In 1938, a radio broadcast tricked thousands of people into believing that the world was being invaded by martians, or so the story goes.
“The War of the Worlds,” was an episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio show created by Orson Welles, who would later go on to direct and star in Citizen Kane.
The radio show was adapted from H.G. Wells’s novel “The War of the Worlds,” which itself was released just 40 years earlier in 1898.
The broadcast told the story of Martians invading earth and quickly crushing all military efforts to stop them. The first segment of the broadcast, about a half hour, mimicked a news broadcast, as if the invasion was actually taking place.
Many recounts of the event state that the fact that the program was presented this way alongside the lack of breaks in the first segment tricked many people into believing that the invasion was actually taking place.
The studio was reportedly bombarded by calls during and in the wake of the broadcast, and police and reporters were eager to speak to the people responsible.
With such uproarious panic, it seems undeniable that the broadcast had widespread influence. However, the actual number of people was likely very low.
The news coverage is likely what skyrocketed the story to the heights it reached. The actual number of concerned callers, though possibly in the thousands, was much lower than would be expected if it truly caused such widespread outrage.
In spite of the popularity of CBS as a studio, between the lack of popularity of the show, and the much more popular Chase and Sanborn Hour running at the same time, it is unlikely the show exceeded five thousand listeners, and much less actually believed the invasion was real.
All told, there were simply not enough people listening to the program for the panic to be truly as big as newspapers of the time stated, and even those who did believe it was real vastly misunderstood what it was about
