Forbidden History - The War of the Worlds: History's Greatest Hoaxes

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Forbidden History presents: History's Greatest Hoaxes Orson Welles's Mercury Theater radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel 'The War of the Worlds' was a simulated news broadcast which convinced many Americans that an invasion by Martians was underway... Newspapers claimed that it led to a massive panic around the country, but was the original audience actually that large? Cast List: Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press. Nick Pope: UK Ministry of Defense Marcus Brigstocke: Author & Comedian Joe Nickell: Paranormal Investigator Dr. Linda Papadopoulos: Author & Psychologist Alex Boese: Author, The World's Greatest Hoaxes Clyde Lewis: Radio Host Chris Gaylo: Local Resident Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theater and star of these broadcasts, Hors and Well. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man.

The War of the Worlds was a one-hour radio drama performed, on October 30th, 1938, and aired over the CBS Radio Network. Directed and narrated by actor and filmmaker Orson Wells, it was an adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel of the same name. The radio broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, suggesting an actual alien invasion by Martians was in progress. It caused an unprecedented media sensation. I think Orson Welles' prank with a war.

of the world probably made people more critical of what they listened to. I think up until that point, it was hearing was believing. I thought that what Orson Wells was a genius at was theater of the mind. That's exactly what this was. It was creating a picture in the mind's eye, and people were seeing it as well as listening to it. They were moving closer to their radio, using silence and using all kinds of other sound effects to get people to come right in. The media picks up on these stories. They play them up. They make great copy, but at a certain level, I would suspect there has to be the interplay between the media and the audience.

And when you have that come together in the right way, that's when you get these moments of great hoaxes. You know, back in 1938, listening to this being broadcast at the time, I don't think people would have dismissed it in a way that we would now, because we have lots and lots of context. We also have other channels we can flip over to and go, oh, a thing, the aliens have, Oh, no, no, it's not on the BBC, so it's probably not a thing. The newspapers went massively over the top

because, in many ways, they fell for the hoax more than Wells could have possibly predicted. And of course, what Wells was doing, he was just doing a pretend live broadcast. It played straight into Wells' playbook, more than he possibly could have imagined, because it gave him so much publicity. The infamous War of the World, World's radio broadcast on Sunday, October 30th, 1938, was an episode of the American

radio drama series, The Mercury Theater on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween special of the series and aired over the CBS Radio Network. Directed and narrated by Orson Wells, the episode was an adaptation of H.G. Wells's 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The setting was switched from 19th century English. to contemporary Grover's Mill, a village in the West Windsor Township of New Jersey. The program's format was a simulated live newscast of developing events as Martians invaded America. Something's happening. It's rising out of the pit and then make out a small beam of light against a mirror.

What's there? He's a jet of flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men. He strikes them head on. Lord, they're turning in a flame. The whole field's qualified. The woods of fires, the gas tank, tanks of the automobiles spreading everywhere. Coming this way now, about 20 yards to my right. Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill. The War of the Wells broadcast was a one-hour special broadcast on CBS radio

by Orson Wells and his Mercury Theatre Repertory Company. That was a sort of kind of update of H.G. Wells' class. novel. So it was a radio dramatization. It had a very difficult gestation in which the script writers were saying, we can't really make this work, Mr. Wells. It's not really hanging together very well. And eventually, out of all this confusion, it's created this terrifically exciting, and even today, it's a very modern-sounding piece of radio drama. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News, Rotto Canada. Professor Morris of McMillan University reports observing a total of three explosions

on the planet Mars between the hours of 7.45 p.m. and 9.20 p.m. Eastern Standard Times. It all played itself out as if this was really happening. This was really one of the first, if not the first, modern media hoaxes. The public were fooled. People turned on their radio and heard this story of invading Martians. And rather than thinking, hey, this is great entertaining sci-fi, this was being presented to them as if it was a news bulletin. And people started panicking.

