“The Martians are Coming”

On the night of 30 October 1938, Martians invaded the United States. It began with reports of strange explosions on Mars and an unknown object crashing on a farm in New Jersey. From this object, a giant tentacled creature emerged and killed 40 residents with a heat ray. The state deployed a militia, but they too were no match for the creature. As more Martians landed, the aliens conquered New Jersey and stormed New York City, killing residents with a wave of toxic smoke. New York fell, and the rest of the world followed.

At least, that’s what the radio said.

Here’s what really happened: on 30 October 1938, a fake news story frightened an entire nation. At 8pm that night, Orson Welles and his company of The Mercury Theatre on the Air performed a modern adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. To heighten the realism of their performance, they told the story through a series of breaking news updates and ‘live’ reporting on the ground. Audiences began by listening to an orchestra broadcast but were interrupted with news of the events on Mars, then New Jersey, then the wider invasion. While the program identified itself as a performance at the onset, many listeners tuned in after the fact and believed the news of interplanetary war. Across the nation, panic spread; reports came in of suicides, riots, and mass madness as people everywhere fled their homes. One listener reportedly died of a heart attack during the broadcast. A handful of voices on the radio had cried wolf, and the entire country had believed it.

At least, that’s what the newspapers said.

Here’s what really happened: on 30 October 1938, the newspaper industry saw a chance to discredit their nascent competitor in radio, which was stealing the industry’s ad revenue and endangering their monopoly on the news. So when papers began receiving calls asking if there was any truth to a broadcast claiming Martians had stormed the East Coast, the industry saw its chance. The next morning, their headlines declared it a national crisis. A smattering of gullible, frightened citizens became a story of coast-to-coast hysteria, a disaster manufactured by the press.

At least, that’s what the historians said. By now, you’ve probably caught on.

What happened on that night exactly 87 years ago is encased in so many nested mythologies that a single truth is impossible to find. There was no alien invasion, of course. Welles and his company did adapt The War of the Worlds to bring Martians to New Jersey, and some people did hear the broadcast and believe their lives were in peril. But there was no mass hysteria in the streets and no confirmed deaths — the report of the heart attack was never verified. The panicked citizens were most likely few and far between. The narrative of a nationwide panic could have been a plot by newspapers to fight radio encroachment, but no hard evidence of this exists, and the story could have simply justified a few eye-catching headlines. Some journalists may have even believed there was a crisis, since those who panicked did often call local papers for answers. But whatever truth exists is buried in a desert of myth.

In the end, the only real story is the need for a good one. Welles and his company only adapted the novel to improve their play, since a good story is one that an audience believes. They certainly succeeded at that. For the newspapers, whether they saw it as fact or fiction, a whole nation screaming the Martians are coming is a better story than a sprinkling of impressionable listeners. They succeeded too, as the story of the broadcast has become shorthand for the fear-mongering power of the media, to be retold in psychology textbooks and lecture theatres. As for the historians and journalists today who claim the whole mania was an invention of the papers, isn’t that just another parable on the press? Beneath all these layers of myth may be nothing more than Welles himself, the magician conjuring up the invisible, winking as if to say that we’ll keep creating our own Martians as long as there’s someone to listen.

Image from Wikkemedia commons