Nation was shocked by ‘alien invasion’ 80 years ago

Orlando and most of the United States descended into fear and panic 80 years ago tonight. The nation had been invaded — and thousands of people were feared dead.

That’s what millions of radio listeners thought when they tuned into Orson Welles’ CBS show, “Mercury Theatre of the Air,” on Oct. 30, 1938. Welles presented his interpretation of “The War of the Worlds” — author H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction tale of Martians invading Earth.

Using fake news bulletins and

other highly dramatized devices, Welles’ show fooled listeners into believing an alien army was destroying New York and spreading out across America. Panic ensued — even though announcements were made during Welles’ program that it was just a drama.

“Hysteria among radio listeners throughout the nation and actual panicky evacuations from sections of the New York metropolitan area resulted from a too-realistic radio broadcast last night describing a fictitious and devastating visitation of strange men from Mars,” The Associated Press reported. “Excited and weeping persons across all of the country swamped newspaper and police switchboards with the question: ‘It is true?’”

In Birmingham, “people gathered in groups and prayed,” the AP said. “Memphis had its full quota of weeping women calling in to learn the facts. … The Boston Globe told of one woman who claimed she could ‘see the fire’ and said she and many others in their neighborhood were ‘getting out of here.’”

The hysteria made its way to Florida, too.

Orlando Police officer A. Hagan Parish, then 24, was listening to Welles’ program on his car radio while waiting for his wife outside the North Park Baptist Church on Mills Avenue. Thinking the drama was a real-life emergency, he scribbled down the news and rushed into the church to hand it to pastor W.R. Clark.

The pastor “gravely reported the contents of the note to his stunned congregation: Martians had attacked New York and New Jersey and were fanning out across the country,” the Sentinel reported on the 50th anniversary of the broadcast in 1988. The “frightened but restrained North Park Baptist congregation prayed earnestly for the nation’s future.”

Margaret Moore recalled to the Sentinel in 1988 that she and her soonto-be-husband, Woods Rogers, were leaving downtown Orlando’s Beacham Theater that night in 1938 when a frantic man rushed up and pleaded for a ride, saying, “The Martians have landed and destroyed part of New Jersey, and my wife and children are home alone!”

The Tampa Tribune in 1938 reported that its “telephone switchboard was literally swamped” during Welles’ broadcast “as frantic appeals came from men and women to know what was happening. … A prominent Tampa attorney, getting connected with an editor, fairly screamed: ‘Get to your radio quick; hell’s busted loose in New Jersey.’”

“I’m so frightened I don’t know what to do,” one woman caller tearfully told an operator at the St. Petersburg Times, the newspaper reported. “The radio says they’re men from Mars. They’re getting out of a metal cylinder — queer people as tall as trees, and they’re killing hundreds of people in New Jersey.”

In South Florida, the Palm Beach Post noted, “Telephones at The PostTimes started jangling

shortly after the hair-raising program began and continued long after the last germ had acted. As in other cities, feminine voices showed more than a trace of hysteria. Many men felt it was a farce of some description but wanted assurances that nothing was wrong.”

Welles and CBS (then called the Columbia Broadcasting System) immediately apologized for the program amid a firestorm of criticism.

“Naturally, it was neither Columbia nor the Mercury Theater’s intent to mislead anyone, and when it became evident that part of the audience has been disturbed by the performance, five announcements were made over the network later in the evening to reassure those listeners.”

Welles, in a United Press story published in the Orlando Sentinel on Nov. 1, 1938, said he was “really quite shocked” that his broadcast created such panic. “I should think that the motion pictures and comic strips would have made people realize the ‘man from Mars’ was only a fantasy. It is almost a synonym for fantasy.”

Welles added, “I won’t ever try anything like that again. I didn’t do it with the intention of fooling anyone — it was a legitimate dramatic form, and had been used before. But I certainly won’t do anything of that sort again.”

After complaints to CBS and the U.S. government, the network changed policy and said it would “hereafter bar the use of ‘news bulletin’ technique so nothing like the ‘Martian’ invasion ever can give the country another such case

of the jitters.”

Orlando Sentinel publisher Martin Anderson, writing in a front-page column days after the broadcast, noted, “The Radio Hoax proves many things, including the philosophical statement of the cynic who declared one should never underestimate dumbness of the public. An yet, intelligent people have told us they were really scared to death; that they, somehow had missed the announcement explaining the broadcast was only a fabrication of Mr. H.G. Wells’ mind.”

Anderson added, “The sham invasion also demonstrates the lack of perception in the public mind, and its willingness to believe anything it hears.”