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On October 30, 1938 -- 70 years ago today -- the CBS Radio program Mercury Theatre on the Air ran a special Halloween episode. It was a dramatic broadcast adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds.

Wells published the story way back in 1898. Wells was one of the first of writers of what we would come to call "science fiction." War of the Worlds is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who witnesses invaders from Mars landing in the English countryside in huge metal cylinders, emerging in massive "tripod" machines and devastating everything in their path.

For the Halloween (actually the day before) episode of Mercury Radio Theater, producer Orson Welles (no relation to the author) and writer Howard Koch adapted the novel into a one-hour series of simulated news dispatches from the site of the invasion by a fictitious reporter. Welles played recordings of Hradio reports of the Hindenburg disaster for the actors to demonstrate the mood he wanted. Because the Mercury program had a single title sponsor there were no commercial breaks, adding to the effect that this was an actual newscast.

The broadcast has become famous for creating confusion among listeners who thought that it was an actual newscast and an actual invasion was occurring.

Many listeners were apparently confused. It must be noted that the confusion cannot be credited entirely to naïveté. Though many of the actors' voices should have been recognisable from other radio shows, nothing like The War of the Worlds broadcast had been attempted in the United States, so listeners were accustomed to accepting newsflashes as reliable.

Some listeners heard only a portion of the broadcast, and in the atmosphere of tension and anxiety leading to World War II, took it to be a news broadcast. Newspapers reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance.

Professor Richard J. Hand cites studies by unnamed historians who "calculate[d] that some six million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were 'genuinely frightened'". While Welles and company were heard by a comparatively small audience (in the same period, NBC's audience was an estimated 30 million), the uproar was anything but minute: within a month, there were 12,500 newspaper articles about the broadcast or its impact, while Adolf Hitler cited the panic, as Hand writes, as "evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy."

Later studies suggested this "panic" was less widespread than newspapers suggested. During this period, many newspapers were concerned that radio, a new medium, would make them defunct. In addition, this was a time of yellow journalism, where newspapers were not held to the same standards as today. As a result, journalists took this opportunity to demonstrate the dangers of broadcast by embellishing the story, and the panic that ensued, greatly.

[Some experts estimate] that hundreds of thousands were frightened in some way, but note that evidence of people taking action based on this fear is "scant" and "anecdotal." Indeed, contemporary news articles indicate that police were swamped with hundreds of calls in numerous locations, but stories of people doing anything more than calling the authorities typically involve groups of ones or tens and were often reported by people who were panicking themselves.

The aftermath of the War of the Worlds broadcast was to introduce public skepticism of media reports. While no one would suggest that prior to the broadcast the media had always been accurate, at least the public largely trusted news dispatches they heard on the radio. Some people have suggested that the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was received in skepticism by the American public, as a consequence of the radio performance. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but I remember that I and lots of other people felt a sense of disconnect when the planes watching the news on the morning of 9-11, feeling as if it must be some kind of fiction.

I used to live in the Los Angeles area. One of the great things about living there was that it seemed like every day there was some sort of natural disaster, riot or other newsworthy event. TV news would cover it with "live team coverage" with breathless reporters showing close up shots of the latest fire, mudslide, earthquake or whatever. Watched through the filter of the TV news it was easy to get the impression that the entire area had burned, drowned or collapsed. Friends and family from other parts of the country would call us, wondering if we had survived and we would assure them that perhaps 1% of the region had been affected, although you could never have realized that from the TV coverage.

If nothing else the incident proved that the art of the broadcast media can have tremendous emotional impact. It should introduce a healthy skepticism about news reports: how those stories are edited and told can shape how the public perceives current events. Whether it is a TV news report about a presidential campaign, a foreign war or a natural disaster we need to understand the (often) unintentional but inevitable filter that broadcast media (especially from a single source) places on our understanding of the news.

For your infotainment, here's a portion of the 1938 broadcast. If you start to get freaked out while listening, pause the file, take deep calming breaths, go outside and throw a ball to your dog or something...