See Phoenix Art Deco Society’s live performance based on the original script from the 1938 broadcast HERE.
The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, hosted by Mercury Theatre, is a fascinating piece of broadcasting history that still captures people’s imaginations today. The broadcast was a Halloween episode of the CBS radio drama series “The Mercury Theatre on the Air,” directed and narrated by the talented Orson Welles.
The show was an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, presented as a series of simulated news bulletins interrupting scheduled programming. The realistic dramatization of an alien invasion in New Jersey caused widespread panic, as many listeners believed that the events described in the broadcast were actually happening.
Orson Welles was only 23 years old at the time when he hosted this broadcast with Mercury Theatre. “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” he said, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.”
Phone lines were jammed with callers trying to get through to authorities about this all-too-real invasion. “Halfway through the show as we were continuing with the script in front of us, we saw that in the control room there were a great many policemen, and every moment more. I had no idea that I had suddenly become some sort of national event.” Welles said.
And the next day, newspaper headline slammed Welles and his broadcast. The broadcast’s impact was so significant that it sparked a nationwide discussion about the power of mass media and the potential consequences of misinformation. War of the Worlds was one of the modern era’s first “fake news” controversies. In the aftermath, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre faced intense scrutiny and criticism, but the event also cemented their places in broadcasting history.
Despite the controversy surrounding the broadcast, it remains a landmark moment in the history of radio and continues to be studied and discussed by scholars and enthusiasts alike.