Disturbing History - The War Of The Worlds

Episode Date: March 1, 2026

On October 30th, 1938, a twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds that supposedly sent millions of Americans into mass hysteria. But did it really happen that way?In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull back the curtain on one of the most misunderstood events in broadcasting history. We walk through Depression-era America and a nation already on edge from the looming threat of war in Europe, break down how Welles and writer Howard Koch crafted a broadcast so realistic that it mimicked the exact style of emergency news coverage listeners had been hearing for months, and then we get into what actually happened that night versus what the newspapers wanted you to believe happened.Turns out the newspaper industry had every reason to exaggerate the panic because radio was eating their lunch, and a flawed 1940 Princeton study cemented the myth for decades.We also tie it all into the modern UFO disclosure movement and how the exaggerated panic narrative has been used for nearly ninety years to justify keeping the public in the dark. This one goes deep, and it might change the way you think about media, trust, and the truth.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

a true crime podcast that unpacks real-life horrors, one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge. off. We're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets

to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact. This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Tonight, we're diving into one of the strangest, most fascinating, and honestly most misunderstood events in American broadcasting history. And I got to tell you, the more I dug into this one, the more I realize that almost everything we think we know about it is either dead, wrong or at the very least, a whole lot more complicated than the version you got in school. We're talking about the night of October 30th, 1938, the night before Halloween.

A Sunday evening in Depression-era America, when most of the country was gathered around their radio sets, the way families would later gather around television sets, and the way we all now stare at our phones. Radio wasn't just entertainment back then. It was the lifeline. It was how you got your news, how you heard your president speak, how you experienced drama, comedy, music, everything. If you didn't have a radio in 1938, you were basically living in a cave. And on that particular Sunday evening, a 23-year-old theatrical prodigy named Orson Wells and his Mercury Theater on the Air Troop decided to perform an adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds. Now, they didn't just read the book a lot.

loud. That would have been boring, and Orson Wells didn't do boring. No, what they did was transformed the novel into something that sounded exactly like a real radio broadcast, complete with fake news bulletins, fake field reporters, fake government officials, and fake sounds of alien war machines destroying everything in their path. And according to the legend, the story that's been passed down for nearly 90 years now, what happened next was absolute pandemonium. mass hysteria, people fleeing their homes in terror, traffic jams on the highways, families huddled in basements with wet towels over their faces to protect against Martian poison gas, switchboards across the country lighting up like Christmas trees, suicides, heart attacks, armed citizens heading for the hills

of New Jersey to fight the alien invaders. It's a hell of a story, right? But here's the thing, and here's why I wanted to cover this on disturbing history. because the real story is actually way more interesting and way more disturbing than the myth. Because when you start pulling at the threads of this thing, what unravels isn't just a tale about gullible Americans getting scared by a radio show. What you find is a story about the incredible power of media, the fragility of public trust, the manipulation of narrative by newspapers who had their own acts to grind,

and how a single night in 1938 essentially wrote the playbook for every media panic, every misinformation crisis and every debate about fake news that we're still dealing with today. So tonight, we're going to separate the fact from the fiction. We're going to talk about what actually happened, who actually panicked, and why. We're going to talk about a young genius who nearly destroyed his career before it ever really started. We're going to talk about a newspaper industry that was terrified of radio and saw an opportunity to discredit its biggest competitor. And then, before we close this one out,

I want to tie it into something that's happening right now. Because when you look at the way information about UFOs and what the government now calls UAPs is being disclosed, debated, and consumed by the public today, well, let's just say the ghosts of October 30, 1938, are very much still with us. To really understand what happened that night, you've got to understand the world people we're living in.

Because context is everything. And the America of late October 1938, was a very different place psychologically than what we know today. These people weren't stupid. They weren't uniquely gullible, but they were scared, and they had every right to be. The Great Depression was still dragging on. Now technically, the economy had started to recover somewhat under FDR's New Deal programs. But then in 1937, the country got slammed with what economists called the Roosevelt Recession.

Unemployment, which had been slowly declining, shot back up. to nearly 20%. People who thought the worst was behind them suddenly found themselves right back in the soup line. The psychological toll of that, of thinking you're finally climbing out of the hole only to get knocked back down. That's the kind of thing that breeds anxiety on a massive scale. But the economic situation was only part of it. What was really keeping Americans up at night in the fall of 1938 was what was happening across the Atlantic Ocean. Adolf Hitler was on the March, and I mean that literally. In March of 1938, Germany had annexed Austria in what Hitler called the Anschluss, the joining, and the rest of the world had basically stood there with its mouth

hanging open. Then, throughout the summer and into September, Hitler set his sights on the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia. He wanted it. He said it belonged to Germany, and the Czech said no. For weeks, it looked like Europe was going to explode and to another World War. And remember, World War I, the Great War, the war to end all wars, had ended only 20 years earlier. There were millions of Americans who remembered it vividly. Many of them had fought in it. The idea of another one, potentially even bigger and deadlier, was absolutely terrifying.

Americans had been glued to their radios throughout September 1938, listening to real breaking news bulletins about the Sudatenland crisis. They'd heard the voice of Hitler himself, ranting in German, translated by breathless correspondence. They'd heard Neville Chamberlain's anguished attempts at diplomacy. They'd heard the tension, the uncertainty, the very real possibility that bombs were about to start falling on European cities. And then, on September 30th, exactly one month before the broadcast we're talking about tonight, Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving that little piece of paper and declaring, peace for our time. The Munich Agreement.

Britain and France had essentially handed Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise he wouldn't take anything else. And while some people were relieved, a lot of people knew they could feel it in their bones. That this wasn't peace. This was just a pause. The wolf had been fed, and he'd be hungry again soon. So when I tell you that the American public in late October 1938

was primed for bad news, I'm not exaggerating. These were people who'd been battered by economic catastrophe, who'd spent weeks listening to their radios for real news about a potential real war, and who were deeply, fundamentally uncertain about the future. Their nerves were shot. Their trust in the stability of the world was shaken.

And into that psychological landscape walked Orson Wells with his little radio play about Martians. Now, here's something else you need to understand. radio in 1938 wasn't like any media we have today. It occupied a unique position in American life that's honestly hard to overstate. By 1938, about 80% of American households had a radio. That's an astonishing number when you think about it, especially during the Depression,

when plenty of people couldn't afford much of anything. But they had their radios. A family might skip meals, might patch their clothes until there was nothing left to patch, might let the car sit because they couldn't afford gas, but they kept their radio, because the radio was everything. It was the way President Roosevelt spoke directly to the American people

through his famous fireside chats. And those chats mattered. Roosevelt understood the power of the medium in a way no politician before him had. He spoke calmly, warmly, directly, like a neighbor sitting in your living room. And for millions of Americans going through the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. Those chats were a lifeline.

