'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.'

-- Orson Welles' ending remark to the Mercury Theatre's CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, Oct. 30, 1938.

NEWS Flash!!!!

The Martians have landed!!!! (60 years ago in New Jersey)
The Martians have landed!!!!! (100 years ago in England)

By Jayne Spencer

Please enter your very own time machine and travel back 60 years, to the eve of Halloween 1938.

It's a Sunday. Supper dishes are done in households across America. Radio receiving sets "inhabit" more than two-thirds of all homes: squatty console sets sit at the center of attention in living rooms and parlors, as unremarkable as crochet doilies on furniture headrests.

* flash!

Eight days after the 1938 WOW broadcast, Frank McNinch, chairman of the FCC, called the presidents of the nation's three major broadcasting networks -- NBC, CBS and the Mutual Broadcasting System -- to a meeting. He wished to discuss the use of the newspaper term "flash" on radio, "especially the frequent and, at times, misleading use of the newspaper term 'flash.'"

In the "news theater" concoction that Welles had directed, the word was used by the fictional spot news reporters as they chronicled the decimation of the Eastern Seaboard by Martian invaders.

A master of understatement, McNinch opined: "I have heard the opinion often expressed within the industry as well as outside, that the practice of using 'flash,' as well as 'bulletin,' is overworked and results in misleading the public."

There are many "new-fangled" table models (retailing at about $40) being tuned as well, and dry-battery sets in automobiles and farms are crackling alive. Families gather. Young couples take evening drives, turning to their favorite radio personalities while escaping on wheels the realities of the post-depression and a precarious international climate.

You get the picture.

Now re-enter the present, and let's look at the details of what was to become known as the "WOW Panic Broadcast." The 45-minute fictional piece presumably influenced the U.S. Civil Defense program, while providing to a real-world monster named Adolf Hitler the opportunity to take pot shots at what he saw as American "weakness."

That evening, the majority of American and Canadian radio households had tuned to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (yes, the father of Candice Bergen of Murphy Brown) and his wooden sidekick, Charlie McCarthy. The show that night had gotten off to a rough start. The singer, well, was dying out there. Many listeners flipped the channel from the NBC broadcast to CBS, where 23-year-old Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Group was performing an adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. The group collectively considered the script lame, and as a result, the actors, many of whom would later make their marks in Hollywood, nearly performed an adaptation of Lorna Doone at the last moment. But WOW went on air.

Listeners missed a crucial caveat from Welles that preceded the dramatization. The broadcast, he said was a dramatization, a theater piece. He stated the same four times during the broadcast and issued a Halloween greeting of sorts in his final sentence (see above).

What many listeners first heard (or acknowledged hearing) and took to heart was a newscaster-like series of bulletins announcing an intergalactic invasion. First stop: Grover's Mill, N.J.

  • "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 rest, as they say, is history. (You can hear the complete broadcast on line at this site:

    http://earthstation1.simplenet.com/wotw.html


    Naremore
    "WOW is not only the biggest Halloween prank of all time, it's also the most socially significant broadcast ever," said Indiana University film studies expert James Naremore, Chancellors' Professor of English and comparative literature at IUB, and author of The Magic World of Orson Welles (first published in 1978 by Oxford University Press).

    "Welles thought up the idea himself, because he was very much aware of all the radio demagogues in the 1930s and thought it would be an interesting idea to do a 'news' show and then reveal it as a fake," Naremore said. "He was playing a trick that had good political consequences, because his broadcast ended forever people's naive faith in the media."

    The New York Times front-page story Oct. 31 referred to "waves of mass hysteria" and shock, traffic jams and paralyzed communications systems throughout the United States and Canada.

    Reporters in Atlanta said that listeners in the Southeast were under the impression that New Jersey was struck by a planet with monsters and between 40 and 7,000 people had perished. Neighbors across the country reportedly congregated in the streets to discuss the meteor that had destroyed the East Coast. At least five students at Brevard (N.C.) College fainted and open fights broke out as students vied for telephone access to call home. In Indianapolis, reported the Times, a woman ran into a church screaming:

  • "New York destroyed; it's the end of the world. You might as well go home to die. I just heard it on the radio."

    Services were dismissed immediately.

    Welles' particular panache, Naremore wrote in his analysis of the WOW brouhaha, "was the way Welles as director had manipulated the audience's sense of time, keeping to real duration at the beginning of the show and then dramatically collapsing the action once the basic illusion was established."

    Even the Ivy League was not immune to the power of illusion. Two Princeton University geologists, Arthur F. Beddington and Harry Hess, heard alarming reports from a dormitory that a meteor had fallen near Dutch Neck, N.J., five miles away from campus. Weighed down with geological paraphernalia, the two lit out for Dutch Neck, only to find a group of sightseers searching for meteor fragments. (Princeton, by the way, was the source of the first academic study of mass hysteria, which followed on the heels of WOW.)

    Two major myths continue to reverberate 60 years after the broadcast, Naremore said.

    "Although nobody died as a result of the broadcast," he said, "there were widespread instances of localized panic, and people of widely different social classes and educational backgrounds behaved irrationally.

    "And contrary to another myth, not very many people heard the show. In fact, it got one of Welles' lowest ratings," Naremore said. "At the time, Welles didn't have a big audience anyway, and didn't even have a sponsor. But the next day, he was a household word, and the Campbell's Soup Company bought the show."

    Welles took the hot seat the next day at a news conference. Legal suits and countersuits were threatened. The Federal Communications Commission requested a transcript and an electric recording of the broadcast for a "secret session." National security and censorship became hot topics.

    He was well on his way to fame and fortune in Hollywood, his name recognition post-WOW almost equivalent to that of Hitler's.

    Welles also had a distinctly clairvoyant if not futuristic take on media as message.

    "Radio is a popular, democratic machine for disseminating information and entertainment," Welles said. "The highbrows are still sniffing at it. But when television comes -- and I understand it is not far off -- they will be the first, in all probability, to hail radio as a new art form."

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