On October 30,1938, CBS Radio interrupted a live music program to deliver an important announcement. It said that astronomers had detected blue flames shooting up from the surface of Mars. The broadcast returned to its music, but it was soon interrupted again. This time the news said that a strange meteor had fallen on a farm near Grover’s Mill in New Jersey, and then CBS Radio switched over to continuous live coverage of the eerie scene around the meteor crash.
As the event unfolded, the terrified audience discovered that the meteor was actually some kind of spaceship. The reporter on the scene described the emergence of and alien from the spacecraft. “Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake,” he said, in an appropriately dramatic tone of voice. “Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s as large as a bear, and it glistens like we leather. But the face. It…it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate . . . The thing is rising up. The crowd falls back. They’ve seen talk. I’ll have to stop the description until I’ve taken a new position. Hold on, will you please, I’ll be back in a minute.”
The alien Martian crawled back into the crater, but re-emerged soon afterwards in a gigantic three-legged death machine, and quickly killed the 7,000 armed soldiers surrounding the crater. Then it proceeded across the landscape, joined by other Martians, blasting people and objects with heat rays, while releasing a poisonous black gas against which gas masks proved useless.
Listeners all over the United States began to panic. People filled the roads, hid in cellars, loaded guns, and even wrapped their heads in wet towels as protection from the Martians’ poison gas. People desperately wanted to defend themselves against aliens. Although the radio broadcast had warned listeners four times that this was a dramatized version of H.G. Wells’s story The War of the Worlds performed my Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater, people simply ignored those announcements. However, by the time the night was over, most people had learned that they were actually listening to a radio play. The fact is that the broadcast had reached approximately six million people and had produced a huge national scare at a time of the growing tension and anxiety leading up to World War II.