There is a view that if aliens were so advanced as to reach Planet Earth then they are already here and in forms we can’t understand or recognize. It has its theological equivalent: the human brain is much too limited an instrument even to begin to conceptualize the reality of God.
If in the latter case, the supreme being has been represented as an older man with a white beard; in the former, extra-terrestrials dart about at great speeds in craft, with lights flashing, we might have designed ourselves.
But why New Jersey? Well, a UFO skeptic could blame tradition for making some of the state’s residents so suggestible or, more specifically, blame Orson Welles.
I was in the Garden State twice recently — the Friday before Christmas Day and the Saturday after it — and I didn’t see anything untoward in the night sky. Maybe the UFOs were on a holiday and/or weekend schedule?
“Nothing nefarious, apparently,” President Biden said when asked about the mysterious drone sightings since November. Fortunately, New York and New Jersey’s police forces, and the Associated Press, the New York Times and other news sources, didn’t use the word “apparently” when called upon to calm public fears on Sunday evening, Oct. 30, 1938.
The New York Times reported on Monday morning, Oct. 31, “A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation between 8:15 and 9:30 o’clock last night when a broadcast of H.G. Wells’s fantasy, ‘The War of the Worlds,’ led thousands to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started with invading Martians spreading wide death and destruction in New Jersey and New York.
“The broadcast, which disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications, was made by Orson Welles, who as the radio character, ‘The Shadow,’ used to give ‘the creeps’ to countless child listeners. This time at least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.
“In Newark, in a single block at Heddon Terrance and Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their homes with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture.
“Throughout New York families left their homes, some to flee to near-by parks. Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities in the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.”
New Jersey, in particular, was concerned for good reason as the Times’ lengthy article, which ran off Page 1 to cover most of Page 4, revealed, “News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed, reporting, with the technique in which the radio had reported actual events, the landing of a ‘meteor’ near Princeton, N.J., ‘killing’ 1,500 persons, the discovery that the meteor was a ‘metal cylinder’ containing strange creatures from Mars armed with ‘death rays’ to open hostilities against the inhabitants of the earth.”
Indeed, the actual landing had taken place at Grovers Mill and the radio play had it that a cloud a black smoke was headed towards Newark.
Fifty years after the event, Grovers Mill put up a monument to commemorate the time some locals shot at the water tower mistaking it for an invading martian. It’s still there and so is the water tower.
MOST POPULAR SHOW
Producer John Houseman, who died a day after the 50th anniversary, Oct. 31, 1988, described the hours following the broadcast as a “nightmare” with the program’s makers and their CBS network bosses hearing about fatal stampedes, suicides and the traffic jams.
Most who’ve looked into the event have revised all of that down. They say it did not justify titles like the 1957 television episode “The Night That Panicked America,” or the 1975 made-for-TV movie “The Night America Trembled.”
Some distressed people may have been on the point of self-harm, but family members intervened. And there was no record of any fatalities more generally.
The most popular show by far in that time-slot was NBC's “The Chase and Sanborn Hour,” which featured star ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. The unsponsored “The Mercury Theatre on the Air,” of which “The War of the Worlds” was the 17th episode, had a small slice of America's radio listenership. Research, too, tended to dismiss as myth the idea that people moved along the dial during a musical interlude, and heard the fictitious announcements.
Not content to debunk the idea there was mass hysteria, however, writers in the 21st-century have argued further that it suited print media to promote the notion that a 23-year-old, Welles, could scare an entire nation out of its wits. The newspapers had seen the radio networks eat into advertising revenue during the Great Depression and aimed to undermine its credibility as a news source.
This seems rather simplistic. If advertising was an issue, why would print media emphasize radio’s unpredictable power and reach? In reality, by 1938, newspapers had come to terms with the medium and most homes had access to it.
A majority of American households, by contrast, still did not have telephones, which complicated researching the event in the weeks and years after it, as Hadley Cantril, a Princeton professor who wrote “The Invasion from Mars” (1940) and was a leading expert in surveying public opinion, pointed out.
