The Night the Martians Landed
The evening of October 30th, 1938, was just like any other quiet Sunday
night to most of the people of America. Many families were at home reading the
papers or contentedly listening to the radio. There were two programs that night
which attracted large audiences. One was a comedy and the other a play
produced by the actor-writer Orson Welles. He was presenting a dramatization of
H. G. Wells’s classic science-fiction novel ‘The War of the Worlds’.
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.