At 8pm Eastern on October 30, 1938, Grovers Mill, New Jersey, was the site of an alien invasion witnessed by millions – yet its impact has been almost entirely forgotten.
As a cylinder-shaped UFO landed, Martians spilled out of their craft and began incinerating people. CBS’s on-the-spot reporter Frank Reddick was one of the first to die.
So began an astonishing night of carnage – as Orson Welles broadcast his radio version of HG Wells’ War Of The Worlds in real time, to an already twitchy national audience.
A fantastical tale about Martians coming to earth and incinerating humans with heat ray guns – up to 12 million people tuned in and were convinced aliens were exterminating the human race.
The Martian invaders – as portrayed in the 1953 film version of War of The Worlds
People ran out of restaurants without paying their checks.
Bartenders left customers to drink as much as they wanted.
A man just out of surgery jumped out of his hospital bed, dressed, and drove himself home, bleeding all over his car.
A woman who had just been married found herself alone at her reception and had the band strike up the Charleston while she danced solo for a half hour.
At least one person is even reported to have committed suicide.
It’s almost impossible to imagine, now, how intelligent people could believe such a story.
But, through a perfect storm of events, millions of Americans were indeed convinced the end of the world was at hand. Here’s how it happened.
The entire country had been on edge from Hitler’s threat to invade the Sudetenland weeks before and touch off World War II.
The depression had dragged on.
Radio had grown immensely popular, with 90 percent of the population possessing one. Congress had also just required all cars to have an AM radio attached.
To illustrate how hooked on radio Americans had become, utility companies reported that people didn’t flush toilets during the show ‘Amos and Andy’, and movies stopped in the middle to play the latest episode.
In the community of Grovers Mill, men armed themselves with guns, and even shot up a water tower, thinking it was an alien invader
Welles (top left) in rehearsals for the broadcast which convinced millions of people that Martians had invaded the USA
The golden age of radio, then, was in full swing, as breaking news bulletins peppered the American people with news of imminent war, natural catastrophes, and horrific crimes. People were waiting for the other shoe to drop as autumn closed in on Halloween and leaves scraped down sidewalks.
From a CBS studio high up in the Manhattan skyline, 23-year-old Welles began his broadcast of the play, using a revolutionary (at the time) breaking news format – broadcast within a broadcast.
It starts with Ramon Roquello and his orchestra playing in the ballroom of a local New York hotel when suddenly the first news bulletin pulls listeners in.
Then, as the reporter is vaporized, Welles holds up his hands for quiet in the studio and commands a full six seconds of dead air.
This is the terrifying heart of the broadcast. It convinces listeners they have just heard a man burned alive and die.
Now the Martians are heading for New York and the rest of the country. By now, people have left their radios, jumped in their cars, subways, taxis, started running, hiding, anything to get away from the awful terror the precocious Welles has unleashed.
Police stations and the CBS switchboards lit up with frantic callers.
CBS executives and the police tried to gain entrance to the studio to halt the broadcast, but Welles’ partner, John Houseman, kept the door locked so they could make it to the station break and finish unleashing the terror.
The Manhattan switchboards were overwhelmed with calls and police stations were overrun by people with their belongings demanding gas masks and desperately wanting to know where to escape the murdering Martians.
Traffic became a demolition derby as motorists drove 70 miles an hour through stop lights and didn’t stop for police. Suddenly, everyone was speeding while the 126 affiliates of CBS spread Orson Welles’ broadcast from coast to coast.
A Hollywood executive and his wife driving in the Redwood Forest in California heard the broadcast and tried to get back home to their children but ran out of gas. They wrote later that all they could do was wait to be incinerated by the invading Martians.
A man came home to find his wife staring at a bottle of cyanide at her kitchen table saying she would rather poison herself than let the Martians get her.
Another man got a call from his crying daughter at college and drove the hundred miles to her college in his Studebaker, took the doors off his car, and packed it with crying girls, tying some down across the hood and the trunk, then driving full speed back down the highway.
A bus full of people in North Carolina stopped and a man jumped on, telling the driver it was the end of the world. The driver, in a fit of panic, took his passengers on the wildest ride of their lives while trying to get away from the Martians.
As the reporter is vaporized, Welles holds up his hands for quiet in the studio and commands a full six seconds of dead air
Residents of Grovers Mill gather the day after the broadcast to discuss the ‘invasion’
A plaque in Van Nest Park, New Jersey, marks the spot where the ‘Martians’ first landed
A letter from a listener who ‘did not jump out the window’ or attempt suicide
A young actress in Manhattan ran out of her apartment and fell down the stairs, breaking her arm. The next day she was featured all over the nation in front page articles proclaiming her a war casualty.
A man who had had an affair confessed to his wife, only to find out later the broadcast wasn’t real.
People ran out of apartment buildings with wet blankets over their heads while hospitals all over the country admitted people for shock and heart attacks.
Men in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, where the ‘Martians’ had landed, rode around with rifles and shot up a water tower they thought was an alien.
The military issued an alert stating Martians were not invading and that there was no danger. Operators across the country answered calls saying just four words. There are no Martians.
But it took several hours for the message to finally land.
In the meantime, phone lines were clogged all over the country as people tried to call loved ones for last goodbyes. People didn’t even have to hear the broadcast to join the panic – they were simply told by family members to run for their lives.
A man drove right through his garage door, then looked at his wife and said: ‘Well, at least we don’t have to fix it.’
Many years later, he was attacked in a hotel lobby by a man screaming he would kill him if he ever saw him again
Nearly 70 years after the Orson Welles broadcast, War of The Worlds became a movie, starring Tom Cruise
The terror continued until the morning when the hoax was revealed, and headlines read: ‘Radio play terrifies nation’, ‘Fake radio war stirs terror through us.’
Welles and CBS received death threats and lawsuits, while the FCC considered censoring radio.
A press conference was held, Welles pleaded his innocence, but it took New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson to quell the rising anger, proclaiming the director a genius.
‘If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars,’ she wrote, ‘they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fear of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorized into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.’
She added that Welles had ‘made the scare to end all scares, the menace to end menaces, the unreason to end unreason, the perfect demonstration that the danger is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogue.’
After the dust had settled, the director went on to make what many consider the greatest film ever, Citizen Kane.
But six years after the infamous broadcast, he was violently attacked in a hotel lobby by a man screaming that he was going to kill him.
After the man was pulled away and Welles bundled into an elevator, a story emerged that surely haunted the director.
The man’s wife, after listening to War of the Worlds, had committed suicide that fateful October 30, 1938. The man had vowed to murder Orson if he ever saw him.
Many have said Welles never intended to create the mass panic of War of the Worlds. Part magician, thespian, conman, genius, the War of the Worlds broadcast was Orson’s greatest sleight of hand. Of course he meant to do it.
Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America by William Elliott Hazelgrove is published by Rowman & Littlefield