The Truth About How An Ominous Radio Message Reportedly Sent Thousands Fleeing From Their Homes

In chilling tones, a narrator’s telling the listening public, “I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? There’s a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they’re turning into flame!” Terrifying stuff.

No wonder the audience was scared — and, apparently, thousands panicked and went out into the streets. The shock was reportedly enormous. Everyone says that Orson Welles’ famous broadcast caused terror, but when people have taken a closer look at the facts, it seems that the real picture is far more complicated.

The story’s well known now, with the tale of how the Mercury Theatre radio show caused a hysterical reaction being shared again and again over the decades. But at the turn of the century, some experts started to look more closely at the story. And a professor named W. Joseph Campbell has since claimed that those reports had little if any grounding in reality.

The broadcast we’re going to look at happened in 1938. Back then, FDR was president of the United States, and men who’d fought in the Civil War still lived and remembered. Superman was just beginning his life in Action Comics, and Joe Louis had recently KO’d Max Schmeling in round one.

But people outside of the stadium didn’t watch Louis defeat the German fighter. There was no TV. Sports came to the public through the radio set. The medium had taken off after World War One, with the first radio news broadcasts beginning in 1920. Soon, radio was spreading like wildfire, and by early 1922 a million households were enjoying the entertainment it offered.

By the time the 1930s rolled around, that million had grown to include the majority of homes in America. Families came together around the huge sets that were features of their living rooms. There, they’d listen to comedies and variety shows, enjoying hours in the company of such entertainers as Edgar Bergen and Jack Benny.

A Golden Age of Radio ensued, with such companies as the Columbia Broadcasting System (now better known as CBS) and Radio Corporation of America (RCA) leading the way in the U.S. So, prior to TV becoming the dominant entertainment medium during the 1950s, listeners had to create pictures of what they were hearing for themselves.

And the people turned to radio in droves. In 1947, research found that more than four-fifths of the U.S. population tuned in to the radio. They enjoyed music, of course, but also news and comedy. Perhaps somewhat surprising to today’s listeners is that one of the most popular radio genres was drama — and one of the age’s top dramatists was Orson Welles.

Welles had begun his career in theater, working as an actor in Ireland and then teaching drama in Illinois. In 1934, he trod the boards on Broadway for the first time, and a year later he was directing as part of a New Deal-funded production. It’s fair to say that his talent as a director quickly became apparent.

Welles’ interest in labor issues led to conflict with the project, though, so he set up Mercury Theatre with a partner in 1937. It was a huge success, leading to radio productions — which we’ll of course hear more about. Welles continued to act on stage, and he was also heard in the role of “The Shadow” on the radio.

The Mercury Theatre didn’t last, though, as financial issues struck. Welles set off for Los Angeles to try to make money, and he was more or less done with Broadway. He still had an interest in the theater and got involved in several productions outside the U.S., but he’d become much better known for his film work.

In fact, Welles entered the movie world with a bang. His first effort as a director was the much-acclaimed Citizen Kane in 1941. Arguably, it was too much too soon, as Welles himself would later say: “I began at the top and have been making my way down ever since.” Certainly, his subsequent films had their issues, and he didn’t tend to like many of them himself.

Welles didn’t just direct movies; he also acted. He wasn’t the world’s greatest actor — he liked to serve up his work with a side of ham — but he sounded good. His rich voice was heard in respected films such as The Third Man, but he’d also do some trashy projects to rake in the cash for his own productions.

Back in 1938, though, films were still in Welles’ future. His focus was The Mercury Theatre on the Air. This was a regular radio show that featured dramas based on pieces of literature. And on October 30 that year, one of these episodes was a working of War of the Worlds.

Now, War of the Worlds — a classic of science fiction written by H.G. Wells in the 1890s — has been adapted lots of times. But no one had done it the way Welles did. He took the creaky prose of the original novel and turned it into a bang up-to-date, exciting broadcast. And, it must be said, one that was convincingly real.

In the book, Martians land on Earth, specifically in the United Kingdom, sometime around 1900. They quickly overcome the Brits with their powerful firearms, but they have no defense against viruses, which finish them off eventually. It’s meant to be an allegory of imperialism: the world’s top colonial power is colonized itself, and it’s all pretty believable.

Now War of the Worlds was an interesting choice by Welles. After all, sci-fi wasn’t very popular in the 1930s. It was mostly a genre for kids, with the possibility of alien life not thought to be all that likely. So scriptwriter Howard Koch didn’t find the source materials to be very promising at first.

The big problem Koch faced was that the narrative voice in War of the Worlds is dry and, well, dull. And most of the Mercury shows took on a first-person point of view. Welles had an idea, though. He urged Koch to make the most of the idea of pretending to be a news broadcast early on in the show. That just might hook the listeners.

Well, that was the plan, but as the writing progressed, the news flashes became much more important. That first section swelled, leaving a long time before any announcement would be made that would clue listeners in that it was all just fiction. With the break between acts now coming very late in the piece, it became all the more plausible that this was a real news event and not a drama.

And when the broadcast went ahead, it caused something of a furor. Newspapers reported it in shocked tones. The next day’s The New York Times wrote of a “wave of mass hysteria.” The article claimed that thousands of people believed there really was a war between the worlds of Earth and Mars, with serious damage having been dealt to New York and New Jersey.

