[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we are—we're celebrating a multiple set of anniversaries, because it was 80 years ago—80 years ago that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater decided to allow Martians to invade the state of New Jersey.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: It's one of the most famous broadcasts in broadcast history because it freaked people out.

JAD: Yes. And then merely 10 years ago, we decided to take another look at this broadcast, which has gotten very complicated and layered and disputed in some ways over time.

ROBERT: We're now celebrating our 10th, they're celebrating their 80th. So along with Orson Welles, who I'm afraid couldn't be here tonight ...

JAD: [laughs]. May he rest in peace.

ROBERT: Yes. We would like to present our homage to—I guess to microbes.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: To the little earthlings that saved the planet.

JAD: Right, so in honor of the microbes, in honor of War Of The Worlds, which broadcast 80 years ago today, tonight, here is our take on War of the Worlds.

JAD: 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: 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, something interesting about chrysanthemums, I don't know. Why choose a Martian invasion radio show from 1938? 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. 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. 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.

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: 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.

ROBERT: And now.

JAD: 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?

JAD: We interrupt this broadcast for some breaking news. This just in. It seems we may have gotten a few things wrong when we performed that show many years ago. Most notably just now, when I said that the FCC Commissioner in 1938 called Orson Welles a 'radio terrorist?' In his statement he certainly suggests that, but if you read it it seems he was actually referring to a statement he made about a year earlier where he was calling radio producers who terrorized children. He doesn't actually name Orson Welles by name. I just botched that. My apologies. And we have this guy to thank for bringing it to our attention.

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: Michael Socolow, and I'm associate professor of journalism and communication at the University of Maine.

JAD: And Michael Socolow also makes an interesting argument that the panic may not have been as large as we made it sound. For example, we state that 12 million people were listening on that night, which is a widely quoted number. And it comes from polling done six weeks after the War Of the Worlds first aired. Socolow suspects that the actual number of listeners was way smaller. There's no way to know for sure, but he trusts a poll conducted that night.

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: That night when the broadcast was on, 5,000 Americans were surveyed by the C.E. Hooper Company.

ROBERT: Uh-huh?

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: The ratings survey company. Why are we bothering with a study done six weeks later after the newspaper tells everybody that there was this giant panic? Why don't we look at the surveys that were done that night, and the survey that was done 12 hours later by CBS the following morning?

ROBERT: What do the two surveys immediately after say?

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: The C.E. Hooper ratings survey found 98 percent of the respondents were not listening to Orson Welles or War Of the Worlds. They were listening to the Chase and Sanborn Hour or their radios were off or they were listening to another program. Of the two percent that they found that were listening to War Of the Worlds, not a single respondent thought it was a news broadcast.

JAD: Socolow strongly suspects that the panic was actually trumped up by the newspapers who were trying to sort of piss on this new medium called radio that was taking away their, you know, audience.

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: Exactly. Here was the opportunity. And radio—the radio industry and the newspaper industry had been battling for years. Throughout that decade, the entire newspaper industry had been losing money, political prestige, and other things to the radio industry. You know, some of their best employees. And so they were waiting for a way to really prove to advertisers and prove to federal regulators, you know, they had the First Amendment, they understood responsibility. These are the newspaper managers. These radio guys were conflating advertising with programming, they were frightening their viewers, they were acting irresponsibly. And remember, this is a month after Munich, when radio proved that news really works on the radio. Well, one month after radio news, you know, comes of age, suddenly they're conflating news accounts with fiction, and they're acting irresponsibly and they're terrorizing the public. And so the newspaper industry had the perfect thing to hang their critique of radio on.

ROBERT: Interesting.

JAD: That is interesting. So all those—all those eyewitness accounts that the panic and I thought it was this and I packed my bags and whatever whatever, and all those sort of reports of people miscarrying, do you feel like that's all in memory embellished, or how do you explain that stuff?

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: Let me give you—let me give you an analogy, okay? If you were to ask 100 Americans today, did you see a plane fly into the World Trade Center on September 11, I think you would get an extremely high percentage of people saying they saw that plane fly in. But that's because it's part of our national visual memory. It's really a trauma. And it's—it's the kind of hysteria and panic we're talking about. It's that moment in time in our relationship to the media, okay?

JAD: Hmm.

