# Was the panic resulting from Orson Welles's 1938 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast overblown? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 24, 2017, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208 "2017-12-24T15:38:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![davidmich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@davidmich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidmich)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/1 "2017-12-24T15:38:31Z")
Hi Was the panic resulting from Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast overblown? I’ve only seen a handful of website articles stating that it was overblown. What is the authoritative view today? I look forward to your feedback. ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/2 "2017-12-24T15:41:24Z")
And how do you define overblown? Many people did panic and behaved accordingly, disrupting their lives and that of those around them. ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/3 "2017-12-24T15:47:36Z")
FWIW: Stephen King had an “Aunt Betty” who sat in the bathtub with a razor, waiting for the Martians to come over the horizon. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/4 "2017-12-24T16:05:25Z")
Are you asking if the panic was overblown? (Obviously yes, since it was fiction.) Or if the _stories_ of panic are overblown, i.e. the panic didn’t really happen to any great extent? ---
**Author:** ![rbroome](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/838e76/32.png) [@rbroome](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rbroome)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/5 "2017-12-24T16:28:34Z")
There was a recent news article about this. I will look for a link. The article makes clear that there was no panic. No significant uptick in calls to the police, no traffic problems, nothing at all. There were people talking about the story, which incidentally identified itself 3 times during the broadcast as fiction, that were exaggerated in the days afterwards as a panic. Nothing of the sort actually happened. Orson Wells talked about the “panic” in news stories in the years afterward and confirmed that nothing like it had happened-but the stories afterward were a tribute to his story-telling powers. There was a New York news story about the panic but it was almost entirely made up. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/6 "2017-12-24T17:38:24Z")
You need to read A. Brad Schwartz’s [Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News](https://www.amazon.com/Broadcast-Hysteria-Orson-Welless-Worlds/dp/0809031647/). He argues that the newspaper coverage in the days that followed was entirely overblown. A few incidents did occur but most people did not take to the streets or go into hiding or shoot guns. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to read this book, but I did do a fair amount of research into the subject a few years ago, including reading as many contemporary news articles as I could find plus a couple of later books. Probably the single most important fact to consider is that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a low-rated highbrow show that wasn’t even carried by all the CBS stations. Boston didn’t air it, making reports of panic there dubious in the extreme. It aired opposite the top ten Edgar Bergen show. You need to believe that large segments of the audience tuned away from Bergen during his first commercial to pick up the Welles show in progress. And then stopped listening before all the subsequent reminders that it was a drama and the huge time shifts at the end that made it obvious it wasn’t covering current news. It’s all unlikely. People do unlikely things all the time, though. A professor, Hadley Cantril, in New Jersey, the epicenter of panic reports, did a pioneering set of interviews with listeners after the event. [The Invasion from Mars: A study in the psychology of panic](https://www.amazon.com/invasion-Mars-psychology-Researches-behavioral/dp/B0007FCHA4/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1514135973&sr=1-2&keywords=The+Invasion+from+Mars) finds that many of them were spooked and some did leave their houses. That reprint edition is available cheaply and worth looking at, because there’s nothing else quite like it, although the protocols were primitive by current standards. Newspapers probably hyped any and all anecdotal reports far out of proportion to reality. Nevertheless, Welles got pounded afterward and had to issue a public apology. Congress investigated CBS. Columnists wrote pseudo-profound analyses of what it all meant. And when the show was redone by others, in other times, and countries, and languages, it was said to have produced similar panic from people who couldn’t have known about the original. One mob supposedly burned the radio station down when it learned of the hoax. Did they? I can’t prove it. But a station in Buffalo redid the show many decades later and got a huge public uproar that appears to be real. My guess is that a surprising number of listeners believed that an invasion of some sort was happening. The show triggered a huge response in an uneasy population in an era when live news coverage on radio was so rare that few even considered the possibility of a drama imitating reality. Newspapers then feasted on the few details, possibly because newspapers hated the radio media that was already seen as a threat to their monopoly over coverage and were happy to put radio in a bad light. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/7 "2017-12-24T18:19:44Z")
Just as a curious aside about how fiction also influences reality, I remember that in the fine documentary _The World at War_ (The Barbarossa episode) when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941; Sir John Russell, that then was at the British Embassy in Moscow, declared that ‘the shock was all the greater when it did come.’ And said that “It was like a work of fiction.” > [@](#): > > 'I had been out that particular night somewhere and I came home rather late and turned the radio on, and I got onto I think it was Rhykov or Kiev or somewhere like that. Accounts were going on of bombings and attacks and things which I thought was like an Orson Welles programme, like when he bombed New York you remember? Then when we checked around we found it was real.’ And later that year many in the USA later claimed to “remember” that the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan interrupted a musical show just like in _The War of the Worlds_ and some also thought that the attack was also a work of fiction. But in reality the musical show just by coincidence had ended and the networks began on the top of the hour with the news flash about the war starting for the USA. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/8 "2017-12-24T20:13:42Z")
