Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast H.G. Wells's 'The War of the Worlds' as a series of urgent, realistic news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Though most listeners understood it was fiction, enough tuned in mid-broadcast to spark alarmed phone calls, panicked flight from homes, and national headlines about mass hysteria. The stunt made the 23-year-old Welles instantly famous and remains a landmark case study in media persuasion.
At 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening, CBS Radio interrupted what sounded like a dance-music program with a bulletin: strange explosions on Mars, then a meteor-like object crashing into a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Actors playing scientists and reporters described a Martian war machine emerging and incinerating onlookers with heat rays, their voices trembling with rehearsed panic. Welles had deliberately mimicked the cadence of real news coverage of the Munich Crisis, which had gripped American radio audiences only weeks earlier.
Newspapers, eager to discredit radio as a rival medium, ran breathless stories the next day claiming mass hysteria, suicides, and stampedes, though later research found the panic was real but far smaller than reported. Police stations fielded worried calls; some families packed cars and fled; a Princeton geology team supposedly drove out looking for the meteor. Welles opened a press conference the next morning genuinely startled by the uproar, insisting no one intended deception. The broadcast became a foundational text in studies of mass media, propaganda, and the thin line between performance and belief.
Key people: Orson Welles, Howard Koch