MICHAEL SOCOLOW: But if you were to actually find out whose TVs were on live at 9:48 in the morning that day and who was actually watching, there would be a discrepancy in that number. Now am I saying all those people are lying? All those people are confused? No, what I'm saying is that the relationship of memory to the media is extremely complex.

JAD: Complex, indeed. And we thank Michael Socolow for checking our facts. And if you believe, as he does, that the 1938 panic was—well, it didn't happen or it wasn't as bad as it sounds, then that actually makes what we talked about next in our live broadcast even more puzzling.

ROBERT: We'll be right back with Radiolab live.

[LISTENER: This is Lily from Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We are in St. Paul, Minnesota, from the Fitzgerald Theater. Our subject today is the War Of the Worlds, broadcast originally on October 30, 1938.

ROBERT: Okay, now I'm gonna ask the house for a show of hands. Do you think that somebody else could imagine the broadcast using the exact same script more or less, also with Martians, also invading, also interrupting the musical things, same deal? After all the publicity from the 1938 broadcast, could you do it twice? Show of hands, please. Oh, some of you don't think so! Look, if we—if there wasn't another one of these, what would we be doing for the next 40 minutes?

JAD: Well ...

ROBERT: So ...

JAD: Those of you who've raised your hands—I'd say it's about 75 percent of you—you are correct. Because it has happened again. And I want to tell you a story, an amazing story, really. An under-reported story of a War Of the Worlds reenactment happened in the mountains of Quito, Ecuador in 1949. We were very lucky. We had a reporter, Tony Fields, who happened to be traveling there. We asked him to do a couple of interviews and he brought back some tape and played it for me.

JAD: All right. So Tony, set the scene for me. 1949, Quito. Where's Quito?

TONY FIELDS: Quito is the capital of Ecuador. Quito's in the middle of the mountains, in the Andes mountains.

JAD: Hmm.

TONY FIELDS: And ...

JAD: Small town, big town?

TONY FIELDS: Quito now is a big city. At the time it was a pretty small city. The word that everybody who I spoke to used to describe the way that Quito was in 1949 ...

JAD: Mm-hmm?

TONY FIELDS: ... was 'tranquilo.'

[MAN: Tranquilo.]

[WOMAN: Muy tranquila.]

[MAN: Ciudad tranquila.]

JAD: Like tranquil?

TONY FIELDS: Exactly. It is what it sounds like. And Radio Quito was the most popular radio station. Everybody listened to it.

JAD: So those are your basic ingredients. You got a small town, population 250,000. You have one major radio station, which also happened to be in the same building as the one major newspaper, El Comercio. And the leader of the radio station, the guy who ran it, a devious fellow by the name of Leonardo Paez. One day someone shows up with a script for Orson Welles—not H.G Wells—Orson Welles' version of War Of The Worlds, and gives it to Leonardo Paez. He reads it, says "Brilliant! We've got to do this here in Quito"

TONY FIELDS: They insert local place names, you know? So instead of the Martians landing in New Jersey, they would land in Cotocollao, which is on the outskirts of Quito. They write in parts for government officials—the Minister of the Interior, the mayor of Quito.

JAD: These are actors or real government people?

TONY FIELDS: These would be actors.

JAD: Doing impressions.

TONY FIELDS: Doing impressions, that's right.

JAD: Whoa!

TONY FIELDS: Not only that, Paez got his bosses at the newspaper, El Comercio, to agree to run little articles in the newspaper in the two days leading up to the broadcast reporting that strange objects had been seen in the skies over Quito.

JAD: Wow! So he set out to screw with people, basically. I mean, he was planting paranoia.

TONY FIELDS: It really seems like he wanted people to believe what they were hearing that night. Okay, so Saturday February 12, 1949, the day of the broadcast. All day long, listeners hear an announcement.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Quito newscast: Buenas noches, señoras y señores.]

TONY FIELDS: That there's going to be a special performance by the Duo Benitez Valencia.

JAD: Benitez Valencia?

TONY FIELDS: Yeah. Benitez Valencia at that time were one of the most popular musical acts in town.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Quito newscast: En Radio Quito.]

TONY FIELDS: Eight o'clock rolls around, Benitez Valencia launches into their performance. They play a few songs. Then suddenly there's an interruption.

