Radiolab - War of the Worlds

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

It's been 80 years to the day since Orson Welles' infamous radio drama "The War of the Worlds" echoed far and wide over the airwaves. So we want to bring you back to our very first live hour, where we take a deep dive into what was one of the most controversial moments in broadcasting history. "The War of the Worlds," a radio play about Martians invading New Jersey, caused panic when it originally aired, and it's continued to fool people since--from Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Hi, I'm Robert Crulwich. Radio Lab is supported by the Netflix film. They'll love me when I'm dead. This is a movie that chronicles the last years of Orson Welles's life. He's the genius behind Citizen Kane. It's wildly entertaining, full of nuance and depth. They'll love me when I'm dead, directed by Morgan Neville, only on Netflix, November 2nd. Wait, you're listening. Okay.

All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. Six. Yeah. Hey, I'm Chad Ibramrod.

I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. And today we are celebrating a multiple set of anniversaries because it was 80 years ago, 80 years ago, that Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater decided to allow Martians to invade the state of New Jersey. It's one of the most famous broadcasts in broadcast history because it freaked people out. Yes. And then merely 10 years ago, we decided to take another look at this broadcast, which has gotten very complicated and layered and disputed in some ways over time. We're now celebrating our 10th. They're celebrating their 80th. So along with Orson Wells, I'm afraid couldn't be here tonight. May he rest in peace. Yes. We would like to present our homage to, I guess, to microbes.

to the little earthlings that saved the planet. Right. So in honor of the microbes, in honor of War of the World, which broadcast 80 years ago today, tonight, here is our take on War of the Worlds. October 30th, 1938. On that night, the United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we'd never seen before. And the reason, which today sounds almost comical, was a radio one. play. Around 12 million people were listening. Most got the joke.

It was Halloween after all. But if you consider that about one out of every 12 people didn't get the joke, that's what surveys found afterwards. About one out of every 12 people who heard the broadcast thought it was true, and that some percentage of that one million people ran out of their homes, towels over their faces, clutching children, tripping, breaking limbs? Well, that constitutes a major freakout. And in this is our first ever live hour on radio lab here at St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Fitzgerald Theater, we ask, why?

Why did people panic? And of course, we'll ask the big question as well, which is, can it happen again? I'm Chad, I boomrod. Thank you all for coming, and where is my co-host? Crullwich? So let me just say at the outset, I'm just a tiny bit puzzled. Before you do, but just tell everyone who you are? Oh, yeah, I'm Robert.

Didn't you just say? Robert Crullwich is my name. And with all due respect, I mean, if we had any number of things we could have done in the hour, could have done sex lives of watermelon, something interesting about chrysanthemums, I don't know. Why choose a Martian Invasion radio show from 1938? Old, old, old. Okay.

Well, I guess it's a valid question you ask. Truth is, I actually only discovered the War of the Worlds recently in 2001. Actually, not long after that day in 2001. And it just really struck me. And it wasn't so much that the broadcast had a kind of end-of-the-worldness that I guess we were all feeling in real life at that moment. But it was more just the way that the story unfolded, step by step by step,

and how in the broadcast you felt like you were, lost inside a newscast. Which is not unlike what it was like on September. Yeah, we were all, you know, glued to the TV in real life, grasping at these pieces of news, trying to figure out what was going on. And that was very much, I think, what they were trying to create in the broadcast.

But now, many years later, what I'm really left with is a question. What? Well, if I were alive in 1938, in front of the radio, and I heard those sounds, what would I have thought? Would I believe it? I mean, I don't know.

What about you? I don't really know. Okay, well, let's do something. Let's actually go back to 1938 and see if we can figure out how these sounds landed on people's ears and what information they had in their heads. And I need your help with this. How would I help with that?

Yeah, I want you to go over to that seat right there. We're going to call that seat in 1938. Oh, all right. Okay, now let's just all imagine. There you are on your easy chair. You're maybe drinking a cream soap. Let's tune the dial. Okay.

I've got something on the dial here. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From the Meridian room in the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City, we bring you the music of Raymond Raquelow in his orchestra. Who is Rick? Margino Raymond Raquelot. The touch of the Spanish, Raymond Raquelot leads off with La Campanita.

Now, you don't know that there's no such person as Ramon Raquel and that it's just a record in a CBS studio, but it sounds professional enough, so you sit back, you relax, but then. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At 20 minutes before 8th Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory

reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity. We now return you to the music. music of Ramon Raquelow playing for you in the meridian room of the Park Plaza Hotel situated in downtown New York. So at this point you think? I'm thinking explosions on Mars, hydrogen gas moving towards Earth a little strange, but how could it be so bad if I still get

to listen to the fabulous notes of the lovely Raymond Reckleckle. And he does continue to play for another minute, 34 seconds, but then it happens again. Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bullet in a moment ago, the government, of Meteorological Bureau has requested the law. Now, before we go any further, before we're going to go further, let me ask a really basic question here. I mean, we're dealing with a play, a radio play. Why would Orson Wells and his posse of Troopadores