I suspect a lot of people who listened to this there and then at the time were terrified. However, there were quite clear announcements made at the beginning of the program as to what it was. The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present or something. and Wells and the Mercury Theater on the air in the War of the World by H.G. Wells. People were concerned. There were concerns. People called into the New Jersey State Police, for example. Absolutely they did. Some of the stories are quite funny. One guy supposedly got his wife in the car and went right through the garage door. And when she complained, he said, well, we won't need it anymore because the Martians are coming.

Some of the stories are funny, but you see that something else is going on other than strict reporting. The War of the World's hoax was huge in terms of sort of the fallout and I guess the mythology around the hoax afterwards, people reportedly committing suicide and losing their minds and running around. But interestingly enough, there wasn't that many people tuned in that night to listen. The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series without commercial interruptions, which added to the program's realism. But this episode was quite different. I think the thinking with a lot of this is that people were listening to something else

that had commercials and switched channels, and so you're happily listening to whatever else on the other channel, they're commercials, you flip over and what you hear is, The aliens have landed and did they're here now and there's a big beam coming out of the... And they'd have gone, oh my God, this is a news broadcast. It sounds like a news broadcast because no one else had done that. They hadn't used that style before. It might be a face.

Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumptions that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight of the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. Yes, there were clear elements of trying to create something for listeners that was extremely believable. They used the news flash format, which was a new thing for a play. They used real place names. They brought on somebody they described as the Secretary of the Interior who sounded an office. sounded an awful lot like President Roosevelt.

I think that shows, yes, there was some intent to deceive. Could they possibly have predicted how big it would become? No. Radio was a trusted friend that was in your living room, and you believed it. And you know the difference between a real story and a false story by the way that it was told. Well, it's very clear that Orson Wells knew this,

because when he came up with the story, This wasn't put in the language of drama or a fiction. This was made to sound as realistic as possible. This was made to sound like a news bulletin. And the population at the time inevitably bleaked it. The baby. The monsters. The monsters are going to kill us.

The radio. It's not a standard radio play. It's not one person talks and other person talks. It's a very jumbled, mixed up. Fake live broadcast in which there's gunfire can be heard, people seemingly sort of croaking, dying, broadcast being interrupted, intermittent music suddenly having to appear to cover up a breakdown in broadcasts, sounds of aliens attacking. It is a very, very compelling piece of radio. You know, you might think it'd be very easy to scoff at, but no, it's not. You know, it was made in 1938, we're a long way from 1938 today, and even to it still sounds pretty compelling. In the days following the broadcast, there was widespread outrage in the media. The program's news bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures,

leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission. Now this all took place on Halloween, which I think itself should have been a clue for people. for people. But in terms of the initial radio audience, it wasn't huge. However, the ripples travelled far and wide. The news media, when they got hold of this and told the story afterwards, I mean, there was, it was a sensation. The newspapers went massively over the top, because in many ways, you know, they fell for the hoax more than Wells could have possibly predicted. And of course, what Wells was doing, he was just doing a pretend live broadcast.

The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times. 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns fitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from ours. 120 known survivors. There was an enormous tension between radio and the newspapers in the 1930s, and radio had essentially won as being the main provider of news for the people. So you had the newspapers trying to negotiate this new role for themselves, and one of the ways they were doing that was using radio's immediacy against itself,

saying this is far too emotional a medium, and it whips people up into irrational ideas, and it plays on their worst emotion. I think that newspapers jumped at the opportunity to vilify radio. Don't forget, you know, radio was a new kid on the block and it was, you know, to some extent, you know, biting into sort of market share, right? So that, you know, people were committed to listening to it, to getting their news from it, to getting to some extent their entertainment from it. So the idea that, you know, radio's done this awful thing needs to be played

up by the newspapers and they're going to milk it for all its worth. There was scandal. I think Orson Wells was accused of irresponsibility. How dare he take a revered work of science fiction and play it like this? The newspapers sort of were very, very willing to sort of lay into what was seen as a scurrilous form of broadcasting. And they went horrendously over the top. In fact, they reacted in many ways more sort of over the top than they would have done had there been a real Martian invasion. And so therefore, but it played straight into Wells' playbook more than he possibly could have imagined because it gave him so much publicity.

