Radio and Invasions from Mars
Successful hoaxes ride a foundation of plausibility derived from 1) source and 2) nature of presentation. If the presumed source is an authoritative one, and information is relayed straightforwardly and with confidence, people are inclined to suspend their disbelief. In the history of mass media, no event demonstrates this with as much clarity as the October 30, 1938, radio dramatization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, written by Howard Koch and produced and directed for broadcast by twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles, creator and host of the Mercury Theatre of the Air. Probably inspired by a 1926 BBC broadcast of increasingly violent fictional “bulletins” about labor rioters destroying London, Welles framed a merciless Martian invasion as a series of news bulletins that interrupted “regular programming.” By doing so, he redefined the relationship of “new media” (radio) and news, much as the Web, Twitter, and other sources redefine it today.
Available on LP since about 1962 and now easily found on the Web and elsewhere, Welles’s War of the Worlds (no prefatory “The”) quickly became American folklore, partly because tales of nationwide (or, at least, East Coast) panic immediately attached themselves to the tale. But the broadcast did not engender panic. An important 2015 book by cultural historian A. Brad Schwartz, Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, went to primary sources to discover that the Welles broadcast panicked almost no one, and frightened relatively few. Only a small minority of listeners that became concerned during the broadcast apprehended that the enemy was from Mars; the greater number of worried listeners assumed that the trouble was caused by a terrestrial enemy (Nazi predation in prewar Europe during 1936–38 had already set Americans’ teeth on edge), or by natural disaster.
In retrospect, Koch and Welles’s creation has far less to do with extraterrestrials and UFOs than with human behavior. But because human behavior—specifically, how we interpret what we see, and what we hope to see —colors every UFO incident, the broadcast remains a uniquely important part of UFO history.
Local variations of the Welles broadcast aired in 1939 (Charleston, South Carolina); 1944 (Chile’s Cooperativa Vitaliciaradio network); 1949 (Ecuador’s Radio Quito); 1968 (Buffalo’s WKBW); 1971 (WKBW); and 1975 (WKBW, again!). Each of the redos provoked the expected laughs and mild upset . . . except for the 1949 Ecuador broadcast, which brought hundreds of citizens into the streets of Quito, and climaxed with the torching of the Radio Quito building.
At least half a dozen trapped staffers leapt or fell to their deaths. The blaze spread to nearby structures, and tanks finally had to clear the way for firefighters.