They trusted the voice coming out of that box, and that trust extended beyond politics. Radio News was still relatively new, but it had already established itself as fast and authoritative. When something big happened, radio was how you found out, not the morning paper, not the newsreel at the movie theater next week.

Radio. Right now. In real time. This was revolutionary, and it created a relationship between the listener and the medium that was fundamentally different from the relationship between a reader and a newspaper. When you read a newspaper, you know on some level that the information has been filtered, edited, composed, printed, and delivered. There are layers between you and the event, but when a voice comes out of your radio telling you something is happening

right now, when you can hear the urgency in the reporter's voice, when you can hear sounds in the background, it feels immediate, it feels real. It feels like truth. And nobody in America, as of October 1938, had ever had a reason to seriously doubt it. The idea that someone would use the radio to deliberately present fiction as though it were fact, that simply hadn't occurred to most people. Why would it? The radio was where you got the news.

The president spoke to you on the radio. Why would anyone lie to you on the radio? This is crucial to understanding what happened. It's not that people were stupid. it's that the medium was still new enough and still trusted enough that most Americans had never developed the kind of media literacy we take for granted today. They had no reason to question what they heard. There was no precedent for it.

And now we need to talk about the man at the center of all this because he's one of the most remarkable figures in American cultural history. And in October of 1938, he was barely old enough to legally drink. George Orson Wells was born on May 6, 1935. 15 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. From the very beginning, he was one of those people who seemed to operate on a different level than everyone around him. His mother Beatrice was a concert pianist and a suffragette. His father, Richard, was an inventor and a businessman.

They recognized early on that their son was something special, and they nurtured it. By the age of 10, Orson Wells was already performing in theater productions. By 16, he'd talked his way into the Gate Theater in Dublin, Ireland, literally showing up at the door and claiming with that booming voice and that absolute confidence that would define his entire life that he was a Broadway star. He wasn't, of course. He was a teenager from Wisconsin, but they believed him. People always believed Orson Wells because he had that quality, that magnetism, that voice, that sheer force of personality that made you want to believe him. By his early 20s, Wells was already a legitimate star of the New York theater scene.

He'd co-founded the Mercury Theater with John Hausman in 1937, and their productions were the talk of the town. They were innovative, daring, politically charged. Their version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was set in fascist Italy and was a thinly veiled commentary on Mussolini and Hitler. It was brilliant, and it packed the house. In the summer of 1938, CBS gave the Mercury Theater a weekly radio slot, Sunday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern.

It was called the Mercury Theater on the air, and each week they'd adapt a classic novel or story for radio. They'd done Dracula, Treasure Island, a tale of two cities, the Count of Monte Cristo. The show was critically acclaimed, but not exactly a ratings juggernaut. In fact, it was getting consistently trounced in the ratings by what was on at the same time over on NBC, a hugely popular variety show called The Chase and Sandborn Hour, starring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. Yeah, you heard that right. A ventriloquist on radio.

I know. The 1930s were a different time. But here's the thing. The competition actually plays into our story. Because the Chase and Sandborn Hour typically featured a musical act about 12 to 15 minutes into the show. And a lot of listeners would dial hop during that musical interlude, scanning the dial for something else to listen to,

until Edgar Bergen came back on. And what they'd find, on October 30th, when they turned that dial to CBS, would be the most convincing fake news broadcast in history, already in progress, with no context for what they were hearing. But we'll get to that. First, let's talk about how the broadcast itself came together. The idea to adapt H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds for the Mercury Theater's Halloween episode wasn't Orson Wells originally. It actually came from John Hausman, Wells producing partner, and from a writer named Howard Koch, who'd been brought on to help with the script writing. Now, Houseman would later claim that the idea came up relatively casually.

They were looking for something seasonal, something appropriate for Halloween week, and someone suggested the old Wells novel. It had been published in 1898, so by 1938 it was 40 years old, and a well-known classic of science fiction. The story, Martians invade Earth, devastate everything with their heat rays and poison gas, and are ultimately defeated not by human weapons, but by bacteria, having no immunity to Earth's microorganisms, was a staple of the genre. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. But adapting it presented a challenge. The novel is set in England, told in a somewhat dry, retrospective first-person narration. Just reading it aloud would be dull radio. And Orson Wells didn't do dull. He wanted something innovative, something that would grab the listener and not let go. The breakthrough idea, and this is where it gets really interesting,

was to present the story not as a conventional dramatization, but as a series of simulated news broadcasts. The format would mimic exactly what Americans had been hearing on their radios for real over the past several months. The interruptions, the bulletins, the increasingly panicked field reporters, the authoritative sounding officials. It would be a mirror held up to the real thing. Howard Koch was given the assignment to write the script, and by all accounts, he wasn't exactly

thrilled about it. He found the source material dated and didn't think it would translate well to radio. But he sat down and got to work, and what he produced over the course of about a week was remarkable. Coke made several key decisions that would prove critical. First, he moved the setting from England to the United States, specifically to Grover's Mill, New Jersey, a tiny real hamlet in Mercer County. Why Grover's Mill? Coke later said he was looking at a map of New Jersey and his pencil happened to land there. Whether that's true or apocryphal, it was an inspired choice, because the specificity of the location gave the story a sense of reality that a fictional town never could have. Second, Coke structured the first two-thirds of the broadcast

almost entirely as a series of fake news bulletins that interrupted what appeared to be a normal evening of radio programming. The show would begin with a weather report and then transition to what sounded like a live broadcast of music from a hotel ballroom, the kind of thing that was absolutely routine on radio in 1938. Then gradually, news bulletins would begin to interrupt the music. At first they'd be brief and restrained. Astronomers had observed unusual explosions on the surface of Mars. Then they'd become more frequent and more urgent. A strange cylindrical object had fallen from the sky at a farm near Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Then a reporter would be on the scene. Then things would begin to go very, very wrong. Third, and this is important, Coke modeled the style of the bulletins

very closely on the kind of real-time radio reporting Americans had just experienced during the Munich crisis. The breathless tone, the interruptions, the confusion, the official statements followed by contradictions. It was all drawn from the real thing, and it was terrifyingly effective. When Coke delivered his first draft, Orson Wells wasn't satisfied. He thought it was too tame, too obviously fictional. He wanted it to feel more real. So he and the cast worked through the script during rehearsals in the days leading up to the broadcast, punching it up, making the performances more naturalistic, adding details that would enhance the illusion. Wells himself would play two roles in the broadcast. He'd provide the opening and closing narration as a third-person storyteller,