start their play this way? The original H.G. Wells' story was written in 1898, so it was really an old book at the time, and there is no reporter character in the book, by the way. Does everybody know this War of the World story? or most people do? The story basically is this. Little green creatures from Mars, for a number of reasons having to do with thirst or something, have to leave their planet and they come to Earth. They're not very nice people. They invade, they destroy quite a number of us, and then ironically, in the

end, they get killed by little viruses. Our smallest inhabitants of our planet, bite them and destroy them. It's science fiction, of course, but in 1938, most kids knew this story. It was very popular, so I don't see why... Right, and in fact, let me bring in a clip for from Orson Welles' producer at the time, John Housman. Orson and I chose it. We decided at the time come we should be doing a science fiction show, and so we tried a few that weren't very easy to do. And just a few days before they had to be on the air

with their next installment, John Housman pulls that book off the shelf, shows it to OW, says, hey, what about this? And Orson Wells says, this? You want me to do this? He had trouble in what sense, in the sense of the language? He said it was dull. No, he said it was boring. If it was something that happened 50 years ago, everybody knows it didn't happen.

So who the hell cared? If we're going to make people care about this old story, we've got to update it. Not 1898, 1938, 1938. And it just so happened that one month prior something had happened that forever changed the world and the news. What was that? Well, began with this man. Hitler was threatening Europe, first Austria and then Czechoslovakia, World War II was right around the corner, and CBS sent a team of guys to cover this story among them, Edward R. Murrow. Colombia continues this extensive coverage of a European crisis.

And in September, Murrow and his CBS producers did something with the news that was kind of novel. They broke in. We interrupt this program of music by Harry James and his orchestra. to bring you a bulletin just received in the WOR NewsR role. Now, this had happened before, but never quite like this, with live reports, eyewitness accounts, and never quite so much. We interrupt this broadcast to bring to this important bulletin from the United Press. In just one month, these bulletins have become so numerous?

We interrupt our program to bring you a special broadcast. That bulletins were practically interrupting bullets. We interrupt this program to bring you a special broadcast. We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. We interrupt this program to take you to the NBC News Roll. Here is a special bulletin. So after weeks and weeks of hearing these constant interruptions, it's easy to understand why this play... Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago...

Didn't sound like a play. The Government of Meteorological Bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars. We have arranged an interview with a noted astronomer Professor Pearson, who will give us his views on this event. In a few moments, we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until then for the music of Raymond Raquelow and disorder. I don't know whether I need any more of Raymond Markello.

I need to know a little more about this Martian thing. Isn't it interesting how slowly it starts? And by the way, what time do you got on your pocket watch there? The pocket watch says 804. All right, 804. Tell me when it gets to 805. To what? 805.

805. 805. 805. And now. This is my favorite minute in understanding one of the greatest media hoaxes of all times. Because the thing that's interesting is that at this moment in October of 1938, Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater of the Air were not that popular. They had a tiny, tiny slice of the audience.

And so not too many people were listening, certainly not at the beginning from 8 o'clock to 804. And so not too many people heard this very important introduction. The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present the War of the World by H.G. West. Well, why didn't they hear that? Well, because at that very same moment, the majority of people listening were tuned into this. The makers of Chasen Sandborn coffee, the superb blend you know is fresh, present the Chason Sanborn Hour. Ah, the Chasing Sanborn Hour. Now, that, that was good. That was Ed Bergen.

It had the puppet, Charlie McCart. who liked girls. It was the most popular show at the time. It ran opposite the Mercury Theater of the Air. Had ten times the audience, but at 805, the host Don Amici introduces a not-so-popular singer. And it's the rousing, rip-roaring song of the vagabonds from the vagabond gig. For more you beg of the Paris time you raise the rabble of floating.

And just at that moment, thousands, hundreds, we don't know how many listeners. started to dial surf where they landed on the Mercury Theater of the Air. Already in progress, where they stayed put. We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton. Because by then a strange meteor had landed. Where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pearson, famous astronomer. Professor, may I begin our questions? Any time, Mr. Post.

Professor, you're quite convinced, as a scientist, that living intelligence, as we know it, does not exist on Mars? I say the chances against it are a thousand to one. And yet, how do you account for these gas eruptions occurring on the surface of the planet at regular intervals? Mr. Phillips, I cannot account for it. Now we've had four interruptions now. At this point, you've called your whole family into the room. Marge, meteors on Mars, March.

Meteors? What? Meteors on Mars. And just as you are utterly confused, along comes the expert. You know, people surveyed afterwards said, I didn't believe this thing. I thought it was all baloney, until I heard that government official guy, or the Princeton professor.

And this script is chocked full of believable experts. Dr. Gray of the Natural History Museum. Professor Endelkoffers of the California Astronomical Society. Brigadier General Montgomery Smith. Captain Lansing of the signal card. Maybe subconsciously that had an effect to convince people that something was, in fact, happening a feeling furthered a moment later

when the professor and the reporter, Carl Phillips go live to that field in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, where that meteorite, or whatever it is, has landed. The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial. Not found on this earth. Friction with the earth's atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is smooth, and you can see it's cylindrical shape. Just a minute, something's happening. Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific.

