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Of the countless adaptations made of H.G. Wells' 1897 science fiction classic The War of the Worlds over the past century, the one that remains most talked and written about to this day was Orson Welles' live radio broadcast on 30 October 1938. It boasted a distinctly modern twist. Keen on cementing his reputation as a theatrical wunderkind (Welles was on the cover of Time magazine only months earlier), the 23-year-old actor-director reworked the plodding Victorian narrative about a Martian invasion of Earth into a gripping faux newscast with real moments of shock and awe. (Contrary to common nomenclature, Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast was not a hoax sprung on an unsuspecting audience. Rather, the show was a regularly scheduled and announced episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio program dedicated to presenting dramatizations of literary works.) A brief excerpt from the script by Howard Koch shows why Welles' hour-long production of The War of the Worlds is justly regarded as a mini-masterpiece of horror: The broadcast was legendary overnight for supposedly having been too realistic and frightening for its audience. Morning papers from coast to coast reveled in the mass hysteria it had caused — even the staid New York Times, whose front-page headline blared, Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact: In Providence, Rhode Island, weeping and hysterical women swamped the Providence Journal with calls asking for more details of the massacre. In Pittsburgh, Associated Press reported, a man returned home in the middle of the broadcast and found his wife with a bottle of poison in her hand, saying, I'd rather die this way than like that. In San Francisco, police fielded hundreds of calls from frightened listeners, including one man who wanted to volunteer to help fight the Martian invaders. When Orson Welles was asked to comment on the hysteria he was blamed for causing, he was incredulous. We've been putting on all sorts of things from the most realistic situations to the wildest fantasy, but nobody ever bothered to get serious about them before, he was quoted as saying. We just can't understand why this should have such an amazing reaction. It's too bad that so many people got excited, but after all, we kept reminding them that it wasn't really true. WABC, which aired the program in New York, issued this statement one hour after the broadcast ended: For decades, the conventional wisdom based on the sensationalized reporting of the time was that the Mercury Theatre broadcast had indeed spread mass hysteria from one end of the country to the other. By the 2000s, however, sociologists and historians were questioning the true severity of the War of the Worlds panic. W. Joseph Campbell, an American University professor of communication studies, observed in 2010 that the contemporaneous news coverage was almost entirely anecdotal and largely based on sketch wire service roundups that emphasized breadth over in-depth detail: Such data as exist about the listening audience that night support Campbell's thesis. The C.E. Hooper ratings service reported that only 2 percent of national respondents were tuned into Welles' broadcast on 30 October 1938. The rest were either listening to something else (most likely ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, one of the most popular programs on radio), or nothing at all. Based on the network's own audience survey, CBS executive Frank Stanton concluded that most Americans didn't hear the show. But those who did hear it, he added, looked at it as a prank and accepted it that way. Recapping the event on its 75th anniversary in Slate, media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow pointed out that few, if any, of the anecdotal reports of hysterical reactions to the program were ever investigated and confirmed: In addition to overblown press coverage, another reason the event went down in history as an instance of mass hysteria was the publication of a book in 1940 called The Invasion from Mars. Written by Princeton psychology professor Hadley Cantril, the book purported to explain the War of the Worlds panic in sociological terms but suffered from being overly reliant on a skewed report hastily compiled six weeks after the broadcast. On the basis of the report, which Jefferson and Socolow say was tainted by the sensationalistic newspaper publicity, Cantril estimated that one million listeners had been frightened by the show — an impossible number, based on every other known measure of the size of the listening audience. Worse, Jefferson and Socolow wrote, Cantril committed an obvious categorical error by conflating being 'frightened,' 'disturbed,' or 'excited' by the program with being 'panicked.' Was a small percentage of listeners frightened — and a few even panicked, perhaps — by The War of the Worlds on the night of the broadcast? Clearly, yes. Many of those, it was determined afterwards, had tuned in late and missed obvious clues that it was fiction (and a large percentage of those assumed the U.S. was under attack by Germany, not Mars). But was it an instance of mass hysteria overtaking tens of thousands of people throughout the U.S.? The evidence shows otherwise.
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