To understand the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast, masterminded by Orson Welles on October 30, 1938, it helps to know what it was up against. The top-rated competition for Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air program was The Chase and Sanborn Show—featuring a superstar ventriloquist. Yes, millions of Americans thrilled to an audio-only version of a vaudeville routine that seems dependent on seeing the dummy being voiced by a ventriloquist.
Suspension of disbelief was apparently not a problem, and in Dead Air: The Night That Orson Welles Terrified America, William Elliott Hazelgrove lists off the chaos that Welles’s Martian-invasion yarn created. People ran pell-mell outside, sped away in cars with no clear destination, went to church, or just phoned the police or radio station to hyperventilate. According to a Princeton Radio Research Project study, six million heard the broadcast, and 1.7 million believed the events were really happening (at a time when more people had radios than plumbing).
