The most successful Halloween prank in history? Undoubtedly what happened on October 30, 1938, when CBS, the United States radio station, broadcast a program based on a novel by HG Wells, The War of the Worldswhich chronicled the invasion of Earth by Martians. The broadcast was hosted by the Mercury Theater company, which included Orson Welles, theater and film director, who in a few years would direct one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema, Fourth Estate.
Many listeners, knowing the broadcaster’s usually serious tone, mistook the news for truth, thinking that extraterrestrials had really arrived in the United States. Some newspapers spoke of a real wave of panic. Today, however, we know that the psychosis was much less extensive than what was said at the time.
The War of the Worlds on the radio and Orson Welles’ fake news: what happened
On October 30, 1938, a radio broadcast based on a famous science fiction novel (released in 1897) aired in the United States. The War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells, which told of the invasion of the Earth by the inhabitants of Mars. The novel, considered one of the masterpieces of science fiction literature, has had great success and has been the subject of several film adaptations.
On October 30, 1938, CBS (Columbia Broadcasting Systemone of the major radio stations in the United States) dedicated an episode of the program to the novel Mercury Theater on the Airhosted by members of the Mercury Theater company, who offered readings and reductions of famous novels. One of the creators was Orson Welles, who would become one of the world’s best-known film directors.
During the program some announcements taken from were broadcast The War of the Worldscommunicating that the United States was being invaded by extraterrestrial creatures. Here is an example:
Ladies and gentlemen, I have to announce something very serious to you. It seems incredible, but scientific observations and the evidence of facts lead us to believe that the strange beings who arrived on the New Jersey farm tonight constitute the vanguard of an armed invasion coming from Mars. The battle that took place tonight at Grovers Mill ended in one of the most disastrous defeats suffered by an army in modern times
The Martians had therefore arrived and, thanks to their superior technology, had easily defeated the “terrestrial” armed forces.
The alleged wave of panic over the prank on extraterrestrials on Halloween
The invasion was narrated in a very realistic way, simulating the astonishment of the announcer, the screams of terror of the crowd, etc. For this reason, many listeners, despite having been informed before and during the program that the program was based on a novel, mistook the news for the truth. And, according to some sources, panic broke out in the United States. The newspapers told of people who barricaded themselves in their homes or fled to inaccessible places, where the aliens would never reach them. Orson Welles himself said that a wave of panic broke out after the broadcast.
Today we know, however, that these stories were exaggerated.
It is true that some listeners mistook the news for truth and were frightened, but there was no reaction of collective hysteria. The listeners of the CBS program were few, about 2% of the US population, and most of them understood perfectly well that the program did not tell real events. There was no “great fear” of alien invasion and no wave of panic. The fake news, therefore, was not the arrival of the Martians (which no one presented as a real event), but the spread of collective hysteria. The program taken from The War of the Worldsmoreover, was replicated by radio stations in other countries, without triggering waves of panic.
Fake news and collective psychosis: some examples
Throughout history, it has happened many times that the population of entire cities or even entire states mistook fake news for real, imagining that the community was in serious danger and consequently triggering real waves of panic. To give an example, think of the fear of witchcraft and the resulting witch hunt, which bloodied Europe and the territories of European colonization in the centuries of the modern age: tens of thousands of people were put to death on the basis of the completely unfounded belief that they performed magical rites in agreement with the devil.
Or, think of the “great fear” of 1789: in France, a few days after the start of the Revolution, the rumor spread according to which the aristocrats had organized a counter-revolutionary movement and that hordes of armed men were roaming the countryside to exterminate the rural population. The news had no foundation, but it shocked the French countryside for at least two weeks, from 20 July to 6 August, and had profound consequences, contributing to the abolition of feudalism.
The spread of collective psychoses and irrational phobias is not rare, in different forms, even in today’s world. Just think of fake news like the one about radioactive tuna, i.e. the news that cans of tuna caught in Fukushima after the 2011 nuclear disaster and therefore contaminated are on sale on the market. In 1938, the psychosis concerned a supposed alien invasion.
