A Halloween-eve radio drama supposedly sent America into a panic in 1938. The real panic was mostly a newspaper invention.
On October 30, 1938, at 8 p.m. Eastern, CBS Radio aired The Mercury Theatre on the Air's adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, directed and narrated by Orson Welles. Writer Howard Koch moved the Martian invasion from Victorian England to Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
The first 40 minutes were staged as a live newscast, with dance music repeatedly interrupted by bulletins about a Martian cylinder landing, the military response, and an invasion of New York City. The final 20 minutes were a conventional drama. Disclaimers aired at four points during the show and again at 10:30, 11:30, and midnight.
The script was written in a rush. Koch was assigned the job on October 24 and had a first draft by October 26, and CBS demanded about 28 changes to reduce realism, swapping real institutions for fictional ones.
The legend of national panic came from a Princeton study by Hadley Cantril, which estimated 6 million people heard the show, 1.7 million believed it was a news bulletin, and 1.2 million were frightened. Modern scholars note serious flaws in its methodology.
A contemporary C.E. Hooper survey found that only about 2 percent of the 5,000 households called were listening to the drama. Most were tuned to something else, including the popular Edgar Bergen show on NBC.
Historians now see little evidence of mass hysteria. Only about 27 percent of the letters one historian analyzed came from frightened listeners, and no deaths, hospitalizations, or suicides were ever confirmed despite newspaper claims. Papers ran at least 12,500 articles within three weeks, and scholars argue the print industry, threatened by radio's growing ad revenue, played up scattered reports.
At a press conference on October 31, Welles apologized for any distress. His closing line on the broadcast had tied it to the holiday: "If your doorbell rings and there's nobody there, that was no Martian; it's Halloween." The FCC declined to punish Welles or CBS.
A 1949 Spanish-language version in Quito, Ecuador triggered real panic. When listeners learned it was a hoax, crowds rioted and attacked the radio station and a newspaper, and at least seven people died.