On this day in New York · October 30, 1938
Orson Welles Panics America From a Madison Avenue Studio
A 23-year-old actor read a fake news bulletin about Martians landing in New Jersey, and enough people believed it that the country is still arguing about what happened.
The facts
- Date and time
- October 30, 1938, 8 to 9 pm
- Network and show
- CBS Radio, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, 17th episode
- Studio
- Columbia Broadcasting Building, 485 Madison Avenue, New York
- Audience
- An estimated 6 million listeners, with about 1.2 million reported frightened, per researcher Hadley Cantril
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air troupe broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds live from the Columbia Broadcasting Building at 485 Madison Avenue. The show was staged as a run of increasingly frantic news bulletins breaking into a dance music program, describing a Martian invasion starting in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. No clear disclaimer greeted listeners who tuned in mid-show, and CBS's own later estimate put the audience at roughly 6 million, with researcher Hadley Cantril calculating that around 1.2 million of them were frightened or disturbed by what they heard. Welles, all of 23 years old, was standing in front of reporters and flashbulbs by the next morning explaining that he hadn't meant to convince anyone Martians were real.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own.
Opening narration of the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast script, written by Howard Koch and read by Orson Welles, October 30, 1938
Source: Wikipedia -
With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.
Opening narration of the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast script, written by Howard Koch and read by Orson Welles, October 30, 1938
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
It became the founding case study in how a fictional broadcast, staged to sound exactly like real news, could trigger real fear, a lesson this city's media relearns every time a hoax goes viral from a studio a few blocks away.
Sources
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