The 1938 Martian Panic Might Be a Myth
True, odd moments from history, told short and checked against at least two sources.
The story
(15) The night before Halloween, nineteen thirty-eight, a radio show scared America silly. Or did it? (22) Orson Welles, just twenty-three, aired The War of the Worlds on CBS: Martians landing in New Jersey, told as fake news bulletins. (22) Some listeners believed it. Worried calls poured into police, newspapers, and radio stations. By morning, front pages coast to coast said panic.
(20) But that same night, a ratings service phoned five thousand homes. Only two percent said they were listening to Welles. (17) Historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow say newspapers, losing ad money to radio, puffed up the scare. (19) A Princeton study later estimated about a million listeners got frightened. Critics say scared isn't the same as panicked.
(23) What really happened? Some folks truly got scared. How many? Nobody agrees. A nation in panic may have been mostly a newspaper story.
Sources
- slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous
- smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-f
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama
- snopes.com/fact-check/war-of-the-worlds/
- nytimes.com/1938/10/31/archives/radio-listeners-in-panic-taking-war-drama-as-fac
- jeffpooley.com/pubs/PooleySocolowWowHayes2013.pdf
- npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/30/241797346/75-years-ago-war-of-the-worlds-