This end of the thing is beginning to flake off. Top is beginning to rotate like a screw, and this thing must be hollow. He's moving. Keep back there, keep those men back. Keep those idiots back. Take off. The top's loose. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed.

Wait a minute. Someone calling someone or something I can see, tearing out of that black hole through luminous discs. The eyes, it might be a face, might be almost a... But heavens, something regaling out of the shadow like a gray snake. The mouth is kind of bee-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips. I hate rimless lips, actually. As do I.

Now, before we get too far into this scene, let me play you another clip. The ship is riding majestically tortoise, like some great feather. Recognize this? Wow. No, just listen a little bit more. The wind is looking down to the field ahead of them. It's first and a flage. Get their shot.

Get this, Charlie. It's right. And it's crashing. Oh, my, get out of the way, please. It's burning, bursting in the flames, and it's falling on the morning's past. Oh, it's the humanity and all the passengers. This is tape of the Hindenburg crash. Still, fresh in people's minds, happened one year before the broadcast.

Before going on the air that night, actor Frank Redick, who played that reporter, Carl Phillips in the field, he went to the library, dug up this old tape, or not so old, and played it to himself. Over humanity Over and over Over humanity All the passage Freebie garage To get himself in that right frame of mind

For that now famous attack scene In that field in New Jersey Those creatures know what that means What anything means Wait a minute something's happening Hump shape is rising out of the pit I can make out a small beam of light Against a mirror

What's that? There's a jet of flame springings in a mirror And it leads right at the advancing men He strikes them head on Lord, they're turning in a flame All the whole field is qualified The woods of fire in the gas tanked The automobiles are spreading everywhere

Coming this way now About 20 yards to my right The transmission cuts off 12 million people Have just heard slithery green aliens Eviscerate Policemen, farmers, and reporters Followed by

nothing 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 however we will return

to that point at the earliest opportunity and when they do return what you learn is that that grounded flying saucer that just zapped all those men has now stood up it's grown legs it's as tall as a tree and it is marching through the countryside stopping everything

its path and then we are taken to field reports, live battle scenes between militia and pause. But before we do, let me play one more clip. This one is real. If you were in one of the areas mentioned and have a child of school age and wish to have them evacuated, you should send him to school tomorrow, Friday, with hand luggage containing the child's gas mask, a change of underclothing. This is Edward R. Murrow, reporting from London's same time period, just to give you a sense So how scary it was to be alive at this moment in time. Kids in England were being told to take gas masks to school.

All of which would have made the following dramatized battle scenes. We take you now to the field headquarters of the state militia near Grover's Mill, New Jersey. All the more real. 31 meters. 37 degrees. 37 degrees. Fire. Here the New Jersey militia fire on a fleet of Martian pods.

24 meters? To no avail. Fire. Their shells bounce right off, and the Martians in retaliation release a cloud of poisonous gas, which slowly overtake the soldiers. 23 meters. 23 meters. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make.

Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which took place tonight at Grover Mills has ended in one of the most startling defeat ever suffered by an army in modern times. 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against the single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. 120 known survivors. Just a moment, please, ladies and gentlemen.

Another bulletin from Langhamfield, Virginia. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center. Highways to the north, south and west are clogged with frantic human traffic. Police and army reserves are unable to control the mad flight. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. Aero tracks are torn and service discontinued. Marshal law prevails throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Another bulletin.

Gunning planes report enemy machines now three a number, increasing speed northward, kicking over houses. This time we take you to Washington. Citizens of the nation. The Secretary of the Interior. I shall not try to conceal the gravity. A bulletin has handed me. A portion of the situation. Martian cylinders are falling all over the country.

This is the end now. No more defenses. Everything wiped out. We don't know exactly how many people panicked that night. Here's what we do know. The Trenton Police Department got 2,000 calls in under two hours. The New York Times Switchboard received 875 calls alone from people wanting to know where they'd be safer,

on the roof or in the gas raid shelter in the cellar. We're lucky we do have transcripts of what happened on the other side of radios that night, thanks to a Princeton sociologist who went out and conducted a series of interviews after the broadcast. And what's amazing is how effective that broadcast was. Some listeners said they actually felt like they were choking. Others reported to police that they saw with their own. eyes as they looked at the Manhattan skyline, they saw a thin veil of smoke from the battle over the city. Some said they saw Martian machines high stepping their way down the palisades,

splash, splash, splash. And many people, when they called operators or police, they didn't say, oh my God, we're being invaded by Martians. They said, oh my God, we're being invaded by Germans. Here are some of the literal transcriptions. This is what real people actually said. Everybody ready? I knew it was some Germans. trying to gas us all. But when the announcer kept on calling them people from Mars, I just thought he was ignorant. I immediately called up the Maplewood Police

and asked if there was anything wrong. They answered, we know as much as you do. Keep your radio tuned in and follow the announcer's advice. I called into my husband. Dan, why don't you get dressed? You don't want to die in your working clothes. I looked in icebox and saw some chicken left from Sunday dinner that I was saving for Monday night dinner.

