The Night The Martians Took Broadway!

October 30, 2009

The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).

But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”

The program was directed and narrated by the great actor Orson Welles (no relation to H.G. Wells) as an installment of his radio anthology series, Mercury Theater on the Air.

Unlike other radio drama broadcasts of the time, the first 40 minutes of the show was presented as radio bulletins from various locations where Martian spacecraft supposedly landed on Earth. In one of the most frightening scenes towering Martian war machines are described as wading the Hudson River. They lumber down Broadway to poison-gas panicked people “running like rats,” according to the on location radio reporter.

Some Americans who were radio “channel surfing” that night tuned in midway through the show and mistook it for an unfolding news story.  Of the six million people who listened to the broadcast, an estimated one million panicked. Police stations and radio station telephones were jammed.  Some people thought it was the end of the world (sound familiar?) A water tower in New Jersey was mistaken for a war machine and shot at.

The Next day Orson Wells was shocked and apologetic in a press conference. But some accused him of feigning remorse and that he was really out to pull off a Halloween shocker. The Mercury Theater was competing for airtime opposite a real dummy, the Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist puppet (Today all we have for dummies are TV reality show contestants).  The stunt did enjoy great press: over 12,000 newspaper articles!

Today it’s hard to imagine anyone being so duped by a radio broadcast. But in a world without television, Internet and IPhones, instantaneous news was filtered through six-inch diameter radio speakers. More importantly, our nation was suffering through the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was on the rise. So some people may have been easily convinced it was the biblical End of Times. 

Maybe this kind of thinking  resonates with the 2012 doomsday hysteria. We are in the worst economic times since the Great Depression, we are dogged by worldwide terrorism and rogue nuclear nations, and we have a young U.S. President being accused of undertaking apocalyptic and unprecedented social re-engineering.

What’s  still amazing is how readily some people accepted the notion that an advanced form of life could coexist in the solar system and travel here.  There were lots of science fictions pulp magazines at the time. But 1938 was years before space travel or even those goofy reports of silvery flying saucers.

Regrettably, people today have only seen the H.G. Wells tale butchered in two misguided Hollywood films. The 1953 George Pal production felt compelled to replace the eerie “war machines” that walked on tripod legs, with souped-up flying saucers. The film flirted with a religions ending where a doomed saucer crashes at the doorsteps of a church full of praying people. Hallelujah!

The 2005 Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise version was so overshadowed by Cruise soaking up so much screen time that the faithfully reproduce Wells tripod war machines make fleeting appearances.

The most remarkable thing about the original 1898 novel is that H.G Wells foresaw 20^th century warfare:  fighting machines, invisible “heat-ray” weapons (lasers, particle beam weapons), use of poison gas, and directed attacks on population centers. Best of all is Well’s allusion to interplanetary contamination by microbes. The seemingly infallible Martians succumb to Earth viruses. Ah-choo!

Little might Wells have imagined that our government today would have a Planetary Protection office. Not for defending Earth from Martian invaders, but carefully handling Martian microbes that might return to Earth on a rock sample brought back from a future robotic mission. Even Well’s fervent imagination never foresaw that!

 

 

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