[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Live at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota.

JAD ABUMRAD: October 30, 1938. On that night, the United States experienced a kind of mass hysteria that we had never seen before, and the reason, which today sounds almost comical, was a radio play.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: ... affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater On the Air in the War of the Worlds.]

JAD: Around 12 million people were listening. Most got the joke—it was Halloween after all. But if you consider that about one out of every twelve people didn't get the joke, that's what surveys found afterwards, about one out of every twelve people who heard the broadcast thought it was true. And that some percentage of that one million people ran out of their homes, towels over their faces, clutching children, tripping, breaking limbs? Well, that constitutes a major freakout. And in this, our first ever live hour of Radiolab here at St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Fitzgerald Theater, we ask why? Why did people panic? And of course, we'll ask the big question as well, which is: can it happen again? I'm Jad Abumrad. Thank you all for coming and where is my co-host? Krulwich?

ROBERT KRULWICH: So let me—let me just say at the outset, I'm just a tiny bit puzzled.

JAD: Wait. Before you do, can you just tell everyone who you are?

ROBERT: Oh, I am—didn't you just say? Robert Krulwich is my name. And with all due respect, I mean, if we had any number of things we could've done in the hour, we could've done sex lives of watermelons or something interesting about chrysanthemums, I don't know. Why choose a Martian invasion radio show from 1938? Old, old, old, I’m thinking.

JAD: I can't believe you wait 'til now to ask me that question.

ROBERT: Well no, I'm just thinking some—some of them might be thinking, you know, "Old, old, old."

JAD: Okay. Well, I guess it's a valid question you ask. Truth is, I actually only discovered the War Of The Worlds recently, in 2001. Kind of late 2001. Actually, not long after that day in 2001, and it just really struck me. And it wasn't so much that the broadcast had a kind of end-of-the-worldness that I guess we were all feeling in real life at that moment, but it was more just the way that the story unfolded step by step by step, and how in the broadcast you felt like you were lost inside a newscast.

ROBERT: Which is not unlike what it was like on September 11.

JAD: Yeah, we were all, you know, glued to the TV in real life, grasping at these pieces of news, trying to figure out what was going on. And that was very much, I think, what they were trying to create in the broadcast. But now, many years later, what I'm really left with is a question.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Well, if I were alive in 1938 in front of the radio and I heard those sounds, what would I have thought? Would I have believed it? I mean, I don't know. What about you?

ROBERT: I don't really know.

JAD: Okay. Well, let's do something to start us off here. Let's actually go back to 1938, and see if we can figure out how these sounds landed on people's ears and what information they had in their heads. And I need your help with this.

ROBERT: [laughs] Okay. How would I help with that?

JAD: Yeah, I want you to go over to that seat right there. That's—we're gonna call that seat 1938.

ROBERT: Oh, all right. 1938.

JAD: Okay, now just—let's all just imagine there you are on your easy chair, and you're maybe drinking a cream soda. Let's tune the dial. Try to find something to hear.

ROBERT: Okay. Okay, I've got something on the dial here.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From the Meridian Room in the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City we bring you the music of Ramon Rocello and his Orchestra.]

ROBERT: Raymond Rocello. Who is Roc—Marge, you know a Raymond Rocello?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: A touch of the Spanish, Raymond Rocello leads off with, "La Campesita"]

JAD: Now, you don't know that there's no such person as Ramon Rocello and that it's just a record in a CBS studio, but it sounds professional enough, so you sit back, you relax. But then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At 20 minutes before 8:00 central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity. We now return you to the music of Ramon Rocello playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel situated in downtown New York.]

JAD: So at this point you think ...

ROBERT: I'm thinking explosions on Mars, hydrogen gas moving towards Earth—a little strange. But how could it be so bad if I still get to listen to the fabulous notes of the lovely Raymond Rocello?

JAD: And he does continue to play for another minute, 34 seconds. But then it happens again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago, the government meteorological bureau has requested ...]

JAD: Now before we go any further—before we go any further, let me ask a really basic question here. I mean, we're dealing with a play, a radio play.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Why would Orson Welles and his posse of troubadours start their play this way?

ROBERT: The original H.G. Wells story was written in 1898, so it was really an old book at the time. And there is no reporter character in the book, by the way.