I said to my nephew, We may as well eat this chicken. We won't be here in the morning. 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. 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. That was how Orson Welles concluded the War of the World's broadcast with those words, basically, ha-ha, it was a joke, gotcha. But it was only after he and his producer, John Housman, left and read the papers the next day, that they understood just how much trouble they had caused. Well, it was very disagreeable because for at least a couple of hours, we believed we were mass murderers. I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar. to children through the medium of comic strips and...

This is well as in the press conference that following day. Many succeeding novels and adventure stories should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners. So immediate and so profound that the FCC commissioner of the time, George Henry Payne, labeled the Mercury Theater of the Air, and get this. Terrorists. Radio terrorists. But there is one thing we must not overlook.

All this took place in 1938, in a less sophisticated yesteryear, that did not know the atom bomb, guided missiles, and rockets that may shortly fly to the moon. Edward R. Murrow, 1957. Was he correct when he said that? Were we really so unsophisticated in 1938? I mean, it's so different from now? Well, let's see, huh? We interrupt this broadcast for some breaking news. this just in, it seems we may have gotten a few things wrong when we performed that show many years ago.

Most notably, just now, when I said that the FCC commissioner in 1938 called Orson Welles a radio terrorist. In his statement, he certainly suggests that, but if you read it, it seems he was actually referring to a statement he made about a year earlier where he was calling radio producers who terrorized children. and he doesn't actually name Orson Wells by name. I just botched that. My apologies. And we have this guy to thank for bringing it to our attention. Michael Sokolow and I'm associate professor of journalism and communication at the University of Maine.

And Michael Sokolow also makes an interesting argument that the panic may not have been as large as we made it sound. For example, we state that 12 million people were listening on that night, which is a widely quoted number. And it comes from polling done six weeks after the... the War of the World's first aired. Sackalo suspects that the actual number of listeners was way smaller. There's no way to know for sure. But he trusts a poll conducted that night. That night, when the broadcast was on,

5,000 Americans were surveyed by the C.E. Hooper Company, the rating survey company. Why are we bothering with a study done six weeks later after the newspaper tells everybody that there was this giant panic? Why don't we look at the surveys that were done that night and the survey that was done 12 hours later by CBS the following morning? the two surveys immediately after say? The C.E. Hooper rating survey

found 98% of the respondents were not listening to Orson Welles or War of the Worlds. They were listening to the Chase and Sanborn Hour, or their radios were off, or they were listening to another program. Of the 2% that they found that were listening to War of the World, not a single respondent thought it was a news broadcast.

Sokola strongly suspects that the panic was actually trumped up by the newspapers who were trying to sort of piss on this new medium called radio that was taken away their, you know, audience. Exactly. Here was the opportunity. And the radio industry and the newspaper industry had been battling for years. Throughout that decade, the entire newspaper industry had been losing money, political prestige, and other things to the radio industry, you know, some of their best employees. And so they were waiting for a way to really prove to advertisers and prove to federal regulators. You know, they had the First Amendment.

They understood responsibility. These are the newspaper man. These radio guys were conflating advertising with programming. They were frightening their viewers. They were acting irresponsibly. And remember, this is a month after Munich when radio proved that news really works on the radio. Well, one month after radio news comes of age, suddenly they're conflating news accounts with fiction, and they're acting irresponsibly and they're terrorizing the public. And so the newspaper industry had the perfect thing to hang their critique of radio on. Interesting. And it's interesting. So all those eyewitness accounts that the panic and I thought it was this and I packed my bags and whatever, whatever, and all the sort of reports of people miscarrying, do you feel like that's all in memory embellished? Or how do you explain that stuff? Let me give you, let me give you an analogy, okay? If you were to ask 100 Americans today, did you see a plane fly into the World Trade Center on September 11th?

I think you would get an extremely high percentage of people saying they saw that. plane fly in. But that's because it's part of our national visual memory. It's really a trauma, and it's the kind of hysteria and panic we're talking about. It's that moment in time in our relationship to the media. Okay. But if you were to actually find out whose TVs were on live at 948 in the morning that day and who was actually watching, there would be a discrepancy in that number. Now, am I saying all those people are lying? All those people are confused? No, what I'm saying is that the relationship of memory to the media is extremely complex. Complex indeed. And we thank Michael Sackle off for checking our facts. And if you believe, as he does, that the 1938 panic was,

well, didn't happen or it wasn't as bad as it sounds, then that actually makes what we talked about next in our live broadcast, even more puzzling. We'll be right back with Radio Lab live. This is Lily from Lake Nabagman, Wisconsin. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hi, I'm Robert Crullwitch. Radio Lab is supported by the Netflix film The Other Side of the Wind. Witness the last film from legendary director Orson Wells. It's the story of director J.J. Jake Haniford,

who comes back to Hollywood after years of semi-exile in Europe. he plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie, which, as it happens, is also entitled The Other Side of the Wind. It's a cinematic event 40 years in the making, the other side of the wind, on Netflix and in Select Theater's November 2nd. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crilwitt. We are in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the Fitzgerald Theater.

