938). Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio drama company based in New York City, broadcast a dramatization of H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Adapted by Howard Koch, the script updated the story to the current day and moved the action to the East Coast of America. Although the program opened with an introduction, it segued into a pretend music show that was quickly interrupted by a series of news bulletins. After a series of strange explosions are sighted on Mars, an alien capsule lands in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Martians emerge and begin to incinerate all and sundry.

Due to a variety of circumstances, some people took the news broadcasts seriously and there were isolated incidents of panic and confusion. Many people tuned into the show late, after the introduction, and stopped listening before the end of the program when it becomes clear it’s a fiction. Listeners took to the streets, and rumors began to circulate. The next day, The New York Times reported: “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners . . . The broadcast . . . disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems . . . . At least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.”

One factor that may have led to the panic was the growing militarization of Adolph Hitler's Germany. It’s thought that many of the listeners thought that it was Germany invading, not Mars. Also, the device of fake news broadcasts had never been used before, and the listening public was used to assuming that anything presented as news must be true. Afterward, CBS was made to promise never to use the device again.

In the following years, the idea was picked up and repeated in other countries, with even more dire results. In Chile, troops had to be mobilized to keep the peace; in Ecuador, when listeners learned that the broadcast was a hoax, they set fire to the radio station, killing 15 people.

The events of that evening inspired a TV movie from ABC in 1975, The Night that Panicked America. The original broadcast is now a popular radio programming item around Halloween each year.