On this day in history 1938 a radio broadcast of H.G Welles The War of the Worlds was broadcast on the radio.
The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series that the Mercury Theatre put on the Air. It was broadcast as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds.
The first two thirds of the 60-minute of the broadcast were presented as a series of simulated “news bulletins”, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress.
Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a ‘sustaining show’ it ran without commercial breaks. This actually made the listeners think that the program was real events. The program’s news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode secured Orson Welles’ fame.