The Night Martians Landed

Who Owned Sunday Night

To understand that night, go back to radio in 1938. Radio was the living room. It was where families got their music, their comedy, and their news.

And one month earlier, the news had been frightening. In September, Europe looked like it was sliding toward war during the Munich Crisis. Announcers broke into regular programs with bulletin after bulletin from overseas.

So people had learned something. When the music stops and a voice says, "We interrupt this program," you listen.

Every sailor knows that reflex. On a ship, when the speakers crackle outside the normal routine, conversations stop mid-word. Nobody has to tell you to listen.

But at eight o'clock on Sunday nights, most of the country wasn't waiting for bulletins. They were listening to NBC, where a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen and his wooden dummy, Charlie McCarthy, owned the hour. It was the biggest show going.

Over on CBS, opposite Bergen, was a small, low-budget drama called The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was run by an actor and director named Orson Welles. He was twenty-three years old. His company did serious literature. Shakespeare. Robert Louis Stevenson. Not many people were tuning in.

For the night before Halloween, they picked an old science fiction novel by the English writer H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds.

And the people making it thought it was a dud. Their fear was simple. Nobody would listen.

A Pencil on a Map

The script was written by Howard Koch.

Koch and the Mercury team had a problem. A Martian invasion seemed silly to them. Kid stuff. So they did everything they could to make it sound real, because they figured that was the only way anyone would keep listening.

Their answer was to tell the story the way radio told real news.

Koch moved the action from England to the New York area. To pick the landing spot, he later said, he put a pencil point on a map of New Jersey. It landed on a tiny place called Grover's Mill, near Princeton. He liked the sound of it.

The show opened with an announcement that this was a radio play. But after that, it didn't sound like a play at all. It sounded like a weather report. Then dance music from a hotel ballroom. Then an announcer cutting in with a bulletin about strange explosions on the planet Mars.

Back to the music. Then another bulletin. Then an interview with a Princeton astronomer, Professor Pierson, played by Welles himself.

The pacing was the trick. The bulletins came faster. The reporters got more frightened. And the music stopped coming back.

Which brings us to that farm field.

Dead Air

In the story, a flaming object falls on a farm near Grover's Mill. A reporter named Carl Phillips rushes out to describe it. A crowd gathers around a huge metal cylinder. The top begins to unscrew. Something comes out.

Then a heat ray. Then screaming. Then dead air.

Anyone who has stood a watch knows that feeling. A voice on the circuit is a comfort, even when the news is bad. It's the silence that makes your stomach drop.

Many listeners weren't with Welles from the start. Many tuned in late, after catching the opening of the Edgar Bergen show. If you landed on CBS in the middle, you missed the announcement. You were the listener at the top of this story.

By about forty minutes in, Martian machines are attacking New York City with poison gas.

In the end, the Martians are killed by ordinary germs, just as in the novel.

Then Welles stepped out of character. He told the audience the show was the Mercury Theatre's own radio version of "dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!"

A Halloween prank. That's how he described it.

But by then, the phones were already ringing.

Monday's Headlines

Police stations. Newspaper offices. Radio stations. Some sixty percent of the stations that carried the program had to put out announcements to calm people down. The next day, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that oversees broadcasting, called the broadcast "regrettable."

And on Monday morning, October 31st, the newspapers went big.

The front page of The New York Times read, "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact." Papers across the country ran stories of families fleeing their homes, people praying in the streets, crowds jamming phone lines.

Orson Welles faced reporters that Monday looking shaken. Every sign from Welles at the time was that he honestly didn't know if he'd be sued, or even arrested.

And here the story splits in two. Decades later, Welles liked to hint that he had seen it all coming. Everyone else who worked on the show said they were caught completely by surprise.

Two years later, a Princeton psychologist named Hadley Cantril published a study called The Invasion from Mars. He estimated that about six million people had heard the broadcast, and that at least a million of them were frightened or disturbed.

So that became the story. America heard a radio play and lost its mind. For the next eighty years, that's mostly how it got told.

But a few historians eventually asked a simple question. How many people were actually listening?

Five Thousand Phone Calls

Two media historians, Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, dug up an answer from that very night. A ratings service called C. E. Hooper telephoned five thousand households. Only about two percent said they were listening to Welles.

Remember the ventriloquist? Most of the country was with him.

Pooley and Socolow also argued that Cantril blurred a line. Being scared for a few minutes in your chair at home is not the same thing as running into the street.

Then another historian, W. Joseph Campbell, noticed something about the newspapers themselves. Most of them dropped the story within a day or two.

Therefore the question got sharper. If families really ran from their homes that night, who wrote it down?

The answer was sitting in boxes of mail.

The Letters

After the broadcast, Americans wrote to Orson Welles, to CBS, and to the Federal Communications Commission. A historian named A. Brad Schwartz went through those letters for his book, Broadcast Hysteria.

There are about fourteen hundred letters to Welles at the University of Michigan, and a little more than six hundred to the FCC at the National Archives.

So Schwartz went looking for the families who fled. In the letters to Welles, only about six describe anyone running from home. In the letters to the government, only five or six more.

So go back to that listener who tuned in late and heard the microphone go dead. What did they actually do?

Most of the letters weren't about running at all. About nine in ten of the letters to Welles took his side. Schwartz remembers one woman who fired off an angry letter right after the show. Then, at the bottom of the page, she scrawled a postscript. "Upon thinking about it, I must say, it was marvelous and accept my congratulations."

Most of them stayed in their chairs.

Schwartz doesn't say nobody was scared. Some people were terrified. A relative handful acted in strange ways. But most frightened listeners were sitting by the radio, not running for the hills. And many didn't even think it was Martians. Coming in late, plenty assumed it was a German attack, or some other disaster.

So how did a scare that was real but limited become a national panic? Schwartz says the newspapers took scattered reports from a chaotic night and stitched them together into a wave.

And some historians think the papers had a reason. During the Depression, radio was taking advertising money from newspapers. Pooley and Socolow argue the papers played up the panic to make radio look reckless and untrustworthy, to advertisers and to regulators.

There really was a frightening broadcast on October 30th, 1938. Some people really did believe it. But the story of a whole nation in hysteria may have been the real piece of fiction. And it spread the same way the scare did. Through rumor, through repetition, and through people who trusted what they heard without checking.

The night made Orson Welles famous. Three years later, he made Citizen Kane. But for the rest of his life, he was the man who brought the Martians to New Jersey.

In the Navy, you learn early that a first report is not a confirmed contact. You verify before you act. That works at home too, whether the news comes from a radio, a newspaper, or the phone in your pocket.

Out in Grover's Mill that night, the field where the Martians landed was just a dark New Jersey field. Nothing crawled out of anything.

Tomorrow: an old American destroyer, a German submarine, and a war America hadn't joined yet. The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. If you liked this one, subscribe. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.