Our subject today is the War of the World's broadcast, originally on October 30th, 1938. Okay, now I'm going to ask the house for a show of hand, Do you think that somebody else could imagine the broadcast using the exact same script more or less, also with Martians, also invading, also interrupting the musical things? Same deal.

After all the publicity from the 1938 broadcast, could you do it twice? Show of hands, please. Oh, some of you don't think so. Look, if there wasn't another one of these, what would we be doing for the next 40 minutes? Well, so. Those of you who are,

raise your hands. I'd say it's about 75% of you. You are correct. Because it has happened again. And I want to tell you a story, an amazing story, really. An underreported story of a war of the world's reenactment happened in the mountains of Quito, Ecuador, 1949. We were very lucky. We had a reporter, Tony Fields, who happened to be traveling there. We asked him to do a couple of interviews, and he brought back some tape and played it for me. All right, so Tony, set the scene for me. 1949, Quito. Where's Quito? Kito is the capital of Ecuador. Kito is the capital of Ecuador. Kito is in the middle of the mountains, in the Andes mountains. Small town, big town?

Kito now is a big city. At the time, it was a pretty small city. The word that everybody who I spoke to used to describe the way that Kito was in 1949 was Tranquilo. Tranquil. Very tranquil. A city tranquil.

Like tranquil? Exactly. It is what it sounds like. And Radio Kito was the most popular radio station. Everybody listened to it. So, those are your big. basic ingredients. You got a small town, population, 250,000. You have one major radio station, which also happened to be in the same building as the one major newspaper, El Comercio, and the leader of the radio station, the guy ran it, a devious fellow by the name of Leonardo

Pais. One day someone shows up with a script for Orson Wells, not H.T. Wells, Orson Welles' version of War of the World, gives it to Leonardo Pius. He reads it, says, brilliant. We've got to do this here in Quito. They insert local place names, you know, so instead of the Martians landing in New Jersey, they would land in Kotokoyau, which is on the outskirts of Kito. They write in parts for government officials, the minister of the interior, the mayor of Quito. These are actors or real government?

These would be actors. Doing impressions. Doing impressions. That's right. Whoa. Not only that, Paias got his bosses at the newspaper El Comercio to agree to run little articles in the newspaper in the two days leading up to the broadcast, reporting that strange objects had been seen in the skies over Akito.

Wow. So he set out to screw with people, basically. I mean, he was planting paranoia. It really seems like he wanted people to believe what they were hearing that night. Okay, so Saturday, February 12th, 1949, the day of the broadcast. All day long, listeners hear an announcement. that there's going to be a special performance by the duo Benitez Valencia. Benitez Valencia at that time were one of the most popular musical acts in town.

8 o'clock rolls around. Benitez Valencia launches into their performance. They play a few songs, and suddenly there's an interruption. What was that? Well, it turns out that Leonardo Lepaes, in addition to the other tricks he had up his sleeve, he had a sound effects guy in the corner that was creating this sound. Like one of Garrison Kielers guys kind of thing? That's right. Tom Keith, everyone.

Eventually, the music stops, and Leonardo Lepaes comes on the air and says, Please, dear listeners, excuse, the technical difficulties, there seems to be some sort of atmospheric conditions interfering with the Radio Quito signal. But you are listening to Radio Quito, brought to you by, you know, such and such. And now back to Benitez Valencia. So, we hear another couple songs, and then there's another interruption. It's Leonardo Pius again, and this time it's a news flash. So now we're on script, basically.

That's right, that's right. They send Pius out to report from the scene. And Paisers is doing the play-by-play, you know, what is this thing? Oh, my God, the cop's unscrewing. Here come the tentacles. And here come the heat rays. And zap. Pius is fried.

You can wait, wait, wait, wait, do we have, forget reenactments. Do we have a copy of the real broadcast from that night? All we have are. descriptions. There is no existing recording of what was broadcast that night. And you'll understand why in a second. By all accounts, it worked. Outside, it was sheer mayhem. Everything that happened next happened extremely quickly. People poured out into the streets. People were running, but they didn't know where to run. The spaceship supposedly was in the north of the city, but this black cloud of gas was in the south, and a lot of them actually did what any good Catholic would do.

They made a beeline for the church. The church, because they thought they'd be safe there? Perhaps, or perhaps they just wanted to get right with God before the world ended. There are even reports, and I wasn't able to confirm this, but there are reports of men confessing to adultery right there in front of their wives and priests absolving whole crowds at once. This is Jorge Riba De Naira, who is a longtime journalist, worked for many years at the newspaper. He was listening with his family.

They all believed it. They all ran outside, found a taxi cab, threw the kids in, the rest of them ran behind the taxi cab. They were going to flee the city. And he tells me that he sees going the other way, this convoy of military trucks. filled with soldiers. Do we, real trucks, real military vans? Real military vans with real soldiers and cops behind them, and they're screaming

towards the north of the city. Where are they going? They're going to Koto Koyoo to fight the Martians. Yeah. So if you had any doubt at this point, once you saw those military vans, you were like, oh, bleep, I've got to get the hell out. Right.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Does everybody in Qito believe, didn't someone call the judge? general beforehand, say tonight we're having a broadcast. Well, the mayor or someone who sounded an awful like the mayor, was on the radio saying Martians were invading. The mayor didn't call the general before. No, no.

