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Have you ever heard about the War of the Worlds radio broadcast?
As a long-ago communication arts major who attended the University of Wisconsin over thirty years ago, we were assigned to read about it. I had known about it beforehand, having been told about it by my father as a child.
As a kid, I voraciously read science fiction and horror stories including H.G. Wells’ story about technologically advanced Martians invading Earth and landing in southern England. They easily overpower the British military. Ultimately, though, the aliens are defeated because they can’t breathe our air and lack immunity to our viruses and bacteria. And that was decades before COVID-19!
The infamous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in 1938 performed a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey.
Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired (Smithsonian magazine).