and he'd also play Professor Richard Pearson, a Princeton astronomer who served as the broadcast's main expert character, the kind of calm, authoritative voice of science that listeners would instinctively trust. For the role of the field reporter at Grover's Mill, arguably the most critical role in the entire production, Wells cast Frank Reddick, and Reddick did something that was kind of brilliant and kind of creepy. To prepare for the part, he listened over and over again to recordings of Herbert Morrison's famous on-the-scene radio report of the Hindenburg disaster from May, 1937. You know the one. Oh, the humanity, Morrison's voice, cracking with real emotion as he watched the great airship burst into flames. Reddick studied that recording,

internalized the rhythms, the rising panic, the way Morrison's professional composure gradually disintegrated in the face of real horror, and then he applied those same vocal techniques to his performance. The result was that when Reddick's character, reporter Carl Phillips, stood in that field in Grover's Mill and described what he was seeing climb out of that alien cylinder, when his voice began to shake when you could hear him struggling to maintain his composure. It sounded achingly, convincingly real. It sounded like a man who was actually watching something terrifying happen, because in a sense, Frank Reddick had trained himself on the real thing. Other members of the Mercury Theater cast were given similarly specific assignments. Kenny Delmar played a

character clearly modeled on FDR, a calm, measured secretary of the interior, who addressed the with reassurances that were deeply familiar in cadence and tone to Roosevelt's fireside chats. Ray Collins played a character very clearly inspired by real CBS news correspondence of the era. Every voice, every character, every line was calibrated to sound exactly like the real people and the real broadcast that Americans heard every single day. Now here's something that gets overlooked in almost every telling of this story, and it matters a lot. The broadcast included disclaimers. It wasn't presented completely cold with no identification.

At the very top of the show, before anything else happened, an announcer clearly stated, the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on the air in the War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. There it was. Clear as day. The name of the program. The name of the performer. The name of the source novel. the name of the author. If you heard that opening, you knew exactly what you were about to hear,

a radio drama based on a science fiction novel. The problem was that a lot of people didn't hear that opening. Remember what I said about Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? The Chase and Sandborn Hour started at the same time on NBC, and it had a much larger audience. Millions of people were listening to Bergen at 8 p.m. when the Mercury Theater broadcast began. And when the Chase and Sanborn Hour hit its first musical interlude, roughly 12 to 15 minutes in,

a significant number of those listeners did what they always did. They turned the dial, looking for something else to listen to until the comedy came back on. And what they found, when they landed on CBS, was what sounded exactly like a genuine news broadcast about some kind of catastrophic event unfolding in New Jersey. They'd missed the introduction. They'd missed the disclaimer. They had no context. They were just hearing what sounded like real radio news.

The kind of radio news they'd been trained by months of crisis coverage to take very, very seriously. There were additional disclaimers later in the broadcast. There was a station break about 40 minutes in where the announcer again identified the program as a Mercury Theater production. And Orson Wells himself broke character at the very end of the broadcast to reassure listeners that it had all been fiction. his famous little sign-off where he compared the broadcast to dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. But by the time those later disclaimers aired, the damage, whatever damage there actually was, had already been done. Because the first 40 minutes of the broadcast were the ones that sounded like real news, and they were absolutely relentless. Let me walk you through what listeners heard that night, because the craft of this thing really was extraordinary.

The show opens with that announcer introduction I mentioned, the one that clearly identifies it as a Mercury Theater production. Then Orson Wells' deep, resonant voice comes in, narrating a slightly modified version of the novel's famous opening lines. He talks about how in the early years of the 20th century, the world was being watched by intelligences greater than man's. It's moody, atmospheric, literary, classic Wells. But then, and this is where the genius kicks in, the narration ends, and we hear what sounds like a routine weather report. Boring stuff, temperature, precipitation forecasts. Then the announcer says something like, We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York,

where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquelho and his orchestra. And we hear dance music, pleasant, unremarkable, the kind of thing that was absolutely standard. radio fair in 1938. There's nothing alarming about it, nothing unusual. It sounds exactly like a thousand other evenings of radio programming. Then the first interruption comes.

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. And the bulletin reports that several astronomers have observed what appear to be incandescent gas explosions occurring at regular intervals on the surface of the planet Mars. The report quotes a Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory in Chicago.

It's brief, measured, scientific, not alarming, just interesting. Then the music resumes. This is so important to understanding how the broadcast worked. It didn't start with screaming and explosions. It started slowly, casually, the way real news develops. A minor story. A curiosity. Something the astronomers are keeping an eye on.

and then back to your regular programming. A few minutes later, another interruption. This one's a little more detailed. A Professor Pearson, that's Wells' character, is interviewed at his Princeton Observatory. He's calm, authoritative, maybe even a little dismissive of the suggestion that the disturbances on Mars could be anything significant.

Life on Mars? He doesn't rule it out, but his tone suggests he finds the idea somewhat unlikely. He's the voice of rational science. He's reassuring. This is masterful psychological manipulation, because by having the expert downplay the situation early on, Coke and Wells established a baseline of normalcy.

When that expert's calm eventually cracks, when even the scientist begins to lose his composure, the effect on the listener is devastating. This is the critical window. This is roughly when the first musical interlude hits on the Chase and Sanborn Hour over on NBC, and an unknown but significant number of listeners start scanning the dial. And what they hear when they land on CBS is a reporter, Carl Phillips, played by Frank Reddick, broadcasting live from a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey,

where a large cylindrical object has crashed into the earth. Phillips is describing the scene, the crowd of onlookers, the police, the strange humming coming from the cylinder. His tone excited but professional. He's doing his job. He's being a reporter. Then the cylinder begins to open, and this is where Reddick's preparation pays off. His voice begins to change. The professional composure starts to slip. He describes what he's seeing, something emerging from the cylinder, something with tentacles, something that's looking at the crowd with eyes that seem to burn. His breathing gets faster. His sentences get shorter. You can hear the fear creeping in, and around the edges. Then the creature produces a heat ray and Reddick, channeling that Morrison

Hindenburg energy, describes the carnage, people burning, people running, screaming. The sound effects team goes to work. There's a roaring sound, explosions, static. Phillips is screaming into his microphone. Then his voice cuts off. Dead silence. Nothing. Just dead air. And then a shaken studio announcer comes back on and says something to the effect of, ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill. Evidently, there's some difficulty with our field transmission. Dead air on radio is terrifying in a way that's hard to explain to people who've grown up with television and the internet.

In 1938, if you were listening to a live broadcast and it just stopped. That was deeply wrong. Something had happened. something bad, and the human imagination, left in that silence, will fill in horrors far worse than anything a sound effects team could produce. From this point on, the broadcast escalates with breathtaking speed, and it does so using the exact rhythms and conventions of real emergency broadcasting. News bulletins come faster and faster. The military has been dispatched to Grover's Mill. There are reports of other cylinders landing across the country. The creatures,

now clearly identified as coming from Mars, have assembled some kind of enormous walking war machine. They have heat rays. They have poison gas. They are destroying everything in their path. A brigadier general comes on and declares martial law in parts of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. His voice is clipped, military, authoritative. He sounds exactly like a real military officer making a real emergency announcement. Then we hear from the Secretary of the Interior, Kenny Delmar's Roosevelt-esque character. He addresses the nation, urging calm, pledging the full resources of the government to meet the threat. He sounds so much like FDR that CBS actually received complaints, not about the alien invasion being fake, but about someone impersonating the president.

