Eighty years ago today, Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast ‘War of the Worlds’ used cutting-edge audio technology to convince listeners that planet Earth was under attack by Martians. What was intended as a Halloween special allegedly caused listeners all over the country some real distress, and we talk to three experts—Ben Blacker, co-creator of the Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast and creator of the comic series Hex Wives; Valerie Stafford, President of the Concrete Chamber of Commerce; and CJ Smith, an educator at The Museum of Flight—to uncover how and why this broadcast so effectively brought to life a Martian invasion. Blacker observes that the episode’s found-footage, documentary style delivery “was a precursor to so much of the audio that’s popular now.” The global anxiety that preceded World War II provided a tense backdrop for War of the Worlds, and according to C.J. Smith, the fear of a Martian invasion could be traced back to a misunderstanding over Martian geography. But it was a strange set of social and meteorological circumstances that spun the small town of Concrete, WA into a panic.
Want to learn more about the pop culture inspirations for science and space exploration? Check out our Charles Simonyi Space Gallery and our APOLLO exhibit. And be sure to join us on November 2-3 for Space Expo 2018, where you can meet members of the Mars Society and ask them about their theories of life on the Red Planet.
Host: Sean Mobley
Producer: Keny Dutton
Webmaster: Layne Benofsky
Content Marketing Manager: Irene Jagla
Episode Transcript
0:00:23
SEAN MOBLEY: Eighty years ago today, a radio show set off a panic.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At 20 minutes before 8:00 Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.
SM: At least that’s what the newspapers claimed.
Those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.
SM: The October 30, 1938, Orson Welles radio performance of the War of the Worlds used cutting edge techniques to bring listeners to an alternate planet Earth, under attack by Martians.
BB: It’s kind of amazing how effective it is.
SM: That’s Ben Blacker, co-creator of Thrilling Adventure Hour, a life stage show and podcast based on old time radio shows like the War of the Worlds and creator of the upcoming Vertigo Comic Series, Hex Wives.
00:01:25
BB: It’s a very thoughtfully made piece and to do it as a documentary style, right, which is essentially what it is; it feels like it is sort of a precursor to so much of the audio that’s popular now, whether it’s serial, Welcome to Night Vale, or whatever.
SM: Our understanding of Mars has evolved over time, but a major contributor to the myth of the alien living on Mars was a simple mistranslation.
CS: Schiaparelli was an astronomer in the 1800s in Italy.
BB: CJ Smith is an educator here at the Museum of Flight, specializing in astronomy and planetary science.
CS: He’s Italian; he’s writing this description in Italian and so he describes these channels across the surface of Mars and he calls these pathways across Mars, canales, and pretty clearly identifies them as likely natural formations. The word canale gets mistranslated into canals in English, so our minds, as English speakers, that’s a pretty man-made thing, a canal.
SM: The concept of artificial canals set fire to the public’s imagination and the search for extraterrestrial life actually inspired some science fact.
CS: One of the guys that was really, really obsessed with this is Percival Lowell and he’s responsibility for the building of the Lowell Observatory. And he was really—he was going to find proof of life on Mars.
00:02:50
SM: Though he never found his little green men, his telescope did make major contributions to scientific knowledge.
CS: The Lowell Observatory, that’s where we discovered Pluto.
SM: Over the years the 1938 broadcast of the War of the Worlds has become known for the panic it supposedly set off across the country.
CS: Just kind of a great little story of a couple who tune in, they listen to a couple of minutes, they realize that, you know, supposedly these Martians are moving New Jersey to New York City and so they run out the door; they pack their bags; they go to the train station and they are on the train to Hartford.
SM: More recent scholarship has shown that most likely the panic wasn’t all that widespread. Newspapers got a hold of some smaller incidents and inflated the story, but every story starts somewhere. In this case, a small industrial community, about a two-hour drive through idyllic Washington countryside from the Museum of Flight here in Seattle, the Town of Concrete, Washington.
00:03:47
VS: If you want to take a really nice trip to a tiny town at the base of the Cascades, it’s absolutely beautiful here.
SM: Valerie Stafford is President of the Concrete Chamber of Commerce and the owner of the historic 95-year-old Concrete Theater on Main Street.
VS: I think in 1938 I read that there were about 1,000 people here.
SM: While the stories of national panic were greatly exaggerated, a spectacular set of circumstances set the 1,000 residents of Concrete, Washington, up for a perfectly terrifying Halloween broadcast.
VS: It was becoming a little more isolated because of the number of families moving out of the area. We’re about 30 miles away from the nearest bigger city. Back in those days the roads were not very good. When you were going to leave town, you pretty much figured it was going to take you a day to get anywhere.
SM: Larger world events gnawed at the back of everyone’s mind.
VS: In 1938, we were on the cusp of the 2nd World War and people were more concerned about Germany attacking than they were Mars.
CS: So there were some people who thought that this was perhaps an attack from Germans.
00:04:55
SM: By 1938, radio was fairly ubiquitous and the art form was in the midst of a golden age of narrative story telling.
CS: It’s a huge variety of radio dramas, live broadcasts of orchestras.
VS: People really depended on radio for their news. We had a local newspaper that came out every week, but radio really connected us to the rest of the world.
BB: There are a bunch of those that were sort of Twilight Zone-ish that, when they’re well executed, they really are effective. There’s so much you can do with that medium when you use it the right way.
