Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit War of the Worlds: Orson Welles' Alien Invasion Hoax About this episode In 1938, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast stunned America. It was a defining moment in broadcast history - reports claimed it caused mass panic, with listeners believing Martians had truly invaded, and fleeing their homes in terror. But how much of that panic was real, and how much was media hype?
In this episode we're joined by A. Brad Schwartz, author of 'Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News'. He helps us to separate fact from fiction, and explains what this story tells us about the power of mass media and the spread of misinformation.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall.
You can read the letters written to Orson Welles about his famous broadcast here -https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wow/.
Join Dan and the team for a special LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025!
To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask!
Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/.
We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.
You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:32 Speaker 01 Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory, costs climb; too little, production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.
1:02 Speaker 02 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up! Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
1:39 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. At the very end of October and the beginning of November 1938, a young, 23-year-old director of radio drama called Orson Welles.
1:52 Dan Snow? Was about to receive an avalanche of letters. He had just produced a shocking, innovative Sunday night broadcast, which was an adaptation of H.G. Wells's, no relation, War of the Worlds. It had, let's just say, divided opinion. Here's one letter now in the University of Michigan library, which actually has an archive of all these letters and you can search them digitally, it's brilliant. Dear Mr. Wells, if you had any idea what terribly realistic portrayal of H.G. Wells's play could do for college girls away from guiding parents, you might be able to understand why some 100 girls in our hall believed that some horrible catastrophe had occurred in the east. Many of the girls tried frantically to call parents and pack suitcases. Some thought of their friends caught in the area, and even some of the girls lived near
2:37 Dan Snow? New York. The hall was a madhouse, and one councillor was vainly trying to reassure the girls. In future, please, when you give that type of drama on the air, ask the announcer to cut in at frequent intervals to mention the station and the programme. Though I believed I recognised your voice a few times, I thought you were giving over your programme to announce the catastrophe. I certainly think you're one of the best actors, and I've thoroughly enjoyed every one of your programmes till this one. Please, next time, have something not quite so realistic. One of the victims, Betsy Kruger. Another woman, Ethel De Potti, from Flint, Michigan. So I think it's an insult to the public for you to perpetuate such a practical joke on them through their radios. I don't think it was a bit funny, frightening people out of their wits.
3:21 Dan Snow? She finishes by saying, and if I'm so fortunate as to never to tune into another one of Mr. Orson Welles's smart ideas, I will be much too soon. But in that archive, there are letters of praise as well. Mrs. S. Shirley says, of all the crybabies I've ever heard of, this sure beats all. Shame to admit to other countries, that the American people, so civilised, so advanced, can put on a panic of such sort merely over a radio programme. Won't Hitler get a laugh? Where are the true Americans? These mollycoddled jitterbugs show what they're made of, just a bunch of crybabies. More power to Orson Welles for such realistic performances. He's tops, A1 in the radio realm, and five votes from my household. The broadcast of War of the Worlds on the radio on the 30th of October 1938 has become
4:06 Dan Snow? a thing of legend, has become a thing of myth. And that's what we're talking about on the podcast today. I'm going to ask Brad Schwartz, he's a writer and historian. He's just written the book Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. I'm going to ask him, what happened that fateful night? Did people up and down America get their weapons out, start shooting at the sky, believing they were under alien invasion? Is all that true? And what does it tell us about a world of innovative media platforms, propaganda, fake news, believing things? Believing everything you hear. It's a story decades old, but my goodness, a lot in here that feels very contemporary. Enjoy.
4:47 Speaker 03 T minus ten.
4:48 Speaker 04 The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first some black unity.
4:56 Speaker 03 Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
5:05 Dan Snow? Brad, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, buddy.
5:07 Speaker 05 My pleasure. It's great to be here.
5:09 Dan Snow? Tell me, everyone's heard of this book, but just give me the history of it, the background. H.G. Wells wrote it. When was it published?
5:15 Speaker 05 Like a lot of novels back in those days, it was serialized for the first time before it was published between hardcovers, so it appeared in magazines, I think, beginning in 1897. Comes out as a hardcover in 1898. It's the latter installment of this sort of remarkable run that H.G. Wells has when he's really debuting as a novelist. He's still very young. He would be in his early 30s, like 31, 32, when War of the Worlds is coming out. But he does write in a row. He does The Time Machine, he does The Island of Doctor Moreau, he does The Invisible Man, and then he does War of the Worlds. And so you can imagine the effect that that's had on science fiction writing, on our popular culture.
5:56 Speaker 05 I mean, he's inventing the modern time travel story, the modern alien invasion story. Of course, how many things have been based on the concept of an invisible man or a mad scientist? He's drawing from the cutting-edge science of his day and packaging it in a way that makes it much more thrilling. So he bursts onto the scene with, I think, one of the great debut runs of literary history. And in many ways, War of the Worlds itself is the culmination of it.