Communications are failing. Roadways are jammed. The Martian machines are wading across the Hudson River. They're approaching New York City. There are descriptions of the New York skyline being obscured by clouds of poison gas. People are fleeing through the streets. Bodies are everywhere. And then the last voice we hear before the station break is a lone ham radio operator,

calling into the void, asking if anyone is out there. 2X2L calling CQ. Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone on the air? Isn't there anyone? Silence. That silence lasts about 10 seconds, but if you're a listener who believes what you've just heard is real, those 10 seconds last an eternity. Because what that silence implies is the end. Not just the end of a broadcast, but the end of everything. The Martians have won. New York is

gone. Civilization is falling, and you're sitting in your living room, alone with the silence and the horror. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back. after these messages. Then the announcer comes back and this time he clearly identifies the program as a Mercury Theater production of the War of the Worlds. For listeners who've been there from the beginning, this is just the intermission. But for the dial hoppers, for the people who've been listening for 15 or 20 minutes without any context, this is the first time they're hearing that what they just experienced was fiction. The question is, how many people heard this station break? and of those who didn't hear it, how many were already on the phone or out the door,

or otherwise too preoccupied to hear it, even if their radios were still on. The second half of the broadcast is much more conventional. It drops the fake news format entirely and becomes a first-person narration by Professor Pearson, Wells' character, wandering through the devastated landscape of New Jersey, encountering survivors, and eventually reaching New York City to discover that the Martians have all died from bacterial infection. It's a straight dramatization, and it sounds like what it is,

a radio play. By this point, nobody's being fooled. But the damage, such as it was, had been done in that first 40 minutes. Wells signed off with his now-famous Coda, speaking directly to the audience in his own voice. This is Orson Wells, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you

that the War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo. So goodbye everybody. And remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch. And if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. It's Halloween. It was charming. It was disarming. And by the time he said,

it, all hell had already broken loose. Or so the story goes. So what really happened? Let's start with what we know for certain. The switchboards at CBS, at local police stations, at newspaper offices, and at various other institutions did light up during and immediately after the broadcast. That's not in dispute. People called. A lot of people called. By some estimates, CBS received over a thousand phone calls that evening. Police departments in New Jersey and New York received hundreds more. Newspapers were swamped, but here's where we need to start being careful about what we're actually saying, because a lot of people called and mass nationwide panic are two very different things. Some callers were genuinely frightened. There's no question about that. There are

documented accounts of people who heard the broadcast, believed it was real, and were scared. Some of them called CBS or their local newspaper or the police to find out what was going on. Some of them ran to their neighbor's houses. Some of them got in their cars. Some of them prayed. But the key question, and the one that historians have been arguing about for decades, is how many, and how panicked, and for how long. What happened the next morning is, in many ways, more interesting and more consequential than what happened the night before. On October 31st, 1938, Halloween morning, the American newspaper industry went absolutely berserk. The front pages were apocalyptic.

The headlines screamed about mass hysteria, nationwide panic, families fleeing in terror. The New York Times ran the headline, radio listeners in panic, taking war drama as fact. The Daily News declared that fake radio war stirs terror through U.S. Papers across the country ran similar headlines, many of them accompanied by dramatic accounts of terrified citizens, clogged highways, and overwhelmed emergency services. And here's where the story gets really interesting, because many of these reports were exaggerated, poorly sourced, or outright fabricated. And the newspapers had every reason in the world to exaggerate them. See, by 1938, the newspaper industry was terrified of radio. and I mean genuinely, existentially terrified.

Radio had emerged as a serious news competitor, and it had several enormous advantages over print. It was faster. You could hear about an event as it happened, instead of reading about it the next morning. It was free. You didn't have to buy a paper every day. And it was intimate.

That voice in your living room felt personal in a way that newsprint couldn't match. Newspapers had been losing advertising revenue to radio for years. They'd tried to fight back in what was called the press radio war of the early 1930s, attempting to restrict radio stations' access to wire service news.

But they'd largely lost that battle, and by 1938, they were watching their dominance erode in real time. So when the War of the World's broadcast happened, the newspaper industry saw an opportunity, and they seized it with both hands. Here was proof, tangible dramatic proof, that radio was dangerous.

That radio couldn't be trusted. That radio was irresponsible. That the American people needed the steady, reliable, fact-checked reporting of newspapers. Not the reckless, unvetted, sensationalized garbage coming out of their radio sets. The newspapers didn't just report the panic. They amplified it. They took every anecdote they could find, blew it up to maximum size, and plastered it across their front pages.

The more terrified Americans appeared, the better the story served the newspaper's interests. Every person who panicked because of the radio broadcast was implicitly, a person who would have been better off reading the newspaper instead. This is not conspiracy theory, by the way. This is documented media history. Multiple historians have pointed out the remarkable speed and enthusiasm with which newspapers covered the panic,

and the extent to which the coverage was disproportionate to the actual events. The narrative of mass panic got a major moment. boost in 1940, when a Princeton psychologist named Hadley Cantrell published a study called The Invasion from Mars, a study in the psychology of panic. Cantrell's study was based on interviews with 135 people who reported being frightened by the broadcast, and it became the foundational academic text on the event. There's just one problem. Cantrell's methodology was, by modern standards, pretty lousy. His sample wasn't random. He specifically sought out people who'd been frightened, people who had contacted newspapers or authorities after the broadcast.

