Science Fiction History: 1938 War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast

About the 1938 radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds combining the talents of H.G. Wells and Orson Welles and creating mass hysteria.

--1938. An American radio program written by Howard Koch in the form of a news broadcast, featuring Orson Welles, and based on H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, purported to describe an invasion from Mars. If Wells's English setting had been maintained, all might have been well, but as the script changed the invasion point to New Jersey, thousands of people in New Jersey, New York, and other States panicked, fled, or tied up the telephone lines demanding information and advice. No other science fiction program will ever again achieve such immediacy--and perhaps a good thing, too.