So then what happens at the end of the show, assuming it ends the way they always do, and so ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-jured? Then what? Well, they stormed the radio station. Good. By the time the broadcast ended and it was announced that the whole thing was a play, huge crowds were in the streets. and word that it was a hoax spread pretty quickly.

All that fear turned pretty quickly to anger. By 9.30, there's a few hundred people outside the station. At some point this boxer shows up. There had just been a match in the Central Plaza, and the boxer shows up, and he's driving this truck, and the truck is full of rocks. He's full of what? Rocks? It's full of rocks, yeah.

Huh. And people start hurling the rocks at the station, at the windows. And windows are shattering. they managed to break into the ground floor where the printing presses are. They're smashing printing presses. At some point, some people in the crowd materialize and they have these flaming torches

and it just goes up like a matchstick. So were people hurt during this? Six people died. Oh, really? Yeah. Most escaped. There was about 50 people in the building. Most got up to the roof, jumped to adjoining buildings,

but six people died. According to reporter Tony, one guy stayed behind. the last guy on the air that night was a man by the name of Luis Beltran. Maria, are you there? Yes, I'm here. Okay, this is Maria Beltran testagrosa,

Luis Beltran's daughter. Maria, you were listening to everything that just came before this. Yes. Tell us the story from your dad's perspective from here forward. Well, he was on the air. He was, I guess, hosting the music program and also doing some of the interruption. with the bogus martin.

At the point in which the fire started, what was he saying? When he realized the magnitude of the situation, he went back on the air and began pleading for help, pleading for assistance from the police and the fire department. But as you said before, no help came because the police were going to fight the Martian. And eventually he was the last one left, and he jumped out the window,

I guess from either the third or fourth floor onto a second floor balcony. And to break the fall, I guess instinctively you want to break the fall, he grabbed onto the railing of that balcony. And he was completely engulfed in flames at that point. And the skin on his hands just remained on the balcony. It was like a barbecue grill. Wow. And from there, he jumped to the ground.

But before he jumped, he was pleading to the crowd to, I guess, catch him, but they didn't. He landed on cement, broke legs, arms, ribs, everything, and compounded by the very, very serious burns that he had all over his body.

So he landed at the feet of an angry mob. An angry mob, and he recalled that as he's losing consciousness, he just heard somebody say, just let him die in peace. Although some of the articles that I read, they try to

throw him back into the building. Really? Someone grabbed him and put him in a Jeep to take him to the hospital, just a bystander. And, you know, he had so many scars here. As children, my brother and I would play with his scars. We would trace them with our finger and ask him what happened, you know, how we got the scars, and he would tell us about the fire.

Would he tell you the whole story? No, he didn't tell us the whole story. He would just give us, just in broad terms that he had been in a building, that caught fire. As children, we didn't really ask him. Maybe had we been older and asked him, he would have told us the whole story. And we should say that your dad stayed behind

to try and help other people get out of the building. Let me ask you a question, though. Your dad obviously is a hero, but given the fact that he was one of the voices that created the panic, did he feel some sort of ambivalence about... I don't know, in retrospect, whether he did or not.

I'm sure there must have been some ambivalence, but from what I understand, the story was kept, it was very top secret so that even the employees did not know what was going to be broadcast during that music program. I don't know at what point he was informed of the detail

so I don't know really how we felt about it. I wish I had had an opportunity to ask him. Well, listen Maria, thank you so much for your time and joining us here. Sure. Thanks. Take it.

I just want to know what happened to the guy who planned the hoax. Well, he He got out through the roof, like a lot of others. He hopped to the next building, hid out for a few days, and then fled the country to Venezuela, never to return. Never to return. Never to return. But I should say that among the six people who died that night

was his girlfriend and a nephew of his. Okay, so the 1949 Quito broadcast caused a whole lot of trouble. The 1938 New York broadcast caused a whole lot of trouble. Now, everybody here before who raised their hand and thought that this could happen again, you are right again. Now, Buffalo, 1968. Updated for the time. It sounds kind of like your basic DJ set until you hear this. What is it?

Joe Downey is handing me something here that I'm supposed to read. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Let's see. The NASA, NASA, the National Space and Aeronautics Administration, those people have alerted all their space watch. and facilities to be on the alert for unusual communication difficulties tonight. A spokesman for the federal agency referred to the explosions on the planet Mars and said it was not known if they would have the same effect on Earth communications

as similar explosions on the surface of the sun. I guess they're talking about sunspots and things like that. So I don't know. It means it it's going to be hard to hear communications from NASA. Can you hear me down in South Carolina? As long as you can hear, KV, what difference you make about communication? Rock and roll. W. KB.W. Jackson, Armstrong.

You're all communicating with your head, Halloween night, getting it all together where it is. WKBW. The WKBW broadcast followed the same structure as the original broadcast we've heard tonight. Long stretches of music, then the news bulletins, then the semi-realistic field reports.