He wasn't studying a representative cross-section of the listening audience. He was studying the most extreme reactions, and then using those extreme reactions to draw conclusions about the broader public. It's like if you wanted to study how people react to spicy food, but you only interviewed people who'd called poison control after eating a ghost pepper. You'd conclude that spicy food causes widespread medical emergencies, when in reality, most people eat spicy food just fine. Cantrell estimated that about 6 million people heard the broadcast, and that roughly 1.7 million of them believed it was real, with about 1.2 million being genuinely frightened. These numbers have been repeated endlessly in textbooks and documentaries, but they've also been

seriously questioned by later researchers. The sociologist David Miller, the media historians Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford, and others have argued that Cantrell's numbers were almost certainly inflated. They point out that the total audience for the Mercury Theater on the air that night was probably closer to three or four million, not six million, and that even among those who tuned in, the vast majority either heard the disclaimers and knew it was fiction, or figured it out quickly on their own. In 2013, a pair of researchers named Jefferson Pooley and Michael Sokolow published a widely cited article in Slate titled The Myth of the War of the World's Panic, in which they argued persuasively that the entire

event has been drastically overblown. They pointed to the C.E. Hooper ratings, the Nielsen of the 1930s, which showed that the Mercury Theater had a minuscule audience share that night, roughly 2%. Even if every single one of those listeners had panicked, it wouldn't have constituted anything close to mass nationwide hysteria. So was the war of the world's panic completely made up? Was it pure newspaper fabrication? A myth? No. That would be too simple. And the truth is rarely simple. People did panic. Real people in real places had real fear responses to the broadcast. That's documented beyond any reasonable doubt. There are police reports. There are contemporaneous accounts from people who weren't talking to newspapers or researchers,

but who simply mentioned it in diaries or letters. There are accounts from phone operators who fielded calls from frightened citizens. But the scale of the panic was almost certainly far smaller than the myth suggests. We're probably talking about thousands of people, not millions. And the duration was brief. Most people who were frightened figured out the truth within minutes, either from the station break, from calling someone, from switching to another station, or simply from the fact that no one else around them

seemed to think the world was ending. What's more, the nature of the panic varied enormously. For most people who were briefly fooled, the reaction was something like concern or confusion, not screaming terror. They heard something alarming, they wondered if it was real, and then they found out it wasn't. That's not mass hysteria. That's just people reacting normally to confusing information. There were, however, some more extreme reactions, and these are the ones that became the iconic stories. Let me walk through a few of the most famous ones

and talk about what we actually know. The tiny community of Grover's Mill, New Jersey, which Koch had chosen essentially at random, found itself at the center of everything, and there does seem to have been genuine confusion there on the night of the broadcast. According to various accounts, some residents of the area did become alarmed.

There are stories of farmers grabbing shotguns, of local roads getting congested, of people showing up at the actual location described in the broadcast, which was, remember, a real place, looking for evidence of the Martian landing. In the days after the broadcast, some Grover's Mill residents reported damage to property, most notably a local water tower that someone apparently shot, possibly mistaking it in the dark for a Martian war machine. This story has been told so many times that it's taken on a legendary quality, and it's hard to know exactly what happened.

But it does seem plausible that in a small rural community, in the dark, with rumors spreading by word of mouth, some people got genuinely worked up. Grover's Mill, to its credit, has embraced the whole thing. There's a monument there now commemorating the landing site, and the community has turned its 15 minutes of fame into a local tourist attraction. Good for them. One of the most persistent claims about the broadcast is that it caused heart attacks, miscarriages, and even suicides.

These claims appeared in newspaper accounts on October 31st and have been repeated ever since. The evidence for them is extremely thin. No deaths have ever been conclusively attributed to the broadcast. No hospital records from that night have ever been produced showing a spike in emergency admissions. The stories about suicides appear to be entirely unsubstantiated. That doesn't mean no one had a medical event that night. In a country of 130 million people, people have heart attacks every night. But the idea that the broadcast caused a wave of medical emergencies is, based on the available evidence, almost certainly false.

Another iconic image from the mythology is that of highways jammed with fleeing families. Again, the evidence for this is slim. Traffic reports from that night don't show unusual congestion. Police departments in New Jersey and New York, while they did receive more calls than normal, did not report emergency level traffic situations. What likely happened is that some people did get in their cars, either to flee or more commonly, to go check on family members or to drive to a place where they could get more information. In an era before television and the Internet, if you were scared and confused,

getting in your car and driving somewhere was a pretty natural response. Some of these individual car trips probably got conflated in newspaper accounts into images of mass exodus. One of the most colorful stories, and one that appears in almost every retelling, is that people were wrapping wet towels around their faces to protect against Martian poison gas. This detail shows up in Cantrell's study and in numerous newspaper accounts. Is it true? Maybe for some small number of people. If you believe that poison gas was being described on the radio and you didn't know what else to do, grabbing a wet cloth isn't an unreasonable improvisation.

But the image of thousands of Americans running around with wet towels on their faces is almost certainly exaggerated. Here's what I think actually happened, based on the best available evidence. A relatively small number of Americans, probably in the tens of thousands at most, out of a listening audience of several million, heard part of the broadcast without kind of, context and were momentarily confused or frightened. Most of them resolved that confusion quickly within minutes through any number of means. A smaller subset, maybe a few thousand, were more significantly frightened and took some kind of action, like calling the police, calling a neighbor, or getting in the car. An even smaller subset, maybe a few hundred, had genuinely intense fear

responses that lasted more than a few minutes. That's it. That's the actual panic. But the myth of the mass panic, the millions of terrified Americans, the clogged highways, the suicides and heart attacks. That myth was created largely by newspapers who had their own reasons for making radio look bad, and it was then cemented by Cantrell's flawed study and repeated endlessly by textbooks, documentaries, and popular culture until it became accepted as historical fact. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after the messages. The panic was real, but it was small. The myth of the panic was the real mass event. Orson Wells, by most accounts, had no idea during the broadcast itself that anything unusual was

happening. He was in the studio, performing, directing, doing his job. It wasn't until after the broadcast ended and he saw the phone lines lighting up, saw the police officers waiting in the CBS lobby, saw the looks on people's faces, that he began to realize. He was not. He began to realize, something had gone seriously wrong, or, depending on your perspective, seriously, right. The next morning, Wells held a press conference, and the photographs from that event are fascinating.

He looks genuinely stunned. He's 23 years old. He's surrounded by reporters, and he seems to oscillate between shock, remorse, and, if you look carefully, just a tiny hint of the knowledge that he's just become the most famous man in America. Wells apologized publicly.

He expressed regret for any distress the broadcast had caused. He said it had never been his intention to deceive anyone. He pointed out the disclaimers that had been included in the broadcast. He was conciliatory and humble and everything you'd want a 23-year-old to be in that situation. But privately. Privately, people close to Wells said he was thrilled. Not because people had been scared. He wasn't cruel, but because the broadcast had worked.

It had done exactly what it was designed to do. It had been so realistic, so convincing, so innovative in its use of the medium that people couldn't tell it from the real thing. For a 23-year-old artist who lived and breathed dramatic innovation, that was the ultimate validation. The Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation. There were calls in Congress for regulation of radio broadcasts. The FCC ultimately determined that no laws had been broken.

The broadcast had included disclaimers, and there was no regulation prohibiting the simulation of news broadcasts in the context of a clearly identified dramatic program. However, the incident did lead to an informal industry standard. After 1938, radio networks were much more cautious about using the fake news bulletin format. CBS itself issued guidelines restricting the use of simulated news interruptions in entertainment programming. The phrase, the following as a dramatization became standard practice. There were also lawsuits, several of them, totaling around $750,000 in damages claimed. None of them succeeded. All were eventually withdrawn or dismissed.