This was the newspaper's opportunity to stick it to the radio, who were their rivals? You know, that's how it worked for them. The then 23-year-old Orson Wells became a household name after the broadcast, and many thought it was all an extraordinary PR stunt that he had planned. He issued a public apology after the broadcast. I'm, of course, surprised that the H.G. Wells Classic, which is the OrchG. Wells' classic, which is the original for many fantasies about invasions by mythical monsters from the planet Mars. I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children

through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners. Shortly after the broadcast, Orson Wells gives a press conference. He says, I'm very sorry if anyone was misled, I apologize if anyone thought this was real, if there was panic, but he was looking very suave and sophisticated. He knew. He knew that he'd hit a home run here. He knew that he had created the sort of publicity that normally directors can only dream about. At the press conference, when Orson Wells is smiling, I think you can say, okay, I'm making the obligatory apology, but lighten up folks, get real.

What we did was a radio drama. And he played the situation. Undoubtedly, he played the media. He was maybe one of the first directors to understand the power of the media, not just when it comes to structure. straightforward promotion of his product, but in creating wider news stories that go beyond the radio broadcast itself. So he, in many ways, was ahead of his time. I think it was something maybe bigger than even he realized. He certainly was trying something different.

There's a lot of really clever stuff going on there. And it is a piece of, I think it is a work of genius. And it certainly made its mark. Wells did apologize with a big smile on his face and said, we're so sorry if our very exciting program confused you a little. You know, I think he was thrilled with how this turned out. Look, I'll be honest.

If I wrote something like that, if I broadcast something like that that had a load of the people listening to it or watching it go, I think that might be, That might be a real thing. I'd be over the moon. Anyone creating anything dramatic, you know, that's what you want. American radio host Clyde Lewis has been compared to Orson Wells, both in size, voice, and his interest in the weirder side of life.

He presents his Ground Zero radio show every week, an all manner of weird phenomena like ghosts, spirits, and UFOs. He believes that Orson Welles, news news, exactly what he was doing with the broadcast. Orson Wells, when he first came on, he did the announcement, this is the CBS Radio Mercury Theater, you know, with this very, very boss, very low-tone voice. And he was very sophisticated and very, you know, authoritative. And I think that's why it was so convincing.

We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences is greater than man's, yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings visit themselves about their various concerns. They were scrutinized and studied. Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Wells had that commanding presence on the radio, and War of the Worlds was special,

because not only was he, the guy coordinating it, he participated in it, and with that little bit of a smirk in his voice, was playing along with everyone else, and that's why I think it's so brilliant as a radio play. The town featured in Wells' production, Grover's Mill, is a real place in rural New Jersey. The site of the alien landing in the H.G. Wells' original novel was a small town called Woking in England, which was near to his own home. Orson Wells then changed the site to Grover's. mill in New Jersey, equally small, equally remote, and just outside New York City.

The perfect thing about growers mill was a, it was a real place, added credibility to the story. It was also close to Princeton, so he could have a Princeton professor come down to investigate us. So that kind of played into the story. So you kind of think of when you hear a story like this, what do you need to verify? Now, if you can look out of your window and see what's happening, well, that's one. where does this story come out? Grover's built New Jersey so you're not like you know near the Empire State building in New York you're not in one of the big metropolitan cities you're actually in kind of more or less a suburb so what

then I can't you know look at me I can't use my eyes to look at so what am I hearing I'm hearing screams and these are very realistic screams because they've been piped and through through very good actors I'm hearing bombs going on I hear them saying it's a newscast at which point am I going to say this is a fake. I've never heard anyone fake this before. So lo and behold, we have a huge portion of people that that listened to that night, which weren't that many, but the proportion that did, believing this. The small community has turned its local coffee shop into something of a shrine to the

radio drama and all the publicity surrounding the event. Every surface inside is covered with posters, photos, aliens, and UFOs. And there's even a personal a letter of apology from Orson Wells to a local resident. My wife grew up in Pennsylvania along with her family, and her father, my father-in-law, actually heard the 1938 radio play when it was happening. As I was saying, I was listening to the radio kind of halfway. Yes, Mr. Willard. And then you saw something. Not first off. I heard something.