JAD: Wait, what was that?

TONY FIELDS: Well, it turns out that Leonardo Paez, in addition to the other tricks he had up his sleeve, he had a sound effects guy in the corner that was ...

JAD: [laughs] No!

TONY FIELDS: ... creating this sound.

JAD: Like one of Garrison Keillor's guys kind of thing?

TONY FIELDS: That's right.

[laughter]

JAD: Dylan Keefe, everyone!

[applause]

TONY FIELDS: Eventually, the music stops and Leonardo Paez comes on the air and says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leonardo Paez: (speaking Spanish)]

TONY FIELDS: "Please, dear listeners. Excuse the technical difficulties. There seems to be some sort of atmospheric conditions interfering with the Radio Quito signal. But you are listening to Radio Quito, brought to you by, you know, such and such. And now back to Benitez Valencia."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leonardo Paez: Benitez Valencia. (music playing)]

TONY FIELDS: So we hear another couple songs and then there's another interruption.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leonardo Paez: Atención! Atención!]

TONY FIELDS: That's Leonardo Paez again. And this time, this time it's a news flash.

JAD: So, now we're on script, basically.

TONY FIELDS: That's right, that's right. They send Paez out to report from the scene.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Leonardo Paez: Cotocollao.]

TONY FIELDS: And Paez is doing the play-by-play. You know, what is this thing? Oh my god, the top's unscrewing! Here come the tentacles! And here come the heat rays. And zap!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Quito newscast: Aah!]

[laughter]

TONY FIELDS: Paez is fried.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Okay, wait, wait, wait. Do we have—forget reenactments, do we have a copy of the real broadcast from that night?

TONY FIELDS: All we have are descriptions. There is no existing recording of what was broadcast that night. And—and you'll understand why in a second. By all accounts, it worked. Outside, it was sheer mayhem. Everything that happened next happened extremely quickly. People poured out into the streets. People were running, but they didn't know where to run. The spaceship supposedly was in the north of the city, but this black cloud of gas was in the south. And a lot of them actually did what any good Catholic would do, they made a beeline for the church.

JAD: The church, because they were—they thought they'd be safe there? Or ...?

TONY FIELDS: Perhaps? Or perhaps they wanted to get right with God before the world ended. There are even reports—and I wasn't able to confirm this, but there are reports of men confessing to adultery right there in front of their wives.

[laughter]

JAD: Wow!

TONY FIELDS: And priests absolving whole crowds at once.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jorge Ribadeneira: (speaking Spanish)]

TONY FIELDS: This is Jorge Ribadeneira, who was a long-time journalist. Worked for many years at the newspaper. He was listening with his family. They all believed it. They all ran outside, found a taxi cab, threw the kids in. The rest of them ran behind the taxi cab.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jorge Ribadeneira: (speaking Spanish)]

TONY FIELDS: They were gonna ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jorge Ribadeneira: (speaking Spanish)]

TONY FIELDS: ... flee the city.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jorge Ribadeneira: (speaking Spanish)]

TONY FIELDS: And he tells me that he sees, going the other way, this convoy of military trucks filled with soldiers.

JAD: Wait, real trucks? Real military vans?

TONY FIELDS: Real military vans with real soldiers. And cops behind them. And they're screaming towards the north of the city.

JAD: Where are they going?

TONY FIELDS: They're going to Cotocollao to fight the Martians.

[laughter]

JAD: Get out! [laughs] So if you had any doubt at this point, once you saw those military vans, you were like, "Oh, bleep! I've got to get the hell out!"

TONY FIELDS: Right.

ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. Does—does everybody in Quito believe—didn't someone call the general beforehand and say, tonight we're having a broadcast ...?

JAD: Well, they—the mayor or someone who sounded an awful lot like the mayor was on the radio saying Martians were invading.

ROBERT: The mayor didn't call the general before?

JAD: No. No.

ROBERT: So—so then what happens at the end of the show? Assuming it ends the way they always do, "Ha, ha, ha. This was a joke." Then what?

JAD: Well, they stormed the radio station.

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs] Good!

TONY FIELDS: By the time the broadcast ended and it was announced that the whole thing was a play ...

JAD: Hmm.

