The listeners prepared themselves for an hour of comfortable excitement but, after the opening announcement, the play did not start. Instead there was dance music. Then, just as people were beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong, an announcer broke in with a dramatic ‘news-flash’. In an excited voice, he said that a professor in an observatory had just noticed ‘some gas explosions on the planet of Mars’. This news was followed by a stream of rapid on-the-spot broadcasts. These told the now uneasy listeners that ‘a metal spaceship containing Martians armed with death-rays’ had landed near Princeton, New Jersey, ‘killing about 1,500 persons’. The Martians had come to make war on the world.