And what did you hear? His sound like this. He was a teenager at the time. He knew it was a play, but he had to say. some relatives in the town in Pennsylvania that didn't know was a play tuned in late like a lot of people did. They thought it was real, and they were in an absolute panic. They called up on the phone, said they were coming over to pick everyone up. They were going to take them in the car and head west away from the Martians. And he was the one that calmed everyone down saying, it's just a play, it's just a play, it's just a play, it's not real, it's just a play.

I'm speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New York City, the... Bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as Martians approach. Estimated in last two hours, three million people have moved out along the roads to the north. I think quite a few people acted as if Martians really landed. It was a different time. Communication wasn't so good. It was AM radio, so people in a regional area in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania area could actually hear the program. But they were far enough away that they didn't know what was going. going on. So quite a few people actually, I think, panicked in some form or fashion.

Around here, people figured it out pretty quick because nothing was happening. But people further away didn't. In 1988, 50 years after the original broadcast, the town of Grover's Mill erected a monument in its local park to commemorate the event. What I find interesting about this is that this monument, and it's a wonderful monument, is buried in the bushes. I mean, it's almost as if they're a little embedded. They're a little embarrassed by what happened back in 1938, but still, it's a remarkable little monument here, and it's a tribute to Orson Wells in the War of the World.

The broadcast is infamous for the idea that millions of people listened to the radio show and that mass panic then broke out. But the reality is that the audience was actually quite small. The radio audience of the show was not very big at all. It was only around 2% of the radio listenership that night. So you are not talking them more than tens of thousands of people. It seems that this had a pretty small audience when it first went out, and it also seems we now know that the hysteria that was claimed didn't really happen.

The idea that millions panicked, I think it's an exaggeration. What was going on at the time is that the newspapers wanted to vilify radio because it was relatively new. So what better way to do it is say, Don't listen to the radio and listen to everything and believe everything you hear. And I think Orson Wells had the same idea, too, that he thought, you know, everything is coming through the squack box. Everything you hear on the squawk box is not real. It's play.

It's theater to the mind. And I think he wanted to illustrate that. So I think both sides kind of exploited in a way. The bottom line is that there weren't that many listeners and the results, the effects were not as great as has been exaggerated. There is also some debate about exactly how much panic was caused by the broadcast, and how much of that panic was made up by the newspapers. Print media came down hard on CBS Radio for airing the broadcast and frightening so many people. It was a huge opportunity for the two great media rivals of the time to come to blows.

If you read the papers the day after the broadcast, they were full of the of all these amazing stories, these scary stories of people getting into their cars and driving at top speed to escape the invaders. One man came home and found his wife listening to the radio clutching a bottle of poison, and she was supposedly screaming, I'd rather die like this than like that. And you had people running through the streets

supposedly screaming, the world is coming to an end. And any anecdote out there, the media was reporting, all of them were unfounded. People died on that night. But I think the point that people miss is that people die every night of all sorts of things. Heart attacks, car wrecks, suicides. Now, the way the media reported this was very interesting and rather sneaky. They tried to link deaths, which had nothing to do. with this radio broadcast, with the story.

So they were like, oh, well, Orson Wells did this terrible, irresponsible thing, created this panic. And oh, look, this person jumped out of a window. Well, the two weren't linked. That person was gonna jump out of that window anyway. If I set down these notes on paper, I'm obsessed by the thought that I may be

the last living man on earth. I've been hiding in this empty house near Grover's Mill. Small island of daylight cut by the black smoke from the rest of the world. So where does this story come from? Where is this idea that it was the night that America went nuts? You have to think about two things. It comes to the fact that newspapers were very, very threatened by radio.

And they felt that radio was the kind of upstart medium that was going to invade their territory. They were right. But at the same time, they didn't actually realize that actually maybe the two industries to complement each other. So because radio is seen as this somewhat spivy upstart, newspapers are very ready to denigrate radio. And what better way to denigrate your radio by then suggesting that CBS, even the relative or Gus CBS, was behaving in a reckless and infantile way.