Here's one of them. What do you got? You got walking injuries or real bad ones? You got the same vivid descriptions of Martians. That's face, I can hardly look at it, darling. I can hardly look at it. It's nothing so over. And according to the station manager, Jeff Kay,

you get the same outcome, people bought it. The Buffalo Police and Telephone Company reported to WKBW that they received more than 4,000 phone calls. The Canadian military authorities dispatched military units to the Peace Bridge, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Queenston Bridge to repel invaders. The story was carried the next day by 47 newspapers, the countrywide, and on the night of the show and during the show, United Press bureaus up and down the East Coast of America

were besieged by phone calls asking about the Martian invasion in Buffalo. Incredible. You're absolutely right. It is incredible. Thanks to the folks at WKBW Buffalo for that. What is this music, by the way? This is the disco version of War of the Worlds, 1978. There's a disco version. Still sells a lot of copies. You'd be surprised. Here's the obvious question to ask. Why does this keep working? Well, that's a difficult question. I came across a psychology professor.

I'm Richard Garrick. I'm a professor of psychology in the cognitive. experimental program at Stony Brook University. He has this notion, Richard Garrick does, that at root, people are suckers for stories. We just cannot help ourselves. When a story starts, you just kind of go, I think the norm is to fall into the story and that it's unusual to sort of keep yourself from falling in.

My favorite example is there's a scene in Goldfinger. Bum, boom, boom. Yeah, the all-time best James Bond movie, I think, where Bond is tied down, spread eagle on a piece of metal and there's this laser coming toward him, which really looks like to cut him in two. And even as I'm saying that right now, I'm starting to feel a little bit of anxiety because I have a picture you in my head and picturing that laser coming toward him. And, you know, spoiler alert, he doesn't actually get split in two by the laser. Yeah, sorry, but here's the

thing. Go and watch the movie now and see if you can get through that scene without experience suspense. And it really seems to say something very powerful and strong about how immerse we can become in the narrative world. This is Ashley Estack calling from Modesto, California. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abramrod.

And I'm Robert Krulwich. And this is the sound of 700 people who have come to bear witness. to the recording of our show today. We are in the Fitzgerald Theater at St. Paul, Minnesota, talking about the strange phenomenon that is the War of the Worlds. You know, it is very great that everybody's here,

of course, but there is one guy I really wish had been here. Who's that? The Ecuadorian guy, Leonardo, what's his... Pius? Yeah, yeah. Because he's the guy I want to ask, like, what were you thinking?

That's what I want about. Well, he's dead. He's dead, yeah. Well, but Orson Wells, I would say to him, what were you thinking, I would say? Dead. Dead. So I found a guy who I think is definitely alive.

I am Daniel Myrick, co-writer, co-director of the Blair Witch Project. Before making the Blair Witch Project, Dan Myrick heard a recording of the War of the World. He was pretty young at the time. He was a teenager. I just thought it was brilliant. Absolutely the coolest thing. And more than anything else, he was impressed by the technique of the thing. There's a couple of moments in particular where they cut to the kind of on-site reporter. I'll return you to Carl Phillips at Grover's Bill.

And it's almost like cut in a second or two early. And you hear the reporter saying, so are we on? Ladies and gentlemen. Am I on? Are we on? Ladies and gentlemen. And then he goes into character. And it's those little beats, those little moments that really make it convincing.

I get this kind of guilty excitement when I know how it affected people. And he was fascinated by the idea that scary stories get even scarier if you think they're true. So years later, fresh out of film school, he and his friend Eduardo Sanchez decided to develop their own Wells-like project. It's your basic scary witch story. Three kids go into the woods. Okay, okay, okay, we're leaving right now. They get lost, they bump into the witch,

and then they die, or they think they die. At least you never see them again. Please, help us! But when you entered the theater to see the Blair Witch Project, the first thing that you'd see on the screen are these two sentences. In October of 1994, three student filmmakers

disappeared in the woods near Berkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found. So the suggestion here is that what we see might be real. Well, we picked a subject matter that was difficult to disprove to the casual observer. Martians invading from outer space is you turn the channel to the next network, and if no one's reporting about it, it's pretty well assured as probably fiction.

But three missing students in the woods, you know, that's something that is a little harder to disprove without a fair amount of scrutiny. and it worked. We were getting calls from police wondering where these three kids were and how come they never heard of this case. You're kidding. Oh yeah, I mean, it was constant.

We still get emails occasionally on what part of the story is real. You know, is there still any phenomena out in Birketsville and da-da-da-da. It's all fiction and is all made up. And I think it reinforces what I think Ed and I suspected that so much of us wants to believe. Some people told Dan Myrick that after watching those three campers go in the woods, they themselves would never go camping again. And he thought that was fabulous.

He loved it. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would you not want people to go camping? I mean, honestly, why would you do that to people? Well, I asked him. I mean, that's why you're doing it. We're not making this movie to kind of scare people. We were making the film to really scare people.

