Halloween
We know now that in the early days of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were being scrutinized and studied...Minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic regarded the earth with envious eyes, and slowly drew their plans against us.
Thus the stage could be set again for what was surely the most successful of all horror dramatizations, if success is measured in terms of thousands sent screaming into the night. The first paragraph is recent news. The second is from Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' novella War of the Worlds.
As far as we know, there are no other intellects in the cosmos, vast, cool, unsympathetic or otherwise. But that does not prevent each and every diaphanous strand of evidence from weaving in our collective imagination a tapestry of civilizations vastly superior to our own. So, when Columbia Broadcasting System's Mercury Theater staged a radio version of Wells' thriller as a simulated newscast, its effect was to send thousands across the nation into a panicked frenzy, thousands who believed that they were facing an invincible army of Martian invaders.
The show aired coast-to-coast over WABC from New York on the evening of October 30, 1938. Coincidentally, just an hour and a half before War of the Worlds went on, electric lights alternately dimmed and brightened in Bergen County, New Jersey, creating a buildup for terror.
Most listeners ignored or missed the play's introduction. They failed to associate the play with the program listings. They ignored three announcements emphasizing the fictional nature of the play. The show went on the air at eight o'clock, and by 8:15 the nation was convinced of the reality of a Martian invasion.
In New York City, families rushed out of their houses, wet handkerchiefs over their faces, to flee what they believed to be a gas attack. A team of geologists traveled to Dutch Neck, New Jersey, five miles north of Princeton, to investigate the reported meteor fall that had brought the alien invaders. (In Wells' story, the Martians arrived in metal cylinders which descended through our atmosphere like shooting stars.) All they found was a gaggle of sightseers, also looking. The invasion seemed so real to many that they contacted police stations and newspaper offices to say that they had actually seen it. Later, one family was found huddled in a field, waiting for the end.
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