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watched,” 16 he happens upon a stranger, “armed with a large knife.” 17 The two weigh each
other out, converse, compare notes on the Martian invasion; the conversation grows grimly
philosophical before Professor Pierson takes his leave to discover “the fate of the great city on
the other side of the Hudson.” 18 However, as he loses all hope of the world’s survival and takes
one last long look at desolate, uninhabited Manhattan, he realizes that the Martians, ironically,
are also dead (following the plot of the original novel), victims themselves of an enemy
invasion—of common bacteria, harmless in humans, but against which their systems have no
defense. 19
So the bad guys lose, but all is not well. To this seemingly satisfactory conclusion, Welles adds a
disclaimer, indicating that he might have overplayed his hand, that the realism of the play
turned out a bit too real: “This is Orson Welles . . . out of character to assure you that ‘The War
of the Worlds’ has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be.
The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush
and saying Boo! . . . You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both
institutions are still open for business….” 20
Perhaps Welles’ disclaimer should have come a bit earlier; it turns out that the play’s
description of millions fleeing the city had not been far from reality that October night. Before
the first station break at forty minutes into the program, reports of panic in the streets had
reached CBS, prompting the insertion of the reminder, “You are listening to a CBS presentation
of Orson Welles … in an original dramatization….” 21 Scriptwriter Howard Koch, at home in his
apartment and oblivious to the panic, recounts the situation as he later learned it: “The scene
in Newark . . . was one of complete chaos, hundreds of cars racing down streets, disregarding
traffic lights to the bafflement of policemen. . . . People in the Riverside area reported . . . the
sighting of Martians on their giant machines poised on the Jersey Palisades before wading the
Hudson to take possession of New York City.” 22
The chaos was not limited to the New York City area. According to a study by Princeton
Professor Hadley Cantril and published in his 1940 book, Invasion from Mars, there were more
than six million listeners on the night of October 30, 1938, and of those, an estimated 1.7
million are believed to have taken the radio play as fact, and within that number, approximately
1.2 million panicked. 23 First-hand reports and newspaper accounts corroborate this assessment.
Chicago, St. Louis, Richmond, New Orleans, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Memphis,
Birmingham, Indianapolis—the response was everywhere the same. Newspapers and radio
stations were flooded with calls from panicked listeners. Many in the Northeast reported seeing
the fires and the smoke and the Martian machines, smelling the gas, and hearing the machine
gun fire. 24 Such, we would come to learn, is the power of the media.
Newspaper headlines the following day read “Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through U.S.,”
“Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,” and “Many Flee Homes to Escape ‘Gas
Raid from Mars’—Phone Calls Swamp Police at Broadcast of Welles Fantasy.” 25 In the
aftermath, Welles, Houseman, and Koch were painted as both “scoundrels and heroes.” 26 At a
press conference the next day, Halloween, Welles claimed “utter amazement” 27 at the panic,
although much later, in 1955, he hinted that he and his team “weren’t as innocent as [they]
meant to be when [they] did the Martian broadcast…” and actually were commenting on the
“credibility of the machine.” 28
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