Additionally, one can’t ignore the first draft of history. The New York Times certainly backed up its lead paragraphs with a very lively, wide-ranging report. The newspaper had logged 895 calls at its switchboard, and while that was, of course, far from a scientific sample, it was large enough to indicate to editors that they were dealing with something unprecedented. One presumes some of the callers became the quoted sources, which allowed the Times to give a real flavor as to how the scare played out over an hour or more and its impact on people’s lives.
Louis Winkler of 1322 Clay Avenue in the Bronx told the newspaper, “I heard that broadcast and almost had a heart attack.”
He continued, “I didn’t tune it in until the program was half over, but when I heard the names and titles of the Federal, State and and municipal officials and when the ‘Secretary of the Interior’ was introduced, I was convinced it was the McCoy. I ran out into the street with scores of others, and found people running in all directions. The whole thing came over as a news broadcast and in my mind it was a pretty crummy thing to do.”
Warren Dean, a member of the American Legion in Manhattan, said, “I’ve heard many programs but I’ve never heard anything as rotten as that.”
Dean added. “It was too realistic for comfort. They broke into a dance program with a news flash. Everybody in my house was agitated by the news. It went on just like press radio news.”
Stanley Tishman of 100 Riverside Drive heard about it from his nephew “who was frantic with fear. He told me the city was about to be bombed from the air,” adding that “when I got to the street there were hundreds of people milling about in panic. Most of us ran towards Broadway and it was not until we stopped taxi drivers who had heard the entire broadcast on their radios that we knew what it was all about. It was the most asinine stunt I ever heard of.”
Harlem was said to be “shaken” by “The War of the Worlds” broadcast. The report said that parlor churches’ “congregations of the smaller sects meeting on the ground floors of brownstone houses, took the ‘news’ in stride as less faithful parishioners rushed in with it.”
PREPARING TO LEAVE
Patrolman John Morrison at Bronx Police Headquarters took a call from a man who said “they’re bombing New Jersey.” When the officer asked how he knew, the reply came, “I heard it on the radio.”
The man said, “Then I went up to the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs, drifting over towards New York. What shall I do?”
At the Brooklyn HQ, meanwhile, eight officers assigned to the switchboard estimated they received 300 calls.
The police headquarters in East Orange, N.J. said it got 200 calls. Panic or concern was recorded in several other suburban towns in New Jersey.
The Times said, “More than 100 calls were received at Maplewood police headquarters and during the excitement two families of motorists, residents of New York City, arrived at the station to inquire how they were to get back to their homes now that the Pulaski Skyway had been blown up.
“The women and children were crying and it took some time for the police to convince them that the catastrophe was fictitious,” the report continued. “Many persons who called Maplewood [police headquarters] said their neighbors were packing their possessions and preparing to leave for the country.”
Emanuel Priola, bartender of a tavern at 442 Valley Road, West Orange, N.J., closed the place, the paper said, “sending away six customers, in the middle of the broadcast to ‘rescue’ his wife and two children.” (The Heritage Lounge occupies that address in 2025.)
The Times quotes him saying, “At first I thought it was a lot of Buck Rogers stuff, but when a friend telephoned me that general orders had been issued to evacuate every one from the metropolitan area I put the customers out.”
William Decker of 20 Aubrey Road in Montclair, N.J., denounced the broadcast as “a disgrace” and “an outrage,” which he said frightened hundreds of residents in his community, including children. He said he knew of one woman who ran into the street with her two children and asked for the help of neighbors in saving them.
“We were sitting in the living room casually listening to the radio,” he said, “when we heard reports of a meteor falling near New Brunswick [New Jersey] and reports that gas was spreading.”
The Times editorialized on Tuesday, Nov. 1, “The inability of so many, tuning in late, to comprehend that they were listening to the account of an imaginary catastrophe has its ridiculous, even its pathetic aspects,” but the “sobering fact” remained that thousands of people “were frightened out of their senses.”
It said, “What began as ‘entertainment’ might have readily ended in disaster.”
Indeed, one can see at a remove of 86 years how it might have upset people that a virtually unknown show could cause such a scare. What might have happened if a far larger segment of the listening public was tuned in?