SM: And, to make it all better, on the evening of October 30, 1938, as families in Concrete settled in for their dose of entertainment.
00:05:39
VS: It was very, very stormy.
SM: Because, of course there’d be a storm.
VS: There was really heavy rain, thunder, and lightening in Concrete. It was the proverbial dark and stormy night.
SM: If you haven’t listened to the War of the Worlds broadcast, you need to understand the structure of this particular radio play.
BB: The story itself, the way it unfolds with—like, it’s basically found footage.
SM: It’s presented as a series of news bulletins, interrupting your regularly scheduled programming. For example:
We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again . . .
SM: This was a break from traditional radio drama. With an emphasis on hyperrealism as opposed to fantasy or escapism.
Well, I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes; like something out of a modern Arabian night.
CS: People were expecting live broadcasts. This was also early days of World War 2 so it was not uncommon to have your normal evening broadcast being interrupted by breaking news from Europe; from Asia.
SM: In Concrete, as thunder and lightening raged overhead, citizens listened to Orson Wells—a master storyteller at the top of his game—cast his spell.
What’s that? There’s a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men . . .
SM: Then, it got real.
00:07:08
CS: And at that very moment in Concrete there was a huge explosion [BLAST NOISE], and all the lights went out and the radio went dead. And that’s when the panic began.
SM: The combination of circumstances—the dark and stormy night; the increased sense of isolation; the live news style broadcast; the real threat of war with powers in Europe and Asia. They all came together in that perfect moment of coincidence when the power went out in Concrete. Reactions varied from panic—
CS: Some of them ran into the streets, screaming, crying, hugging their neighbors; trying to tell people who hadn’t been listening that they had just heard this awful thing on the radio and that the Martians were coming—the Martians had landed.
SM: . . . to resignation—
CS: Other people, according to the report simply sat down in the dark of their homes and waited for the Martian gas to kill them.
00:08:12
SM: A minister decided to outrun the apocalypse.
CS: There was a minister in town who grabbed up his family and all their possessions, put them in his car and realized he was out of gas so he went to a service station and filled up his gas and then told the attendant that it didn’t matter; he wasn’t paying because the world was coming to an end.
SM: It’s so easy to hear these stories today and laugh, because they’re funny, but take a moment and really think. If you were in these listener’s shoes, truly, how might you react?
Oh, could you imagine? I would like to think I would be more discerning; however, I know myself and I know that I’m very quick to jump to conclusions and very easy to startle.
BB: We were at the same heightened state then as we are now and I know my reaction would have been terrifying. I think the analogy now is putting that kind of story out on Twitter and it was realistic enough, if it was based in science enough, then people would believe it.
VS: It’s hard to believe that you could have actually checked with anybody; you only had the people nearest you and that—so that isn’t true today. At least we are able—you read something on Facebook, you’re able to at least, you know, pick up a newspaper or make a phone call or listen to the radio and see if it actually is true before you react. But this was slightly different when you only have one source of news and that was it.
00:09:45
SM: Circumstances aside, perhaps part of the reason the War of the Worlds broadcast was so effective for listeners was that common thread that runs through humanity: We enjoy a good scare. It’s why horror movies continue to make money; it’s why when you were a kid watching a TV show that got a little too scary and you covered your eyes to hide, you’d still peek through the fingers at the screen. Like, remember the couple from earlier in the show? The one who fled New York City by train once the radio broadcast started.
CS: The wife actually wrote a letter to Orson Welles and kind of calls him out for freaking her out, but then at the end of the letter also thanks him for this thrill; this kind of heart-pounding, very real, very visceral experience. She, I’m assuming, can look back now and kind of laugh and it be a fun anecdote, but probably at the time it was pretty scary.
00:10:40
SM: And if a little fright inspires people to pursue real science, if a scare about the Martians invading encourages someone to look up and learn about the real Mars or the universe around them, well, that’s a real trick turned treat.
This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that the War of the Worlds has no further significance then as the holiday offering it was intended to be: The Mercury Theater’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying “boo.” So good bye everybody and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight—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.
SM: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck. The podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed putting it together. If you want to learn more about the pop culture inspirations for science and space exploration, you’ll find information peppered throughout our Apollo Exhibit and in the Charles Simony Space Gallery. For example, coming up this weekend—if you are listening to this episode when it launches—we have our Space Expo on November 2nd and 3rd where you can experience virtual reality demonstrations, participate in an interactive space exploration performance; you can come and meet some members of the Mars Society, which I promise are also not vanguards to a Martian invasion. And you can check out the Museum of Flight calendar for details. So many thanks to my guests on this episode. You can visit Concrete, Washington, which is a beautiful town and Valerie Stafford hosts a ghost walk there every year, on weekends in October, where she talks about spooky places and events in the town, including this War of the Worlds broadcast. So if you want to learn more about that, stop on by next year in October. Ben Blacker has a number of projects out there including a revival of thrilling Adventure Hour and the new Hex Wives comic series. And, of course, CJ Smith is one of my fantastic colleagues here at the Museum of Flight. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast and share it out there; share it with folks that you know. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. You can contact the show at: podcast@museumofflight.org and find more information about us at museumofflight.org/podcast. Until next time, this is your host, Sean, wishing all of you a happy and safe Halloween. We’ll see you out there, folks.