Orson Welles aired War of the Worlds as fake news bulletins
On this day · 30 October 1938
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles dressed an alien invasion as breaking news on CBS, and the legend of nationwide panic was born.
On the evening of 30 October 1938, the CBS radio network aired a Halloween adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, directed and narrated by a 23-year-old Orson Welles for The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
The clever twist was the format. After a brief introduction, the drama unfolded as a string of urgent news bulletins interrupting ordinary programming, reporting Martian cylinders landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and cities falling. Listeners who tuned in late missed the disclaimers.
Newspapers the next morning trumpeted mass hysteria — crowds fleeing, switchboards jammed, injuries everywhere.
The panic, historians now argue, was mostly manufactured by a press eager to discredit its upstart radio rival.
Evidence of real terror is thin; most Americans were listening to a comedy show on NBC anyway. Yet the broadcast made Welles famous overnight, helped land him a Hollywood deal, and became radio’s most enduring cautionary tale about how convincingly fiction can wear the mask of news.
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