And referring to tensions in Europe, the Times continued, “Common sense might have warned the projectors of this broadcast that our people are just recovering from a psychosis brought on by fear of war.”
Indeed, the Munich Agreement had been signed on Sept. 30. One post-“The War of the Worlds” survey said that only a third of those taken in by the broadcast thought aliens were involved. The majority were divided between believing a German invasion was underway or that some sort of natural phenomenon was being described.
The Times editorial called for a “deeply searching self-regulation.”
It added, “Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities.”
REAL PLACE-NAMES
The following week, an unsigned item in the New Yorker magazine’s “Talk of the Town” column described the radio as a “mechanical device, which is still a little staggering to the common mind.”
It mocked “little Orson Welles,” who was “rather painfully injured a while ago when a space rocket he had been playing with backfired on him.”
The magazine was also a relatively new kid on the block and had no selfish interest in thrashing radio but its anonymous columnist said that “a public that unhesitatingly accepts a ventriloquial act without wanting to see that there really is a dummy can accept practically anything, including the total destruction of the Atlantic seaboard.”
Welles was at first shaken by the turn of events, and then contrite. The next day he told reporters he was sorry that they used real place-names, but that H.G. Wells had done so in the European-set original. Interestingly, the bosses at CBS had insisted beforehand that proper nouns not be used, and so, for example, St. Patrick’s would be “the cathedral” and the Hotel Biltmore became the fictional Park Plaza.
“The War of the Worlds” producer and co-founder of the Mercury Theatre John Houseman in 1980.
The first person to panic in this episode in American media history was Howard Koch, the writer hired by the producer Houseman and director/narrator Welles to adapt works for radio. He phoned the studio 36 hours before rehearsals to say “The War of the Worlds” wasn’t working — it was too dull. Houseman told him to keep going, as their only backup for Sunday night was Koch’s treatment of “Lorna Doone,” which they’d already rejected. When the uninspiring script arrived, “The Mercury Theatre On the Air” team worked on spicing it up. Welles had heard about the realistic news-broadcast style being used and even experimented with it on stage the previous month for “Julius Caesar.” Houseman suspected, though, that his Mercury Theatre co-founder, who was juggling various projects, had not read the novel.
Welles was known for his brash confidence. During a tour of Europe as a 16-year-old, he talked his way into a job at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He then moved on to London, but was shipped home to America because he didn’t have the right documents. In New York, he quickly made a name for himself as Broadway’s youngest impresario; but he resisted the lure of Hollywood, preferring to stick with theatre, his first love.
Orson Welles in Connemara in the summer of 1931 before he got a job with the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
After the Wisconsin native made the front of the New York Times on Monday morning, Oct. 31, 1938, all changed, and the West Coast upped its offer, giving him complete creative freedom. The result was “Citizen Kane” (1941), which usually places top or near the top of the “greatest film ever made” lists. The main character is Charles Foster Kane, who was inspired by the real-life media baron William Randolph Hearst.
The 2020 film “Mank” — directed by David Fincher and based on a script by his late father Jack Fincher — tells the story of the writing of “Citizen Kane” in 1940 by Herman Mankiewicz (he and Welles shared the Oscar for best screenplay). For the purposes of plot, the story goes back to the California gubernatorial campaign of 1934 in which conservative Republican incumbent Frank Merriam faces off against the progressive writer Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate.
Mankiewicz (whose son Frank was press secretary for the most tragic electoral campaign in U.S. history, RFK’s in 1968) is disturbed but not surprised when Hollywood moguls help underwrite a media campaign that crushes Sinclair. It includes radio spots meant to sound like news reporting.
At a lavish GOP party on election night, Mank (Gary Oldman) agrees to join the conservative moguls at their table, “to make the best of it,” in his wife’s soothing words.
When it’s clear Merriam will be reelected, a delighted Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says, “You see, if you just give people what they need to know in an emotional way, you can expect they’ll do the right thing.”
Mankiewicz replies across the table, “I think what you mean — if you keep telling people something untrue, loud and long enough, they’re apt to believe it.”