JAD: Mm-mm.

ROBERT: Does everybody know this War Of The Worlds story? Or most people do? The story basically is this: little green creatures from Mars, for a number of reasons having to do with thirst or something, have to leave their planet and they come to Earth. They're not very nice people. They invade. They destroy quite a number of us, and then ironically in the end they get killed by little viruses. Our smallest inhabitants of our planet bite them and destroy them. And it's science fiction of course, but in 1938 most kids knew this story. It was a very popular—so I don't see why ...

JAD: Right. And in fact, let me bring in a clip from Orson Welles' producer at the time, John Houseman.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Houseman: Orson and I chose it. We decided that the time had come we should be doing a science fiction show, and so we tried a few that weren't very easy to do.]

JAD: And just a few days before they had to be on the air with their next installment, John Houseman pulls that book off the shelf, shows it to O.W. and says, "Hey, what about this?" And Orson Welles says, "This? You want me to do this?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: He had trouble in what sense? In the sense of the language?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Houseman: He said it was dull. No, he said it was boring. If it was something that happened 50 years ago, everybody knows it didn't happen. So who the hell cared?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Right.]

JAD: If we're gonna make people care about this old story, we've gotta update it. Not 1898. 1938. And it just so happened that one month prior something had happened that forever changed, well, the world and the news.

ROBERT: What was that?

JAD: Well, it began with this man.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: (speaking German)]

JAD: Hitler was threatening Europe. First Austria, then Czechoslovakia. World War II was right around the corner, and CBS sent a team of guys to cover this story, among them Edward R. Murrow.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: Columbia continues its extensive coverage of the European crisis.]

JAD: And in September, Murrow and his CBS producers did something with the news that was kind of novel. They broke in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt this program of music by Harry James and His Orchestra to bring you a bulletin just received in the WOR newsroom.]

JAD: Now this had happened before, but never quite like this, with live reports, eyewitness accounts, and never quite so much.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press.]

JAD: In just one month, these bulletins had become so numerous ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt our program to bring a special broadcast.]

JAD: ... that bulletins were practically interrupting bulletins.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt this program to bring you a special broadcast.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: We interrupt this program to take you to the NBC newsroom.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: Here is a special bulletin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, newscast: From the NBC newsroom.]

JAD: So after weeks and weeks of hearing these constant interruptions, it's easy to understand why this play ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our bulletin a moment ago ...]

JAD: ... didn't sound like a play.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: ... the government meteorological bureau has requested the large observatories of the country to keep an astronomical watch on any further disturbances occurring on the planet Mars. We have arranged an interview with the noted astronomer Professor Pearson who will give us his views on this event. In a few moments, we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until then to the music of Ramon Rocello and His Orchestra.]

ROBERT: I don't know whether I needed any more Raymond Rocello. I need to know a little more about this Martian thing.

JAD: Isn't it interesting how slowly it starts? And by the way, what time do you got on your—your pocket watch there?

ROBERT: The pocket watch says 8:04.

JAD: All right, 8:04. Tell me when it gets to 8:05.

ROBERT: To what?

JAD: 8:05.

ROBERT: To 8:05?

JAD: 8:05. Just let me know.

ROBERT: And now.

JAD: Okay, 8:05. This is my favorite minute in understanding one of the greatest media hoaxes of all time, because the thing that's interesting is that at this moment in October of 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air were not that popular. They had a tiny, tiny slice of the audience. And so not too many people were listening, certainly not at the beginning, from 8:00 to 8:04. And so not too many people heard this very important introduction.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present the War of the Worlds by H.G Wells.]

ROBERT: Well wait, why didn't they hear that?

JAD: Well, because at that very same moment the majority of people listening were tuned into this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The makers of Chase & Sanborn coffee, the superb blend you know is fresh, present the Chase & Sanborn Hour.]

ROBERT: Ah, the Chase & Sanborn Hour! Now that—that was good. That was Ed Bergen, it had the puppet ...

JAD: That's right.

ROBERT: Charlie McCarthy, who—who liked girls ...

JAD: That's right. It was the most popular show at the time, ran opposite the Mercury Theater of the Air, had ten times the audience. But at 8:05, the host Don Ameche, introduces a not-so-popular singer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don Ameche: And it's the rousing, rip-roaring Song Of The Vagabonds from the Vagabond King.]