TONY FIELDS: ... crowds were in the streets. And word that it was a hoax spread pretty quickly. All that fear turned pretty quickly to anger. By 9:30, there's a few hundred people outside the station. At some point this boxer shows up. There had just been a match in the central plaza, and the boxer shows up and he's driving this truck and the truck is full of rocks.

JAD: It's full of what? Rocks?

TONY FIELDS: It's full of rocks. Yeah.

JAD: Huh!

TONY FIELDS: And people start hurling the rocks at the station, at the windows. And windows are shattering. They manage to break into the ground floor where the printing presses are. They're smashing printing presses. At some point, some people in the crowd materialize,and they have these flaming torches. And it just goes up like a match.

ROBERT: So—so were people hurt during this?

JAD: Six people died.

ROBERT: Oh, really?

JAD: Yeah. Most escaped. There was about 50 people in the building. Most got up to the roof, jumped to adjoining buildings, but six people died. According to reporter Tony, one guy stayed behind. The last guy on the air that night was a man by the name of Luis Beltran. Maria, are you there?

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Yes, I'm here.

JAD: Okay, this is Maria Beltran Testagrossa, Luis Beltran's daughter. Maria, you were listening to everything that just came before this?

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Yes.

JAD: Tell us the story from your dad's perspective from here forward.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Well, he was—he was on the air. He was, I guess, hosting the music program, and also doing some of the interruptions with the bogus Martians.

JAD: At the point—at the point at which the fire started, what was he saying?

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: When he realized the magnitude of the situation, he went back on the air and began pleading for help, pleading for assistance from the police and the fire department. But as you said before, no help came because the police were going to fight the Martians.

JAD: Yeah.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: And eventually, he was the last one left, and—and he jumped out the window. I guess from either the third or fourth floor onto a second-floor balcony.

JAD: Hmm.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: And to break the fall, I guess, instinctively you want to break the fall, he grabbed onto the railing of that balcony, and he was completely engulfed in flames at that point and the skin on his hands just remained on the balcony. It was like a barbecue grill.

JAD: Wow!

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: And from there he jumped to the ground, but before he jumped he was pleading to the crowd to, I guess, catch him. But they didn't. He landed on cement.

JAD: Oof.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Broke legs, arms, ribs, everything. And compounded by the very, very serious burns that he had all over his body.

JAD: So he landed at the feet of an angry mob. What did ...

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: An angry mob. And he—he recalled that as he's losing consciousness, he just heard somebody say, "Just let him die in peace." Although some of the articles that I read, they tried to throw him back into the building.

JAD: Really?

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Someone grabbed him and put him in a Jeep to take him to the hospital. Just a bystander. And, you know, he had so many scars, he—as children, my brother and I would play with his scars. We would trace them with our finger and ask him what happened. You know, how he got the scars. And he would tell us about the fire.

JAD: Would he tell you the whole story? Or how much of this did you know?

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: No, he didn't tell us the whole story. He would just give us just in broad terms that he had been in a building that caught fire. As children, we didn't really ask him. Maybe had we been older and asked him, he would've told us the whole story.

JAD: Hmm. And we should say that your dad stayed behind to try and help other people get out of the building. Let me ask you a question, though. Your dad obviously is a hero, but given the fact that he was one of the voices that created the panic ...

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Mm-hmm.

JAD: ... did he feel some sort of ambivalence about ...

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: I don't know in retrospect whether he did or not. I'm sure there must've been some ambivalence. But from what I understand, the story was kept—it was very top secret, so that even the employees did not know what was going to be broadcast during that music program.

JAD: Oh, really? Wow.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: I don't know at what point he was informed of the details, though. I don't know how he felt about it. I wish I had had an opportunity to ask him.

JAD: Hmm. Well listen, Maria, thank so much for your time in joining us here. And ...

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Sure.

JAD: You know, thanks.

MARIA BELTRAN TESTAGROSSA: Take care.

[applause]

ROBERT: I just want to know what happened to the guy who planned the hoax.

JAD: Well, he—he got out through the roof like a lot of others. He hopped to the next building, hid out for a few days and then fled the country to Venezuela never to return.

[laughter]

ROBERT: Never to return?

JAD: Never to return. But I should say that among the six people who died that night was his girlfriend and a nephew of his.