No regrets on people not wanting to go camping afterwards. So, the... question is, is that what Orson Wells was up to back in 1938? Was he just trying to give people a good old-fashioned show business scare, make them scream way up in the balcony? Because remember, at the time, that is what he claimed, that this was simply an entertainment. 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.

But 16 years later, Orson Welles changed the story. Here he is on the BBC. The year is 1955. In fact, we weren't as innocent as we meant to be. And we did the Martian broadcast. We were fed up with a way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed. So in a way, our broadcast was. an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came through the tap. So here are two ways to think about the war of the worlds. One, it was a smashing entertainment using every trick they could think of, including inventing some new ones, to scare you silly, master storytelling. Or, and, it was, we're trying

to send you a warning. Don't trust everything you hear on the radio. It's It's not always true. To which one was it, you think? Well, I asked the professor. Jason Lovillio. Me? Yeah, you. Jason?

Him. He's a radio historian at the University of Maryland. He says that what Wells understood was that a newscast is often two things at once. In a newscast, you hear something scary or disturbing sometimes, but it's going to be told to you in a way that soothes you, meaning the authority of the voice, the newscaster's steady voice coming through the radio, it will calm you like President Roosevelt's famous fireside chats. My friend, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.

When you study the rhetoric that Roosevelt used, he really did convey two messages. One, we're in terrible danger. And two, I've got it covered. And that is the sort of the authoritative voice coming out of the darkness, this sort of invisible, disembodied voice of the powerful man, the news anchor. September 22nd, 1940. And we'll see this with Murrow on the rooftops of Britain. I'm standing on a rooftop.

During the blitz. Looking out over London. Straight in front of me now. You hear two sounds in just a moment. There they are. He's giving us a story of an unfolding emergency. I should think in a few minutes there may be a bit of shrapnel around here. But his mastery of the information, his mastery of his own voice, his bravery on the scene.

You may be able to hear the sound of guns off in the distance, very faintly like someone kicking a tub. This was the beginning of the formatting of fear, the formatting of crisis. And so people go to the news, not to be afraid, but to be afraid and then to be reassured. Robert, you file things for the news. Yeah. Do you buy this? that a news reporter does these two things simultaneously scares and then reassures and then scares? No, you never go, you know, go cover the governor and say,

first I'm going to scare them and then I'm going to assuage them. No one would do that. But why else would you talk that way? I mean, not you. Oh, but I mean... The form of the news is a... Because the guy is always there. Because he's an anchor, that's what the word means.

It is a reassuring thing to see them night after night telling and telling. But Lovilio says that the real genius of the war of the world was that Wells put you into a newscast where you expect anchors to anchor and you expect reporters to report and then, he kills the reporter and the anchor and suddenly you're left all by yourself in your own living room all alone.

That is exactly right. The moment of the War of the World's broadcast, which still, frankly, terrifies me. It's this moment right here. He strikes them head on. Lord, they're turning in a plane. The whole field's caught it by the woods The fire of the gas tank

Tanks for the automobiles spreading everywhere Coming this way now About 20 yards to my right It's like that silence is terrifying No anchor, no reporter No one to Reassure you

Okay but Forgetting that for a moment What about his second lesson That he had to teach us? The thing about don't believe the radio What about that? Did it work? Well Professor Lovillo says If that is really what Wells

was trying to do if you believe that, well then he failed. Actually, he worse than failed. The War of the World's, not once, not twice. We've shown you three broadcast tonight. It was so good at grabbing an audience and sucking them in that the Wells formula, you might call it. The newscast that scares you enough to keep you listening

has been adopted by, of all folks, news companies. Right now at 11, a night of shopping turns into a night of fear. Swarming over borders, flooding cities and towns, Muslim immigrants. Teens, texting and driving. It's a deadly mix. Terror in the toilet. And sink holes and landslides. Python in the pot.

A rapid baby go. Terrorists working at one of our airports. Terror in the toilet. Pythons in the potty. Maybe there was some snakes somewhere near a toiletry facility of some kind, but it probably wasn't a python, and it probably wasn't your toilet. But you don't know that? You want to hear that it belongs to Mrs. James C. McGillicuddy of 2214 Bodee Boulevard,

and not you, so you want to be reassured, and so you listen, and so you fall in. And if Orson Wells retelling a Martian invasion story by H.G. Wells, that most people already knew, if he could grab us, and then if they could do it again in Ecuador, and then if they can do it again in Buffalo, what does that tell you? It tells you that we can't help ourselves,

even if the headline is slightly preposterous, even if it's slightly scary, even if it's slightly false, we will listen. The fear that these broadcasts generate now suck us in, and you'd think that 70 years later we'd be more sophisticated and critical when the local newscaster tells us that there's something we're feeding our children that could kill them and they'll tell us after the news. I still listen. I'm a media critic, and I still wait through the commercials to see What is it that I'm doing to kill my child?

Even if it's really implausible, your shoelaces will kill you after this beef method. Somehow it gets me every time. Yeah, and Wells New. Jason Studstill calling from Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abramrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel-Hobti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliai, Katzlazlo, and Mo Azayamo. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.