ROBERT: Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no.

JAD: And just at that moment, thousands, hundreds, we don't know how many listeners started to dial surf where they landed on the Mercury Theater of the Air, already in progress, where they stayed put.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton.]

JAD: Because by then a strange meteor had landed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Where Carl Phillips, our commentator will interview Professor Richard Pearson, famous astronomer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: Professor, may I begin our questions?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Pearson: At any time, Mr. Phillips.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: Professor, you're quite convinced as a scientist that living intelligence as we know it does not exist on Mars?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Pearson: I'd say the chances against it are a thousand to one.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: And yet how do you account for these gas eruptions occurring on the surface of the planet at regular intervals?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Pearson: Mr. Phillips, I cannot account for it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen ...]

JAD: Now we've had four interruptions. Now at this point, you've called your whole family into the room.

ROBERT: Marge! Meteors on—meteors on Mars, Marge. Meteors—what? Meteors on Mars.

JAD: And just as you are utterly confused, along comes the expert. You know, people surveyed afterwards said, "I didn't believe this thing. I thought it was all baloney until I heard that government official guy or the Princeton professor." And this script is chock-full of believable experts.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Dr. Gray of the Natural History Museum.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Professor Indellkoffer of the California Astronomical Society.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Brigadier-General Montgomery Smith.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Captain Lansing of the Signal Corps.]

JAD: Maybe subconsciously that had an effect to convince people that something was, in fact, happening. A feeling furthered a moment later when the professor and the reporter Carl Phillips go live to that field in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, where that meteorite—or whatever it is—has landed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Pearson: The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial, not found on this Earth. Friction with the Earth's atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is smooth, and you can see its cylindrical shape.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: Just a minute. Something's happening. Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific. This end of the thing is beginning to flake off. The top is beginning to rotate like a screw and this thing must be hollow.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, crowd: Keep those men back! Keep those idiots back! It's off! The top's loose!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I've—I've ever witnessed. Wait a minute. Someone's crawling—someone or something, I can see coming out of the black hole. Two luminous discs. Are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be—good heavens! Something wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips.]

ROBERT: I hate rimless lips, actually.

JAD: As do I. Now before we get too far into this scene, let me play you another clip.

[NEWS CLIP: The ship is gliding majestically toward us like some great feather. The ship is no doubt ...]

JAD: Recognize this?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Just listen to a little bit more.

[NEWS CLIP: ... Looking down the field ahead of them. It's burst into flames! Get this, Charlie! Get this, Charlie! It's on fire! Oh my, get out of the way, please! It's bursting into flames and it's falling on the—oh, the humanity! And all the passengers!]

JAD: This is tape of the Hindenburg crash. Still fresh in people's minds, it happened one year before the broadcast. Before going on the air that night, actor Frank Reddick, who played that reporter, Carl Phillips in the field, he went to the library, dug up this old tape—or not so old—and played it to himself ...

[NEWS CLIP: Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers!]

JAD: ... over and over ...

[NEWS CLIP: Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers!]

[NEWS CLIP: Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers!]

JAD: ... to get himself in that right frame of mind for that now-famous attack scene in that field in New Jersey.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Carl Phillips: If those creatures know what that means, what anything means—wait a minute, something's happening! A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's there? There's a jet of flame springing from that mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame! Now the whole field's caught fire! The woods, the barns, the gas tanks of the automobiles! It's spreading everywhere. Coming this way now. About twenty yards to my right ...]

JAD: The transmission cuts off. 12 million people have just heard slithery green aliens eviscerate policemen, farmers and reporters followed by nothing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill. Evidently there's some difficulty with our field transmission. However, we will return to that point at the earliest opportunity.]

JAD: And when they do return, what you learn is that that grounded flying saucer that just zapped all those men has now stood up, it's grown legs. It's as tall as a tree and it is marching—boom, boom, boom!—through the countryside, stomping everything in its path. And then we are taken to field reports, live battle scenes between militia and pods. But before we do, let me play one more clip. This one is real.

[NEWS CLIP: If you live in one of the areas mentioned, and have a child of school age and wish to have him evacuated, you should send him to school tomorrow, Friday, with hand luggage containing the child's gas mask, a change of underclothing ...]