ROBERT: Okay. So the 1949 Quito broadcast caused a whole lot of trouble. The 1938 New York broadcast caused a whole lot of trouble. Now everybody here before who raised their hand and thought that this could happen again, you are right. Again. Now, Buffalo, 1968.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, WKBW broadcast: Halloween night!]

ROBERT: Updated for the times. It sounds kind of like your basic DJ set until you hear this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, WKBW broadcast: What is this? Joe Downey has handed me something here that I'm supposed to read. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Let's see, the NASA, the National Space and Aeronautics Administration, those people, have alerted all their space watch and—facilities to be on the alert for unusual communication difficulties tonight. A spokesman for the federal agency referred to the explosions on the planet Mars and said it was not known if they would have the same effect on Earth communications as similar explosions on the surface of the sun. I guess they're talking about sunspots and things like that. So I don't know, it means that it's gonna be hard to hear communications from NASA. Can you hear me down in South Carolina? As long as you can hear KB, what difference does it make about communications? Rock ‘n roll! WKBW Jackson! Halloween night, getting all together where it is. WKBW.]

ROBERT: The WKBW broadcast followed the same structure as the original broadcast we've heard tonight. Long stretches of music then the news bulletins then the semi-realistic field reports. Here's one of them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, WKBW broadcast: What have you got? You got walking injuries or…]

ROBERT: You got the same vivid descriptions of Martians.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, WKBW broadcast: I can hardly look at it, Don. I can hardly look at it. It's dripping saliva!]

ROBERT: And according to the station manager, Jeff Kaye, you get the same outcome: people bought it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jeff Kaye: The Buffalo police and telephone company reported to WKBW that they received more than 4,000 phone calls. The Canadian military authorities dispatched military units to the Peace Bridge, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Queenston Bridge to repel invaders. The story was carried the next day by 47 newspapers countrywide, and on the night of the show and during the show United Press bureaus up and down the east coast of America were besieged by phone calls asking about the Martian invasion in Buffalo. Incredible? You're absolutely right, it is incredible.]

ROBERT: Thanks to the folks at WKBW Buffalo for that. What is this music by the way?

JAD: This is the disco version of War Of The Worlds, 1978.

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs] There's a disco version.

JAD: Still sells a lot of copies. You'd be surprised. Here's the obvious question to ask: why does this keep working?

ROBERT: Well, that's a difficult question. I came across a psychology professor.

RICHARD GERRIG: I'm Richard Gerrig. I'm a professor of psychology in the Cognitive Experimental Program at Stony Brook University.

ROBERT: He has this notion, Richard Gerrig does, that at root, people are suckers for stories. We just cannot help ourselves. When a story starts, you just kind of go, whoop!

RICHARD GERRIG: I think the norm is to fall into the story. And that it's unusual to sort of keep yourself from falling in. My favorite example is, there's a scene in Goldfinger.

ROBERT: (singing) Bum, bum, bum.

RICHARD GERRIG: Yeah, the all-time best James Bond movie, I think. Where Bond is tied down spread-eagle on a piece of metal and there's this laser coming toward him, which really looks like it's gonna cut him in two. And even as I'm saying that right now, I'm starting to feel a little bit of anxiety because I'm picturing it in my head. I'm picturing that laser coming toward him. And, you know, spoiler alert, he doesn't actually get split in two by the laser. Yeah, sorry. But here's the thing. Go and watch the movie now and see if you can get through that scene without experiencing suspense. And it really seems to say something very powerful and strong about how immersed we can become in the narrative world.

[LISTENER: This is Ashley Estack, calling from Modesto, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this ...

[cheering]

JAD: ... is the sound of 700 people who have come to bear witness to the recording of our show today. We are in the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, talking about the strange phenomenon that is the War Of The Worlds.

ROBERT: You know, it's very great that everybody's here of course, but there's one guy I really wish had been here.

JAD: Who's that?

ROBERT: The Ecuadorian guy, Leonardo, what's his ...

JAD: Paez?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah. Because he's the guy I wanna ask, like, what were you thinking? That's what I want to know.

[laughter]

JAD: Well, he's dead.

ROBERT: He's dead, yeah.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, or Orson Welles? I would say to him, what were you thinking, I would say.

JAD: Uh, dead.

ROBERT: Dead, yeah. So, I found a guy who I think is definitely alive.