But the legal threat was real enough that it gave CBS some nervous moments. Here's the kicker, though. The War of the World's broadcast didn't destroy Orson Wells' career. It launched it. Before October 30th, 1938, Orson Wells was a well-regarded but relatively obscure theater director and radio performer. After October 30th, he was a household name. The controversy, the press coverage, the sheer audacity of what he'd done. It all combined to make him the most talked-about young artist in America.

And Hollywood came calling. Within months of the broadcast, Wells signed a contract with RKO pictures that was extraordinary by any standard. He was given essentially complete creative control over his projects, a degree of autonomy that was virtually unheard of for a first-time filmmaker. And what he did with that freedom was Make Citizen Kane, which came out in 1941 and is routinely cited as the greatest film ever made. Think about that for a second. Without the War of the World's broadcast, there's no overnight fame. Without the overnight fame, there's probably no RKO deal. Without the R.K.O. deal, there's no citizen cane, at least not in the form we know it.

One of the most important works of art of the 20th century exists, in part, because a 23-year-old kid scared the hell out of a few thousand people on the night before Halloween. The irony is thick, and Wells knew it. For the rest of his life, and he lived until 1985, the War of the World's broadcast was both his blessing and his albatross. It was the thing everyone knew him for, the story he was asked about in every interview, the event that defined him in the public imagination even more than Citizen Kane. He was simultaneously proud of it and weary of it,

amused by it, and burdened by it. Here's something that might surprise you. The War of the World's broadcast wasn't a one-off event. Similar broadcasts in other countries produced similar, and in some cases, much more dramatic results. In 1944, a War of the World's adaptation was broadcast in Santiago, Chile, and it did cause significant panic. Troops were reportedly mobilized before the hoax was revealed.

In 1949, a radio station in Quito, Ecuador, broadcast its own adaptation without any advance warning to the public. When listeners realized they'd been hoaxed, they were furious. A mob formed and actually set fire to the radio station, killing somewhere between six and 20 people, depending on the source. That's right. People actually died, not from panic about Martians, but from rage at having been deceived. In 1968, a radio station in Buffalo, New York, aired an updated version set in that region. In 1974, a station in Providence, Rhode Island, did something similar. Each time, there were reports of frightened listeners, though none on the scale of the Ecuador tragedy. These subsequent events are significant

because they tell us something important. The underlying vulnerability wasn't unique to 1938 America. It wasn't about Depression-era gullibility or pre-television naivety. There is something fundamental about the way humans process information received through trusted media channels that makes us susceptible to this kind of deception, regardless of the era or the technology. And this is where I want to get a little philosophical, because I think the War of the World's broadcast teaches

us something profound about the relationship between media, trust, and fear. The people who were frightened by the broadcast weren't stupid. I want to emphasize that again, because there's a condescending tendency in the way this story is usually told. A kind of smirking. Can you believe how dumb people were back then? Attitude that completely misses the point. These were people who trusted their radio because their radio had never lied to them. They trusted the format, the news bulletin, The expert interview, the official statement, because those formats had always been reliable. They trusted the sound of authority in a reporter's voice, the calm expertise of a scientist, the grave assurance of a government official, because those things had always been trustworthy.

Their trust wasn't stupid, it was rational, and it was betrayed, not maliciously, but it was betrayed nonetheless. And the lesson isn't don't trust the media. The lesson is that Trust in media is powerful and fragile, and that the formats and conventions we use to convey information. The ways we signal, this is real, this is important, you should pay attention to this, can be mimicked, manipulated, and exploited. The people who panicked in 1938 were victims not of their own gullibility, but of the gap between the power of a medium and the public's ability to critically evaluate that medium. That gap has never closed. It's just moved to new platforms. All right, so let's bring this forward, because I promised at the top of this episode that I was going to tie the War of the World's broadcast into something that's happening today,

and I meant it. If you've been paying any attention to the news over the past few years, you know that the conversation around unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs, whatever term you prefer, has changed dramatically. And I mean dramatically. For decades, the officials, the official. position of the United States government was essentially, there's nothing to see here. UFOs were the domain of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and tabloid newspapers.

Serious people didn't talk about them. Serious journalists didn't cover them. Serious scientists didn't study them. The whole topic was wrapped in such a thick layer of stigma and ridicule that anyone who dared to take it seriously was putting their reputation on the line. And then, starting around 2017, the walls started coming down. In December of that year, the New York Times, the paper of record, the gold standard of American journalism, published a front-page story revealing the existence of a secret Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or ATIP. The program had been funded with $22 million in black budget money, and its job was to investigate reports of UFO. excuse me, UAPs, encountered by military personnel.

The Times story was accompanied by declassified gun camera footage from Navy fighter jets, showing objects performing maneuvers that, according to the pilots who encountered them, defied the known laws of physics. Objects that could accelerate instantaneously, that had no visible means of propulsion, that could transition from air to water without deceleration. Objects that, according to multiple trained military observers using sophisticated sensor equipment, were real, were physical, and were not ours. And the public reaction was, complicated. Some people were electrified. Finally, they said.

Finally, the truth is coming out. Finally, the government is admitting what we've known all along. Some people were skeptical. Show me the evidence, they said. Show me the data. until I see proof that can't be explained by conventional means, I'm not buying it. And some people just didn't want to think about it. Because if those objects were real, and if they weren't ours, then the implications were staggering.

And staggering implications are uncomfortable. Since 2017, the pace of disclosure, and I'm using that term deliberately, because it really does feel like a managed gradual release of information, has only accelerated. In 2020, the Pentagon officially released the three Navy videos that had been leaked earlier, confirming their authenticity. In June of 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment on UAPs that acknowledged over 140 incidents that could not be explained. In 2022, NASA announced the formation of an independent study team to examine UAP data. Congress held public hearings. More whistleblowers came forward. David Grush, a former intelligence officer, testified under oath before Congress

that the U.S. government possessed retrieved craft of non-human origin and was running a secret reverse engineering program. Whether you believe Grush or not and reasonable people disagree, the fact that he said these things publicly, under oath, before Congress, and that Congress took him seriously enough to hear him out is remarkable. 20 years ago, that testimony would have been laughed out of the room. Today, it's generating bipartisan legislation. The National Defense Authorization Act now includes provisions specifically related to UAP transparency.

The All-Domain Anomily Resolution Office, or Arrow, has been established within the Department of Defense. There's a whole institutional apparatus now dedicated to this topic that simply didn't exist a decade ago. So what does any of this have to do with Orson Wells and as Martians? Everything. Because the War of the World's broadcast and its aftermath established a template, a cultural script, for how we think about public reactions to extraordinary claims about non-human intelligence. Think about it. The core narrative of the War of the World's panic is this.

