ORSON WELLES RADIO BROADCAST
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It's October 20th 1938, you return home after a day at work to listen to the wireless. You join 6 million other listeners to CBS's Mercury Theatre on the Air. This night however the story is different.

Orson Welles took Howard Koch's adaptation of HG Wells' classic tale and drove over a million people to believe that the Earth was actually being invaded by beings from another world. In forty minutes people took up arms and prepared to defend themselves from the supposed invaders. Ordinary water towers became fight machines to the panicked minds of some of the listeners. Landing in Grover's Mill, New Jersey the Martians had quickly moved from their pit, killed the local militia and were advancing on New York in no time at all. The reason so many people believed the story is due to it's news story format. The story is told in news bulletins, live reports and what seemed like real time events.

The story caused a lot of controversy, people had always trusted the radio as a distributor of real news and of light entertainment. However the radio had tricked people this time. Welles denied knowing that the panic would have happened. The radio broadcast was noticed all over the world, even the massing Nazi party tried to blame the Jews for the mass panic. HG Wells, the original inventor of the story, was less than happy with the broadcast. He had thought that the broadcast would have been a direct reading of his book rather than an adaptation. However, the aging writer soon lost his dismay when the sales of the original novel began to soar.

These days the broadcast is looked back at with some fondness. The story was a triumph for artist writing. Many have copied the formula of the story. On October 31st 1968 WKBW in Buffalo broadcasted a new modernised version of the adapted version of 'The War of the Worlds'. Learning from the mistakes of Welles they sent out various news releases to TV stations and other news papers to warn them that it was not a real invasion. They also promoted the event for weeks before so that the ordinary listener would be prepared for the story. Even so the station was flooded with phone calls from people who believed it was real.

In 1994 the film 'Independence Day' hit the screens, what was basically another adaptation of the general story of 'The War of the Worlds'. It had all powerful aliens refusing to be destroyed by our modern weapons, and the final death of the alien mother ship being caused by a computer virus. The film spawned a large amount of merchandise and TV links to the film, often taking the shape of TV News broadcasts that were in fact documentaries about the making of Independence Day (some where actually used in the actual film for background displays on televisions). The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) teamed up with 20th Century Fox to make a dramatized version of the Independence Day story for it's lead station 'Radio One'. It was broadcast, but didn't cause a panic as similar broadcasts had in the past. Could this just be the nonchalant British? or are we all now aware of the trickery that radio has done in the past.

Read the full transcript of the 1938 radio broadcast here at 'The Complete War of the Worlds' website. Don't forget to check out the main website too, click here to visit.

Some information, photos and dates have been taken from 'The Complete War of the Worlds'
by Brian Holmsten & Alex Lubertozzi. ISBN157071714