JAD: This is Edward R. Murrow reporting from London. Same time period. Just to give you a sense of how scary it was to be alive at this moment in time, kids in England were being told to take gas masks to school. All of which would have made the following dramatized battle scenes ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: We take you now to the field headquarters of the state militia near Grovers Mill, New Jersey.]

JAD: ... all the more real.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: 31 meters, 37 degrees. Fire!]

JAD: Here, the New Jersey militia fire on a fleet of Martian pods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: 24 meters.]

JAD: To no avail.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Fire!]

JAD: Their shells bounce right off. And the Martians in retaliation release a cloud of poisonous gas, which slowly overtake the soldiers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: 23 meters. 23 meters. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle, which took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by an army in modern times. 7,000 men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. 120 known survivors.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Just a moment please, ladies and gentlemen. Another bulletin from Langham Field, Virginia. The monster's now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Highways to the north, south and west are clogged with frantic human traffic.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Police and army reserves are unable to control the mad flight. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Railroad tracks are torn and service discontinued, except ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Martial law prevails throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Another bulletin: scouting planes report enemy machines now three in number increasing speed northward, kicking over houses.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: This time we take you to Washington.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Citizens of the nation ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: The Secretary of the Interior.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: I shall not try to conceal the gravity ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: A bulletin is handed me. Martian cylinders are falling all over the country.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: This is the end now. No more defenses. Everything wiped out.]

JAD: We don't know exactly how many people panicked that night. Here's what we do know: the Trenton police department got 2,000 calls in under two hours. The New York Times' switchboard received 875 calls alone from people wanting to know where they'd be safer. On the roof? Or in the gas raid shelter in the cellar?

ROBERT: We're lucky we do have transcripts of what happened on the other side of radios that night thanks to a Princeton sociologist who went out and conducted a series of interviews after the broadcast. And what's amazing is how effective that broadcast was. Some listeners said they actually felt like they were choking. Others reported to police that they saw with their own eyes as they looked at the Manhattan skyline, they saw a thin veil of smoke from the battle over the city. Some said they saw Martian machines high-stepping their way down the Palisades, splash, splash, splash. And many people when they called operators or police, they didn't say, "Oh my God, we're being invaded by Martians." They said, "Oh my God, we're being invaded by Germans." Here are some of the literal transcriptions. This is what real people actually said. Everybody ready?

[TRANSCRIPT: I knew it was some Germans trying to gas us all, but when the announcer kept on calling them people from Mars, I just thought he was ignorant.]

[TRANSCRIPT: I immediately called up the Maplewood Police and asked if there was anything wrong. They answered, "We know as much as you do. Keep your radio tuned in and follow the announcer's advice."]

[TRANSCRIPT: I called in to my husband, "Dan, why don't you get dressed? You don't want to die in your working clothes."]

[TRANSCRIPT: I looked in the ice box and saw some chicken left from Sunday dinner that I was saving for Monday night dinner. I said to my nephew, "We may as well eat this chicken. We won't be here in the morning."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.]

JAD: That was how Orson Welles concluded the War of the Worlds broadcast, with those words. Basically, "Ha, ha. It was a joke. Gotcha!" But it was only after he and his producer John Houseman left and read the papers the next day that they understood just how much trouble they had caused.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Houseman: Well, it was very disagreeable because, for at least a couple of hours, we believed we were mass murderers.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: Extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and ...]

JAD: This is Welles in a press conference that following day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: ... many succeeding novels and adventure stories should've had such an immediate and profound effect on radio listeners.]

JAD: So immediate and so profound that the FCC Commissioner at the time, George Henry Payne, labeled the Mercury Theater of the Air—get this—terrorists. Radio terrorists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: But there is one thing we must not overlook. All this took place in 1938, in a less sophisticated yesteryear that did not know the atom bomb, guided missiles and rockets that shortly may fly to the moon.]

JAD: Edward R. Murrow in 1957. Was he correct when he said that? Were we really so unsophisticated in 1938? I mean, so different from now?

ROBERT: Wow. Let's see, huh? Stay with us, folks. I'm Roert Krulwich.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: We're live at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. Radiolab will continue in just a moment.

[applause]

 

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