The American public, when confronted with the possibility of alien contact, will lose its collective mind. People will panic. Society will break down. There will be chaos in the streets and anarchy in the heartland. The masses cannot handle the truth. That narrative has been used for decades as an argument against disclosure. If people panicked over a radio play, the reasoning goes, imagine what they do if they found out UFOs were real. Better to keep the lid on.

Better to maintain the secrecy. The public can't handle it. But we've just spent this entire episode showing you that the panic was exaggerated, that the vast majority of people who heard the broadcast responded rationally, that the mass hysteria was largely a creation of newspapers with their own agenda, that the myth was bigger than the reality, and if the panic was exaggerated, if the American public in 1938 was actually much more resilient and rational than the myth suggests, then the argument against disclosure based on the war of the world's precedent falls apart. This isn't just an

academic point. People in positions of power have explicitly cited the war of the world's panic as a reason for UFO secrecy. The Brookings Institution in a 1961 report commissioned by NASA warned that the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence could cause social disruption and pointed to the war of the world's panic as evidence. That report influenced government policy for decades, but if the foundational example of media-induced panic about aliens was itself largely a media creation. If the proof that people can't handle the truth about non-human intelligence is itself based on a myth, then we need to seriously reconsider the assumptions underlying decades of secrecy policy. And I think we are reconsidering them. The fact that disclosure is

happening, slowly, grudgingly, with plenty of bureaucratic resistance but happening, suggests that the old arguments about public panic are losing their power. The public response to recent UAP disclosures has been fascinating. There have been no mass panics, no stampedes, no runs on the grocery stores. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

When the Navy videos were released, most Americans watched them, said, Huh, that's weird, and went about their day. When David Grush testified about crash retrievals and non-human biologics,

there was no social breakdown. People discussed it, debated it, argued about it on social media, and then moved on to the next thing. In other words, the public is handling it just fine. Just like the vast majority of the public handled the War of the World's broadcast, just fine.

The gap between what authorities fear the public will do and what the public actually does in the face of extraordinary information has always been enormous. Now, there are some important differences between 1938 and today. We live in a vastly more media-saturated environment. We're exposed to so much

information from so many sources at such a rapid pace that our ability to process extraordinary claims has been significantly enhanced. We're more skeptical, more media literate, more accustomed to questioning what we're told. We've been through enough fake news, enough hoaxes, enough media manipulation that very few of us take any single piece of information at face value anymore. In some ways, that's a good thing. We're less susceptible to the kind of immediate, reflexive panic that the war of the world's broadcast may have caused in a small number of listeners. In other ways, it's a problem. We're so skeptical, so overloaded, so cynical about information,

that even genuinely important revelations can get lost in the noise. If the U.S. government were to announce tomorrow that it had definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not convinced the public reaction would be much different from the reaction to any other big news story. There'd be a spike of attention. A week of intense media coverage, a lot of arguments on social media, and then most people would go back to worrying about their mortgages and their kids and their jobs. Because that's what people do. That's what people have always done.

The war of the world's panic, the real one, not the myth, tells us that human beings are actually pretty good at processing scary information. We might be startled. We might be confused. We might make some phone calls or ask some questions. but we don't collapse. We don't abandon reason. We adapt.

We seek information. And we carry on. That's a hopeful message, I think. And it's one worth remembering as we navigate the uncharted waters of UAP disclosure and whatever comes next. There's one more connection I want to draw here. And then we'll wrap this up. In 1938, newspapers exaggerated the war of the world's panic because they had a vested interest in discrediting radio. They were gatekeepers whose dominance was being threatened by a new medium,

and they used the panic narrative to argue that the new medium couldn't be trusted. Today we're seeing something remarkably similar play out around UAP disclosure. There are gatekeepers in government, in the military industrial complex, in certain corners of the scientific establishment, who have controlled the narrative around UFOs for decades. And as that control is being challenged by whistleblowers, by congressional investigators, by journalists, and by a public that increasingly demands transparency. Those gatekeepers are pushing back. They're using some of the same tactics the newspapers used in 1938.

They're questioning the credibility of witnesses. They're emphasizing the potential for public confusion and panic. They're suggesting that the information is too sensitive, too dangerous, too complex for ordinary people to handle responsibly. And just like in 1938, the underlying motivation isn't really about protecting the public. It's about protecting power. It's about maintaining control over the narrative. It's about institutions that have operated in secrecy for decades, fighting to preserve that secrecy in the face of mounting pressure for transparency. The parallels are striking, and they're not accidental.

The War of the World's Panic, or rather the Myth of the War of the World, panic has been used as a tool of information control for nearly 90 years. It's been cited as evidence that the public can't handle scary truths, that extraordinary information must be managed by authorities, that transparency is dangerous. But the historical record doesn't support that conclusion. What it supports is the conclusion that the public is much more resilient than the gatekeepers want to believe, and that the real danger isn't in giving people too much information. It's in giving them too little. Let's zoom out for a moment and think about what the War of the World's broadcast really demonstrated,

beyond the specific question of Martians and Panic. Because the techniques that Wells and Coke used in 1938 have been replicated, intentionally and unintentionally, countless times since then. What they proved is that if you understand the conventions of a trusted medium, you can use those conventions to make fiction indistinguishable from fact. They didn't invent any new technology. They didn't have access to any special resources. They simply understood how real radio news sounded and felt,

and they replicated it with enough skill that a significant number of listeners couldn't tell the difference. That's a profoundly dangerous capability. And it's become exponentially more dangerous in the decades since 1938, because the tools for creating convincing fake media have become exponentially more powerful and more accessible. Think about deepfakes. AI-generated video and audio that can make it look and sound like real people are saying things they never said. Think about manipulated photographs and videos that spread across social media in seconds. Think about bot networks that can create the illusion of mass public opinion where none exists.

Think about sophisticated disinformation campaigns that use all of these tools in coordinated ways to shape public perception. The War of the World's broadcast was a proof of concept. It demonstrated that the gap between mediated reality and actual reality could be exploited. And while Wells exploited it for entertainment, for art, really, others have exploited it for far darker purposes. Every propaganda operation, every disinformation campaign, every deliberately misleading political ad is, in a sense, a descendant of that broadcast. Not in the sense that Wells inspired them. These techniques are probably as old as human communication, but in the sense that the broadcast made the vulnerability visible.

It showed everyone that the emperor of trusted media could, under the right conditions, have no clothes. Here's the thing that keeps me up at night about this story. The whole event only worked because people trusted radio. And that trust was, up to that point, well placed. Radio News in 1938 was, by and large, accurate and responsible. People were right to trust it. But the very existence of that trust created the vulnerability.