Definitely overblown. The supposed effect has been greatly magnified over the years and in fact the popular press blew it out of all proportion at that time too. [Good article on the myth here.](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/radio/what-to-listen-to/the-war-of-the-worlds-panic-was-a-myth/) The truth is that very few people were listening to the show anyway. > [@](#): > > On the evening of October 30, 1938, most people tuning into radio were in fact listening to the highly popular Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy variety show hosted by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergin, which was airing at the same time as War of the Worlds on competing radio station, NBC. The radio ratings survey firm CE Hopper Company were, coincidentally, conducting a telephone poll that night of approximately five thousand households. They asked: "To what programme are you listening?” Only two per cent of people said they were listening to The War of the Worlds. In addition, several key CBS affiliate radio stations (including Boston’s WEEI) decided to carry local commercial shows rather than Welles’s programme, further shrinking its audience. Frank Stanton, later president of CBS, said that CBS were never censored for The War of the Worlds, admitting: “In the first place, most people didn’t hear the show.” ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2017, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/9 "2017-12-24T21:42:36Z")
Remember when the whole world was [terrified of clowns](http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/10/world/creepy-clown-sightings-global/index.html) mysteriously appearing in the woods? But also how no one, at all, ever, actually _was_ scared? It was like that. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/10 "2017-12-25T02:46:39Z")
I heard about the “panic” when I was 10 or 11. I asked my grandmother if she remembered the broadcast. She said she did. I asked if she was afraid, and she laughed, “No! It was just a show. Everybody knew that.” She scoffed at the notion that frightened people were taking to the streets and fleeing. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/11 "2017-12-25T05:38:32Z")
It did supply a nice bit of backstory for _Buckaroo Banzai_, though. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 7:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/12 "2017-12-25T07:21:46Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > I heard about the “panic” when I was 10 or 11. I asked my grandmother if she remembered the broadcast. She said she did. I asked if she was afraid, and she laughed, “No! It was just a show. Everybody knew that.” My Dad, who heard the original broadcast, said pretty much the same thing. “No need to be afraid. We all knew it was just a radio play.” ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/13 "2017-12-25T08:35:39Z")
According to Wikipedia, about 2/3rds of those that were frightened thought they were listening to reports of a German invasion or a natural disaster. They didn’t just miss the fictional aspect, they missed the aliens, too. ---
**Author:** ![whitetho](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whitetho/32/1059_2.png) [@whitetho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whitetho)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/14 "2017-12-25T13:42:20Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > One mob supposedly burned the radio station down when it learned of the hoax. A Contemporary report by the Associated Press about the aftermath of the ill-fated February 1949 Quito, Ecuador broadcast: [Six Die When Quito, Ecuador Mob Wrecks Radio Station After ‘Mars Invasion’ Story](https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3096220/war_of_the_worlds_radio_broadcast/). ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/15 "2017-12-25T14:07:00Z")
> [@Spoons](#): > > My Dad, who heard the original broadcast, said pretty much the same thing. “No need to be afraid. We all knew it was just a radio play.” Well, not\* all…\* Our neighbor once confessed sheepishly that he and a fellow grade schooler had immediately thrown clothes in a duffle and ran away from home. They took the bus downtown to an Army recruiting office and tried to sign up “to help fight the Martians!” ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/16 "2017-12-25T15:34:50Z")
Of course the newspapers blew it out of proportion-they were in direct competition with radio to bring news and information to the people, and a story the purportedly showed radio to be sensationalistic and/or inaccurate was all to the good in their eyes. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/17 "2017-12-25T17:26:41Z")
My father once said that his mother believed it was real and was screaming “The Martians are coming…we are going to die.” I never asked him (or her the one week she spent with us a year later) for more details. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/18 "2017-12-25T17:40:54Z")
> [@digs](#): > > neighbor once confessed sheepishly that he and a fellow grade schooler had immediately thrown clothes in a duffle and ran away from home. They took the bus downtown to an Army recruiting office and tried to sign up “to help fight the Martians!” ummm…it’s a nice story…but a little hard to believe. The radio broadcast began at 8 p.m. In order to hear it, grade school kids would have had to be at home with their family sitting in the living room-- where the radio set was a large, expensive piece of furniture which kids were not allowed to play with. Then your neighbor claims that they “ran away from home”…say,by 10 oclock at night.The kids would have had to pack food from the kitchen, clothes from their closet, money for bus fare …without their parents noticing. Then they would have had to sleep outdoors, and wake up the next morning to go find the bus stop, where they would sit next to the regular commuters going to work, and through all this still remain excited about joining the army.Then, your story continues,they actually located the army recruitment office and went inside (where unaccompanied children were probably not welcomed) and “tried to sign up”. Kids have a lot of imagination…but they also have pretty short attention spans. I’m guessing that your neighbor found the radio broadcast exciting…and then he might have run outdoors to look up at the sky and see what’s happening. Then he went back home to sleep. The rest of his story sounds like the same type of exaggerations that have kept this myth popular for 80 years. ---
**Author:** ![jaycat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jaycat/32/3015_2.png) [@jaycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jaycat)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2017, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/19 "2017-12-25T23:16:10Z")
How good of a ventriloquist do you have to be on the radio? ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2017, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208/20 "2017-12-26T00:28:17Z")
> [@jaycat](#): > > How good of a ventriloquist do you have to be on the radio? Bergen was a terrible ventriloquist, and he knew it, and his dummies Regularly mentioned the obvious fact that his lips were always moving. But his routines were often hilarious anyway. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-panic-resulting-from-orson-welless-1938-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast-overblown/805208.md?page=2)