The second strand to that is because the story was broadcast relatively late in the evening, many journalists were no longer at their desks, many of the early editions of the newspapers are gone. all that was left was the Associated Press running its wire service. And what the Associated Press was receiving were disconnected stories from different parts of the Eastern Seaboard, saying, you know, Mrs. Jones has phoned up CBS and she's very angry about it. So-and-so has missed their train because they were listening to it and they were very angry.

And so the guys at the Associated Press were receiving all these stories, none of which in themselves were massively big, but suddenly it seemed to them that there was something going on. So when the AP was firing, finding out its wire copy, people like the New York Times are thinking, okay, I'm putting two and two together, and I'm making five. I'm now going to actually say this is a mass panic. And of course, this story then just goes through a validation loop.

It was in the New York Times. So other newspapers the next day are then going to go, if it's in New York Times, I'll report it. And the story snowballs. We see it all the time in journalism. You know, one paper reports it, another follows, another follows, and it goes like that. Perhaps it's easy to see how people fell for such a hoax in 1938.

It was a time falling between the aftermath of the First World War and the dawn of World War II, a time that saw the rise of Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, and communism in Russia. Fear was rife. Part of the context of the times was the growth of the fear of war just the month before, Germany had invaded the Sudetenland. You had Winston Churchill warning Americans to prepare for war. The idea of war and invasion was very much on people's minds. So you have to imagine they're listening to the radio and they hear of some kind of invasion

and then poison gas attacks and the memories of World War I are going to be in people's minds. So when they hear this, you know, did they really really? think it's aliens. Radio in 1938 was your smartphone in 2016. It's where you got your information from. It's where you look to to kind of verify what you should be focused on, you know, you should be ignoring.

So it was, you know, think about just where radios were in the home at that time, right? So they were in the center of, you know, of the family room. Everyone gathered around it. So it's kind of like this old kind of uncle or grandparent that you gathered around and you listened to. And again, this is not a media-savvy group.

This is 1938. Media in itself is in its infancy. So, you know, the idea that the people that were consuming it would have had, you know, the, I guess, the critical thinking around it that they do today is just, that wouldn't happen for many decades to come. Many people said they thought it was, it was just some kind of misunderstanding, and it was really the Germans attacking. attacking. So it's very hard to read back into that time.

Were they really believing aliens, space aliens from Mars were invading? Or did they just hear of all these attacks on the radio? And they thought, you know, holy cow, something's happening. We don't know maybe quite what. Maybe it's the Germans, you know, there was just reason, you know, a lot of reason to be concerned. The 1930s America was a far more credulous time, and people were far more willing to believe that there might well be aliens on Mars. I mean, the beginning of the broadcast talks about all these massive flares and sort of ejections coming off the Martian landscape that astronomers are spotting. I mean, that seemed like a thing that might be connected with life. You know, we didn't know if there was life on Mars, and even today we're still scratching our heads about whether there's life on Mars.

It's a simpler world. We haven't had decades of hoaxes and fakes, and we haven't had the X-Files, and we haven't had all the things that come with that. The media itself was a much simpler and more compact organization and group of organizations. When you listen to the radio, you accept it, absolutely. This is the news.

It's not unreasonable for the people. the average American citizen to think in the 1930s that maybe there are, you know, men out there in spaceships who want to go and blow us up. Most people wouldn't have done. But, you know, had it been reported in a realistic way, yeah, there are going to be people who believe it. And there are enormous parts of the United States, even today, you know, that are still very much tapped into that kind of belief in UFOs. And that's why Close Encounter the Third kind by Spielberg was so popular because it had this enormous audience. Perhaps one of the reasons that the radio broadcast made such an impact was the naivety of the

listeners. Unlike today's alien savvy audience, those tuning in in the late 30s would have been quite shocked by what they were hearing. So the context for people listening to this was different. You know, we're used to sci-fi. We've seen it, loads of our films, tele, radio and all the rest of it for years. The American listening audience weren't used to this. They hadn't had Star Trek yet. And so they switched it on and what sounded like a proper news broadcast was telling them the thing that they discussed a bit, you know, about alien life and all the rest of it, but arrived.