DANIEL MYRICK: I am Daniel Myrick, co-writer, co-director of The Blair Witch Project.

ROBERT: Before making The Blair Witch Project, Dan Myrick heard a recording of the War Of The Worlds. He was pretty young at the time, he was a teenager.

DANIEL MYRICK: I just thought it was brilliant. Absolutely the coolest thing.

ROBERT: And more than anything else, he was impressed by the technique of the thing.

DANIEL MYRICK: There's a couple moments in particular where they cut to the kind of on-site reporter ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.]

DANIEL MYRICK: And it's almost like they cut in a second or two early, and you hear the reporter saying, "So are we on?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen—am I on?]

DANIEL MYRICK: Are we—are we on?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen ...]

DANIEL MYRICK: And then he goes into his—into character.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: Ladies and gentlemen, here I am. Back of a stone wall ...]

DANIEL MYRICK: And it's those little beats, those little moments that really make it convincing. I get this kind of guilty excitement when I—when I know how it affected people.

ROBERT: And he was fascinated by the idea that scary stories get even scarier if you think they're true. So years later fresh out of film school, he and his friend Eduardo Sanchez decided to develop their own Welles-like project. It's your basic scary witch story. Three kids go into the woods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Witch Project: Okay, okay, okay. We're leaving right now.]

ROBERT: They get lost, they bump into the witch and then they die. Or I think they die. At least you never see them again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Blair Witch Project: Please help us!]

ROBERT: But when you entered the theater to see The Blair Witch Project, the first thing that you'd see on the screen are these two sentences: "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." So the suggestion here is that what we see might be real.

DANIEL MYRICK: Well, we picked a subject matter that was difficult to disprove to the casual observer. Martians invading from outer space is—you turn the channel to the next network and if no one's reporting about it then you're pretty well assured that it's probably fiction. But three missing students in the woods, you know that's something that is a little harder to disprove without a fair amount of scrutiny.

ROBERT: And it worked.

DANIEL MYRICK: We were getting calls from police wondering where these three kids were, and how come they never heard of this case.

ROBERT: You're kidding!

DANIEL MYRICK: Oh yeah. I mean, it was constant. We still get emails occasionally on what part of the story is real. You know, is there still any phenomena out in Burkittsville, and da da da da. It's all fiction and is all made up. And I think it reinforces what I think Ed and I suspected, that so much of us wants to believe.

ROBERT: Some people told Dan Myrick that after watching those three campers go into the woods, they themselves would never go camping again.

[laughter]

ROBERT: And he thought that was fabulous. He loved it.

JAD: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would you not want people to go camping?

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I mean honestly, why would you do that to people?

ROBERT: Well, I—I asked him.

DANIEL MYRICK: I mean, that's why you're doing it. We're not making this movie to kind of scare people. We were making the film to really scare people. No regrets on people not wanting to go camping afterwards.

ROBERT: So the question is is that what Orson Welles was up to back in 1938? Was he just trying to give people a good old-fashioned show business scare, make them scream way up in the balcony? Because remember at the time, that is what he claimed, that this was simply an entertainment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that the War Of The Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, "Boo!"]

ROBERT: But 16 years later, Orson Welles changed the story. Here he is on the BBC. The year is 1955.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Orson Welles: In fact, we weren't as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast. We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed, so in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came through the tap.]

ROBERT: So here are two ways to think about the War Of The Worlds. One, it was a smashing entertainment using every trick they could think of—including inventing some new ones—to scare you silly. Master storytelling. Or—and it was, "We're trying to send you a warning. Don't trust everything you hear on the radio. It's not always true."

JAD: So which one was it, you think?

ROBERT: Well, I asked a professor. Jason Loviglio.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Me?

ROBERT: Yeah, you.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Jason?

ROBERT: Yeah, him. He's a radio historian at the University of Maryland. He says that what Welles understood was that a newscast is often two things at once. In a newscast, you hear something scary or disturbing sometimes, but it's gonna be told to you in a way that soothes you. Meaning the authority of the voice, the newscaster's steady voice coming through the radio, it will calm you like President Roosevelt's famous fireside chats.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Franklin Roosevelt: My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: When you study the rhetoric that Roosevelt used, he really did convey two messages. One, we're in terrible danger; and two, I've got it covered. And that is sort of the—the authoritative voice coming out of the darkness, this sort of invisible, disembodied voice of the powerful man, the news anchor.