You can't be deceived by a source you don't trust. It's only the trusted sources that can really fool you. And this creates a paradox that we're still wrestling with today. We need trusted information sources. Democracy requires them. Informed citizenship requires them. rational decision-making requires them. But the more we trust a source, the more vulnerable we are to deception through that source.

Social media has complicated this in ways that the people of 1938 couldn't have imagined. Today, the trusted source isn't necessarily a major news network or a prestigious newspaper. For many people, the trusted source is their friends' Facebook post, their favorite YouTube channel, their preferred podcaster, their preferred political comment. trust has been fragmented and personalized, and the opportunities for exploitation have multiplied accordingly. We're all, in a sense, dial hoppers. We're all channel surfing through an infinite media landscape, and we're all potentially catching a broadcast midstream, without context, without disclaimers, without the information we'd need to evaluate what we're hearing. The difference is that

in 1938, you had to physically turn a dial to change the channel. Today, algorithms do it for you, serving you content based on what will grab your attention and keep you engaged, regardless of whether it's true. This brings us to the question of responsibility, which was hotly debated in 1938, and is still debated today. Was Orson Wells responsible for the panic? CBS? The listeners themselves? Wells always maintained that the broadcast included adequate disclaimers and that the fault lay with listeners who tuned in late and didn't bother to check another station or wait for clarification

before panicking. CBS made similar arguments while also quietly implementing new guidelines to prevent a recurrence. Critics argued that Wells and CBS knew, or should have known, that the fake news format would be confusing to some listeners, and that they had a responsibility to make the fictional nature of the broadcast more obvious throughout, not just at the beginning in the middle. Both sides have a point, and neither side has the whole truth. Wells was right that disclaimers were included. Critics were right that the format was deliberately designed to be as realistic as possible. Wells was right that listeners bore some responsibility for their own reactions.

Critics were right that the power imbalance between a broadcaster and an individual listener creates obligations. This debate is now playing out on a much larger scale with social media platforms, AI-generated content, and the broader information ecosystem. Who's responsible when a deep fake goes viral? The creator. The platform that hosted it. The users who shared it.

The viewers who believed it. The technology that made it possible. We don't have good answers to these questions yet. In 1938, we didn't have good answers either. The FCC investigated and decided no laws had been broken. The industry adopted voluntary guidelines. and everyone moved on. But the vulnerability remained.

It just waited for new technology to exploit it. I love this little footnote to the story, so indulge me for a minute here. Grover's Mill, New Jersey, the tiny community that Howard Koch stuck a pin in on a map and made the landing site of fictional Martian invaders is a real place.

It's a small, unincorporated community within West Windsor Township in Mercer County. Before October 30th, 1938, Nobody outside of Central New Jersey had ever heard of it. After that night, it became one of the most famous tiny communities in America. And the people of Grover's Mill have done something really charming with that accidental fame. They've embraced it. In 1988, on the 50th anniversary of the broadcast,

the town erected a monument at the intersection of Cranberry Road and Clarksville Road, near the spot where the fictional Martians supposedly landed. The monument features a bronze plaque commemorating the broadcast and its impact on broadcasting history. There's also a park nearby that was renamed in honor of the event. The community holds periodic celebrations and commemorations, especially on significant anniversaries. Local historians give talks. Radio enthusiasts gather. It's become a pilgrimage site of sorts for fans of broadcasting history,

Orson Welles enthusiasts, and general weirdness officinados. What I love about this is the good humor of it. The people of Grover's Mill could have been resentful. Their community was put on the map by a hoax, and for years they were associated with the panic and confusion that followed. But instead they chose to see the humor and the historical significance, and they've turned an accidental association into a point of community pride. It's a very human response, and it's a nice counterpoint to the narrative of mass panic.

The people most directly affected by the broadcast, the people whose actual community was named as Ground Zero for a Martian invasion, responded with humor, perspective, and grace. If that doesn't tell you something about human resilience in the face of extraordinary information, I don't know what does. Despite decades of scholarly work debunking the most extreme versions of the War of the World's panic story, the exaggerated version persists. It persists in textbooks,

in documentaries, in popular culture, and in the general public's understanding of the event. Why? Several reasons, I think. First, the exaggerated version is a better story. Millions of Americans panicked and fled their homes as a much more compelling narrative than a few thousand people were briefly confused and some of them made phone calls. Human beings are drawn to dramatic narratives and the dramatic version of the War of the World's story is so vivid, so colorful, so perfectly structured, with its hero, its villain, its helpless masses, its dramatic irony, that it's almost irresistible as a story. The truth is messier and less satisfying.

Second, the exaggerated version serves various agendas. For media critics, it's a cautionary tale about the power and danger of broadcasting. For cultural commentators, it's evidence of American gullibility or the dangers of technology. For educators, it's a vivid illustration of mass psychology. Everyone has a use for the myth, and so everyone has a reason to perpetuate it. Third, the exaggerated version was established very early and very firmly by the newspapers and by Cantrell's study. First impressions are powerful, and the initial framing of the event, mass panic, nationwide hysteria, was so dominant and so widely circulated that it became the default understanding.

Later corrections and qualifications have had to fight against nearly 90 years of entrenched narrative. And that's a very uphill battle. Fourth, and this is more speculative, but I think it's important. I think the exaggerated version persists because it flatters us. It allows us to feel superior to the people of 1938. We would never fall for something like that, we tell ourselves. We're too sophisticated, too media savvy, too smart. The myth of the war of the world's panic is, in a sense, a comfort.

It reassures us that we've progressed, that we're better than our grandparents and great-grandparents, that the vulnerabilities of the past are behind us. But they're not behind us. They've just changed form. And our smugness about 1938 may actually make us more vulnerable, not less, because it prevents us from recognizing the ways in which we're susceptible to the same kinds of manipulation in our own media environment. If we stripped away the myth and taught the real war of the world's story, the complicated, nuanced, less dramatic version, what would we learn?

We'd learn that media trust is powerful and must be handled responsibly by creators. We'd learn that the public is more resilient than authorities tend to believe. We'd learn that the real danger in a media scare isn't the public's reaction. It's the secondary narrative created by other media actors with their own agendas. own agendas. We'd learn that the way an event is reported can be more consequential than the event itself. These are lessons that are desperately relevant today, and we're not learning them, because we're still telling ourselves the fairy tale version of the story. As we move deeper into the era of UAP disclosure, as the conversations about what our government knows and what's really in

our skies become more frequent and more serious, I think it's worth keeping the real war of the world's story and mind. Not the myth, the reality. Because the reality tells us that we can handle the truth, whatever it turns out to be. And that, folks, is one of the most disturbing things about this whole story. Not that people panicked in 1938, but that the myth of their panic has been used for decades to keep the rest of us in the dark. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep your eyes on the sky, keep your mind open, and for the love of all that's holy, Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper.