Radio: Boo!

In Newark more than 20 families wrapped their faces in wet towels to save themselves from the gas raid, tied up traffic with their calls for gas masks, inhalators, ambulances, police rescue squads.

While a doughty little band of Princeton scientists set out to investigate the reported catastrophe, in Harlem the godly gathered in prayer. Eight hundred and seventy-five panic-stricken people phoned the New York Times alone.

St. Michael's Hospital, Newark, treated 15 people for shock. A man called the Dixie Bus Terminal, shouting "The World is coming to an end and I've got a lot to do!" It was said that President Roosevelt was on the radio telling everybody to pack up and go north.

The editorial staff of the Memphis Press-Scimitar was recalled to its office to get out an extra edition on the bombing of Chicago, St. Louis, the threatened bombing of Memphis. A brave Californian telephoned Oakland police that he was prepared to go East and repel the invader. In Providence frightened townsfolk demanded that the electric company black out the city to save it from the enemy. Pious Virginians telephoned the Richmond Times-Dispatch that they were praying.

A Pittsburgh woman snatched up a bottle of poison, screamed "I'd rather die this way than like that." Her husband stopped her. A man telephoned the New York Times from Dayton, Ohio to find out exactly when the world was coming to an end. The Associated Press got out a reassuring bulletin.

The cause of this amazing, nationwide panic last Sunday night was a broadcast by Orson Welles's CBS Mercury Theatre of the Air of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (no relative). Author Wells's classic pseudo-scientific thriller about how the men from Mars invade earth in a flying cylinder (at first thought to be a meteorite) was first published in 1898. That its broadcast on Halloween Eve 1938, caused something pretty close to national hysteria was not entirely due to the timelessness of the Wells story, the persuasive microphone technique of Orson ("The Shadow") Welles or the stupidity of the U. S. radio audience.

The broadcast was begun with an announcement that a dramatization was taking place and was concluded by Mr. Welles's statement that it was "the Mercury Theatre's own version of dressing up in a sheet . . . and saying Boo!" But the story had been so realistically transplanted from Britain to the U. S., from the 19th to the 20th Century, that almost any listener who came in on a fragment might be pardoned for a momentary pricking up of the ears.

From the matter-of-fact voice of the militia officer who said he was at the crater caused by the cylinder and had everything under control, to the plaintive gasp of the last radio operator calling into a void, the story and production had grip. But the only explanation for the badly panicked thousands—who evidently had neither given themselves the pleasure of familiarizing themselves with Wells's famous book nor had the wit to confirm or deny the catastrophe by dialing another station—is that recent concern over a possible European Armageddon has badly spooked the U. S. public.