[NEWS CLIP: September 22, 1940.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: And we'll see this with Murrow on the rooftops of Britain.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: I'm standing on a rooftop.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: During the blitz.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: Looking out over London. Straight in front of me now you'll hear two sounds in just a moment. There they are.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: He's giving us a story of an unfolding emergency.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: I should think in a few minutes there may be a bit of shrapnel around here.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: But his mastery of the information, his mastery of his own voice, his bravery on the scene ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Edward R. Murrow: You may be able to hear the sounds of guns off in the distance very faintly, like someone kicking a tub.]

JASON LOVIGLIO: This was the beginning of the formatting of fear, the formatting of crisis. And so people go to the news not to be afraid, but to be afraid and then to be reassured.

JAD: Robert?

ROBERT: Uh-huh?

JAD: You file things for the news.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Do you buy this? That a news reporter does these two things simultaneously? Scares and then reassures and then scares ...

ROBERT: No. No, you never go—you know, go cover the governor and say, "First I'm gonna scare them and then I'm going to assuage them." No one would do that.

JAD: But why else would you talk that way? I mean, not you.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: But I mean ...

ROBERT: The form in—of the news is a—because the guy is always there, because he's an anchor—that's the word means—it is a reassuring thing to see night after night, telling and telling. But Loviglio says that the real genius of the War Of The Worlds was that Welles put you into a newscast where you expect anchors to anchor and you expect reporters to report, and then—bzzzt!—he kills the reporter and the anchor. And suddenly you're left all by yourself in your own living room all alone.

[laughter]

JAD: That is exactly right. The moment of the War Of The Worlds broadcast which still frankly terrifies me, it's this moment right here.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mercury Theater: 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: It's like that silence is terrifying. No anchor, no reporter, no one to reassure you. Okay, but forgetting that for a moment, what about his second lesson that he had to teach us? The thing about don't believe the radio, what about that? Did it work?

ROBERT: Well, Professor Loviglio says if that is really what Welles was trying to do, if you believe that, well then he failed—actually he worse than failed. The War Of The Worlds, not once, not twice—we've shown you three broadcasts tonight—it was so good at grabbing an audience and sucking them in that the Welles formula you might call it, the newscast that scares you enough to keep you listening has been adopted by, of all folks, news companies.

[NEWS CLIP: Right now at 11, a night of shopping turned into a night of fear.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... swarming over borders, flooding cities and towns. Muslim immigrants.]

[NEWS CLIP: Teens texting and driving, it's a deadly mix.]

[NEWS CLIP: Terror in the toilet.]

[NEWS CLIP: And sinkholes and landslides]

[NEWS CLIP: Python in the pot.]

[NEWS CLIP: A rabid baby goat.]

[NEWS CLIP: Terrorists working at one of our airports?]

ROBERT: Terror in the toilet, pythons in the potty. Maybe there was some ...

JAD: Could be true.

ROBERT: ... snake somewhere near a toiletry facility of some kind, but it probably wasn't a python, and it probably wasn't your toilet. But you don't know that. You want to hear that it belongs to Mrs. James C. McGillicutty of 2214 Beaude Boulevard and not you, so you want to be reassured and so you listen and so fall in. And if Orson Welles retelling a Martian invasion story by H.G Wells that most people already knew, if he could grab us, and then if they could do it again in Ecuador, and then if they can do it again in Buffalo, what does that tell you? It tells you that we can't help ourselves. Even if the headline is slightly preposterous, even if it's slightly scary, even if it's slightly false, we will listen.

JASON LOVIGLIO: The fear that these broadcasts generate now suck us in. And you'd think 70 years later we'd be more sophisticated and critical when the local newscaster tells us that there's something we're feeding our children that could kill them and they'll tell us after the news—I still listen. I'm a media critic, and I still wait through the commercials to see what is it that I'm doing to kill my child?

ROBERT: Even it it's really implausible. Your shoelaces will kill you after this brief message.

JASON LOVIGLIO: Somehow it gets me every time.

ROBERT: Yeah. And Welles knew.

[applause]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Jason Studstill, calling from Seattle, Washington. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, Katz Laszlo and Mo Asebiomo. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

 

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