It was happening and it was happening just up the road. It must have been terrifying. There were no pictures, you know, putting pictures together for this would have been nigh on impossible. would have gone, well, that looks like nonsense. But the pictures on radio have always been better than tele, because there are anything you can imagine. And so if you're told a huge, round, spaceship-y thing that's come from Mars has arrived over, you know, the town up the road,

that would be terrifying. And you could imagine it happening. There was nothing like radio before. I mean, even the telephone, which brought outside world and did it on a one-on-one basis. But now you have a medium in which you could sit around the radio. I used to listen to the crime dramas and put your ear up against the big console radios.

And a family could be gathered around that. And it was used remarkably effectively by Franklin Roosevelt for his fireside chats. And he spoke to the American people through the medium of the radio. There was nothing else even close to that. In the end, the so-called War of the World's broadcast became a media legend. It was later established that as little as 2% of the radio audience actually heard the broadcast.

And many of the reports that came out around the time of suicides and hysteria were simply made up by the newspapers as a means of attacking their sworn enemy, the radio networks. It goes down as two great hoaxes. One, the hoax that Orson Wells gave the people with the show, and two, the hoax was perpetrated by the media when they were overplaying or actually exaggerating how many people panicked. It was the newspapers trying to vilify radio, and that's why they expanded it to millions of people when only probably thousands of people panicked that night. One of the things I find fascinating about studying hoaxes is that they're not just these

random, trivial events. But these are events that really resonate with people at the time. They have deep meaning. And so they offer a kind of window onto the larger culture at each moment of the kind of concerns and fears and tensions that exist in history. So each hoax is very much a creature of its time. What Wells has successfully tapped into was an emerging kind of belief,

a cultural meme in aliens and attack from other planets. That had obviously been going on in the comic book world for a long time. There were some very early movies. But obviously what Wells was helping to drive forward was this whole strand through American popular culture of aliens, alien invasions. But also on a deeper, more political level, It was also in the late 30s, America was worried about its security.

The world was worried about whether it might be going to war, lesser in the United States and in Europe. But saying that, there was this worry about global stability. And just as we saw after 9-11, where you've got more and more alien movies being made in the United States, an outside aggressor attacking the homeland, it was a similar time then. There was a worry about security.

the alien invasion tapped into a worry about invasions that were there. Incredibly, despite Orson Welles' confession, that the broadcast was a fully scripted radio play based on a novel. Some people and conspiracy theorists at the time, and even today, feel that it was really all part of a top secret government plan to slowly introduce the world to the existence of extraterrestrials. There are people out there who see things like the Orson Well's War of the World's broadcast,

the story about Roswell and Flying Sources, and all the things that come with it, whether it's science fact or science fiction. There are people who believe this is part of a decades-long program to acclimatize the public to an extraterrestrial reality. there is a whole conspiracy theory that says that things like the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds it's just part of trying to get people used to this so that when it does all come out people won't be totally shocked they'll have been kind of warmed up to the idea I think people are less scullible today I think we're much more media literate I think we're all pseudo-journalists, right? We all know how to edit our photos to, so we look better than we do.

We all know how to edit our Facebook pages so our lives look more interesting than we are. So the idea that someone's going to put a story in front of us that we're not going to question and the way that they, you know, they didn't question in 1938, I think, is really far-fetched. You know, despite perhaps our, you know, need to believe there's something out there, I think there's going to be a lot more questions than there was back then. I think certainly War of the Worlds had a profound impact on the medium. The idea that you could put forward something on the radio. And if you were going to bother to dramatize something, you had to really dramatize it.

You had to do it really well. You had to understand sort of the psychology of having something and then interrupting and being urgent with the voice and so forth. And I think that did set new standards that would be shown later in TV and Orson Wells. I think saw that fairly early how to do that. And that's why he was a genius, and he went on to do other works of media genius. The real winner from this whole hoax was the Mercury Theater on-air radio show. which became infamous across America, with millions of dollars of free publicity,

and the man behind the whole enterprise, Orson Wells, went on to have a very successful career in film. This is Orson Wells, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that the war of the world 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. Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates. By tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. 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.