The newspaper made some bold claims about the show. It reported that entire families had been disturbed and church services had been disrupted. The broadcast had also apparently caused tailbacks and led to problems with telephone networks. And no fewer than 20 people had needed attention from a doctor for the emotional distress that they’d suffered.

Things seemed to have gotten to the residents of Newark. The newspaper claimed that in one block at least 20 households had run from the building, holding cloths to their mouths, in fear of a gas attack. It seemed they weren’t alone: across New York, people gathered in parks for safety. The police were inundated by phone calls from citizens desperate to know how they could defend themselves.

The New York Daily News reported in similar terms. It stated that when people heard the drama, they took it to be a news bulletin and reacted with “terror.” These weren’t just citizens in New Jersey, where the attack was supposed to have happened, either. No, the hysteria was apparently gripping people all the way across in San Francisco.

The Providence Journal also claimed that “weeping and hysterical women” had flooded its switchboard with demands for specifics of the deadly attack. And the Associated Press stated that in Pittsburgh a man discovered his wife carrying some poison, vowing that she’d not let the aliens get her. Of more stout heart was the San Francisco resident who offered to take the aliens on.

Well, that’s what the press claimed. But the truth is, none of it ever happened! No weeping women, no hordes running in panic, hardly anyone even slightly scared. The “hysteria” was almost nonexistent, with barely a soul tricked by the show. So why did the story get about that Welles had terrified the nation?

It turns out that the newspapers may not have been entirely honest about what was going on. It’s suggested that they drummed up the hysteria in order to damage the reputations of radio station owners. The New York Times slammed “radio officials” for the mix of fiction with realistic-sounding news.

The trade journal for the newspaper business also weighed in with its disapproval of radio as a provider of news. Editor and Publisher claimed, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove… that it is competent to perform the news job.”

Years after the so-called panic, it became obvious that at least one reporter accepted that their newspaper hadn’t been entirely honest. Ben Gross, who’d been the radio editor of the New York Daily News at the time, confessed in a 1954 autobiography that he’d traveled through empty streets on the night of the broadcast. But his newspaper still led the next day with banner headlines about the supposed hysteria.

And if the newspapers had wanted to manufacture a panic, then they did seem to have been very successful. With the passage of time, ever more people claimed to have listened to the show and become frightened. It reached a point at which you could imagine that nearly every citizen of the United States had heard the show. But, again, all was not as it seemed.

It turns out that the audience was a lot smaller than we might think. How do we know that? Well, pollsters contacted thousands of households by phone to figure out the ratings. When asked what they’d been doing, only two in a hundred said they’d been listening to a play or the “Orson Welles broadcast.” And nobody said they’d been tuned in to a news bulletin.

So going by those statistics, it seems that the vast majority of America was either tuned in to another show or just didn’t even have the radio switched on. That isn’t a shock, though, because there was a strong competitor in the same slot. The Chase and Sanborn Hour, a fun show featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, aired at the same time — and it had a huge audience.

People weren’t even able to listen to the Welles show everywhere in America. Some affiliates of CBS didn’t air it, preferring local content instead. The network’s president Frank Stanton would later say, “In the first place, most people didn’t hear it. But those who did hear it, looked at it is as a prank and accepted it that way.”

But even if there was no real hysteria, that didn’t stop the claim from becoming an urban legend. So much so that a college professor even wrote about it in 1940. Hadley Cantril, from Princeton, claimed that a million people had been scared by the broadcast. He based his view on an article that’d been written shortly after the show.

The poll that Cantril used claimed that more than twice as many people had listened to the show than any other source had estimated. But the academic got behind this data because he said the company responsible had polled little towns and households that didn’t have a phone, which were usually overlooked by rival firms.

You could argue, though, that these were the very people who’d be swayed by the press coverage, which Cantril accepted. He also bunched together people who said they were “excited,” “disturbed,” or “frightened” by the show with those who were “panicked.” But, of course, you can listen to something scary or exciting without panicking!

And when people in Cantril’s team actually looked into the some of the claims made about that night, they found surprising results. For instance, no one received treatment for shock at Newark’s St. Michael’s Hospital. And when the researchers asked New York hospitals if they’d treated anyone affected by the show, the hospitals had no records of anyone who had been.

The broadcast doesn’t seem to have caused any deaths, either. This is despite a report from The Washington Post that it caused the demise of a listener from Baltimore. One person did take legal action against the network on account of “nervous shock,” but the court was having none of it and sent them on their way.

A few days after reporting that there’d been panic, The Washington Post featured a letter that said otherwise. The writer noted that he’d seen “nothing approximating mass hysteria.” He then added, “In many stores radios were going, yet I observed nothing whatsoever of the absurd supposed ‘terror of the populace.’ There was none.” And the Chicago Tribune agreed that there’d been no one running about its city’s streets.

As for Welles, he made out that he hadn’t had a clue that anyone would think it was a real news broadcast. He told The Daily Princetonian so in November 1938, saying that “it was a terribly shocking experience to realize that I had caused such widespread terror” and apologizing for making the show.