On the evening of October 30, 1938, a 23-year-old Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a Martian invasion of New Jersey over CBS. By the next morning, newspapers across the country reported that the nation had lost its nerve. "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact," ran the New York Times. The San Francisco Chronicle went with "US Terrorized By Radio's 'Men From Mars.'"
Something real did happen that night. But the evidence for a nationwide panic is far thinner than the legend, and the people who built the legend had reasons of their own.
A dull script, rescued at the last minute
Nobody at the Mercury expected to fool anyone. A. Brad Schwartz, writing in Smithsonian, reconstructed the week from script drafts and memoirs. Howard Koch was told to turn H.G. Wells's 1898 novel into a string of late-breaking news bulletins, found the book dull and dated, and on Tuesday, October 25, after three days of work, told the producer John Houseman it was hopeless. Houseman told him Welles insisted on it. A technician's verdict on the rehearsal, as Welles later recalled it, was "Very dull. Very dull."
The fixes that made the show convincing came in a scramble. Houseman and the co-director Paul Stewart cut references to the passage of time, so the invasion seemed to unfold in real time. The station break slid to about two-thirds of the way through, which meant a listener who missed the opening announcement could wait almost 40 minutes for a reminder that this was a play. The actor Frank Readick studied the recording of Herbert Morrison's Hindenburg broadcast to get the sound of a reporter's horror. The landing site was Grovers Mill, a real village near Princeton.
Who was actually listening
On the same night the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households and asked what they were hearing. Only 2 percent named the Welles play or something like it, and none said a news broadcast. Most of the country was tuned to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen on NBC's Chase and Sanborn Hour, or to nothing. Some CBS affiliates, including Boston's WEEI, did not carry the show. Frank Stanton of CBS later put it simply: "In the first place, most people didn't hear it."
The legend adds that Bergen fans twirled the dial during a musical interlude and landed mid-invasion. Surveys by CBS and the American Institute of Public Opinion, summarized by the National Archives, found that 40 to 50 percent of listeners had tuned in late. But as the media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow noted in Slate, no scholar has ever isolated an actual number of dial switchers. A share of a small audience is still a small audience.
What the switchboards recorded
Some people were genuinely frightened, and the record shows it. The National Archives cites an estimate of more than 2,000 calls to New York police headquarters within a single fifteen-minute span and 875 calls to the New York Times switchboard. The city manager of Trenton complained that his police department's communications had been crippled "for about three hours." The actor Stefan Schnabel, who played a doomed farmer, recalled policemen filling the anteroom at CBS while page boys and executives kept them out of the studio. "It was a show to witness," he said.
The Telegraph retells a local story that a few Grovers Mill residents fired buckshot at a water tower they took for a Martian machine. The paper suggests that may have been the true extent of the panic. W. Joseph Campbell of American University, who studied the coverage closely, reads the calls as people checking a report, not panicking. Some callers, the academic David Miller noted, were asking where to donate blood, and others were phoning CBS to say they had enjoyed the show.
What the investigators found
The worst stories did not survive checking. Researchers working under the Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril chased a rumor that several people had been treated for shock at St. Michael's Hospital in Newark and found it false. Six New York City hospitals surveyed afterward had no cases tied to the broadcast. The Washington Post reported that a Baltimore listener died of a heart attack, but nobody confirmed it. No suicide was ever verified. One listener sued CBS for $50,000 for "nervous shock," and the suit was quickly dismissed. The only claim said to have been paid was for a pair of black shoes, size 9B, owed to a Massachusetts man who spent his shoe money on a train ticket away from the Martians.
The mail tells the same story. Of 1,770 letters to CBS's New York station, 1,086 were complimentary, and 91 percent of the letters to the Mercury staff were positive. Roughly 40 percent of the more than 600 letters to the Federal Communications Commission defended the program. A Washington Post reader who walked down F Street during the broadcast saw "nothing approximating mass hysteria."
How the panic got into the textbooks
The decisive figure came from Cantril's 1940 book, The Invasion from Mars. He estimated about six million listeners, of whom perhaps 1.2 million were frightened or disturbed. The National Archives summary gives a larger audience of nine to twelve million, so even the estimates disagree. Cantril leaned on a survey taken six weeks after the broadcast, after the newspaper frenzy, whose audience estimate he admitted was more than double any other measure. His team interviewed 135 people, 100 of whom were known to have been upset. Pooley and Socolow add that he folded "frightened," "disturbed" and "excited" into a single category of panic.
The newspapers had a motive. Radio had siphoned off their advertising during the Depression, and here was a chance to show advertisers and regulators that radio could not be trusted with news. "Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities," the Times lectured. Yet Campbell found that coverage faded from most front pages after a day or two. The FCC got an informal promise that fake news flashes would not be used again, sanctioned no one, and barred complaints about the show from license renewal hearings.
Why the legend suited everyone
Welles faced reporters the next morning looking contrite. "If I'd planned to wreck my career," he told several people, he could not have done better. Later he embraced the myth, telling Peter Bogdanovich that churches were filling up and calling the hoax a lesson in skepticism. Houseman and Koch repeatedly denied any plan to fool listeners. Adolf Hitler cited it in a Munich speech as a sign of democratic decadence. When H.G. Wells met Welles in San Antonio in 1940, he asked whether it had simply been "your Halloween fun." The Telegraph dates that interview to 1949, three years after Wells died, which cannot be right. Campbell's verdict is that the panic is "a tale just too delectable not to be true."
There was a real radio panic, though. In February 1949 a Spanish-language version of the script went out on Radio Quito in Ecuador. Police and firefighters rushed out of the city to meet the invaders, and when the hoax was revealed the crowd turned on the station and the newspaper El Comercio. At least seven people died. That is the War of the Worlds broadcast that actually caused a riot, and it is the one almost nobody remembers.