6:22 Dan Snow? Yeah, see, we are now so used to aliens invading and deploying new kinds of weapon systems, but this is not something you read about in the middle of the 19th century, right? This is not something that earlier novelists... Thought about like, what is going on there? Is it just the product of astonishing imagination? Or is it this era of science of looking deeper into the solar system around us? What's happening?
6:43 Speaker 05 I think it's both. I mean, it's a singular imagination that can get all of the stuff that's in the air and combine it into a story. You know, this is the first really alien invasion story. So you don't get Independence Day, you don't get the Dalek, you know, if you don't have the War of the Worlds. H G Wells is the one who comes up with that template. But it's really a combination of, on the one hand, this growing scientific consensus that existed in the late 19th century, that Mars could be inhabited, if not likely was inhabited. So you had astronomers, there was an Italian astronomer by the name of Giovanni Scaparelli, who was one of the first people who aimed a high-powered telescope at Mars and saw what he, in Italian, wrote down as canali, which sort of translates to English as channels.
7:28 Speaker 05 And that can be a geographic feature, it can be natural. That gets mistrated into English as canals, which a canal is something that intelligent beings built. And so you had other people like Percival Lowell, you had, coming out in this scientific and particularly popular literature, the idea that Martians are up there building canals. And if there are canals, there are canal builders. So this idea that we had neighbors very close was a broadly, at least plausible, scientific theory. But you also had, equally as important, if not more so, is the political context, because this is barely 20 years out from World War I.
8:09 Speaker 05 It's the era of invasion literature being very popular, particularly in Britain and Europe, but fantasies of what the next war might look like, because the tensions are rising. People know generally that this is on the horizon. And so even though it's alien invaders, the mechanized war machines, populations of major European capitals becoming refugees, the use of things like poison gas, all of this is anticipating what's about to happen very, you know, relatively soon after the book comes out. So it plays into very Very directly, on the one hand, this scientific plausibility of alien invasion. And on the other hand, this fear of a terrestrial war.
8:53 Speaker 05 And that's one of the reasons that this story, this concept, but this story specifically has had such a long life because it always comes back whenever, you know, in the 1930s, when World War Two is on the horizon, Cold War, in the post nine 11 era, the Martians always get reconfigured to match up to the threat that we're most afraid of on this planet.
9:14 Dan Snow? There are so many themes in it that we recognize today because I'm very struck by that. It happens in Surrey, you know, which for listeners elsewhere in the world, Surrey in the 1890s was like the safest, richest place on earth. It's HQ of Britishness. Britain's the largest empire on earth, got the largest fleet. And that reminds me that when you watch alien movies set in the 20th century or the early 21st, it's places in the US that seem so insulated from the rest of the world, like happy towns in the Midwest. And it's inconceivable that in this American hyperpower that anything could strike you there. But that's where it happens. You know, I love that parallel. And then I like the things that the author, the protagonist notices, how people respond.
9:56 Dan Snow? Is it the artilleryman? He's the sort of soldier who emerges and he dreams of kind of radical solutions to humankind. You know, how war breaks everything and rebuilds it in ways that is unimaginable. Like, we're going to rebuild human civilization underground, or we're going to upend the social order. You know, these are things that are recurring.
10:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I think to some degree, the artilleryman is speaking for Wells, or an extreme version of Wells, because he was a socialist, he was a radical thinker in a lot of ways. His politics sort of suffuse his work and we forget that when we read it just as an early example of science fiction today. You know, he goes on one of his more famous later books, I think it was 33, 1933, when he writes The Shape of Things to Come, where he predicts almost like to the month when World War Two is going to break out and how. But then the results of that, the idea that this is going to radically change human society, his predictive abilities are not quite as good there. But the setting of the book, which, you know, You're right to point out, I mean, that's where Wells was living when he wrote it.
10:57 Speaker 05 He was living in Woking, which when I visited England a few years ago, I was finally able to go and walk around. And his, his home has a blue plaque on it. You can actually see it from the train when you're going to London. And he was writing letters to his family or friends, I think at that time, talking about how much fun he's having killing his neighbors in the most horrific ways in this book. But it was, you know, being in that space and going for a walk one day in the woods in Surrey with his brother Frank, talking about British colonialism in Tasmania specifically, and sort of the annihilation of the indigenous population. And his brother says, in this, you know, and you're describing it quite well, this very peaceful, very secure, beautiful wooded English environment.
11:42 Speaker 05 And his brother Frank says, well, what if beings from another world came down here and started doing to us what we did to people who we believed to be inferior. And that was the genesis of the idea. The idea that you're going to have this reversal, the most powerful nation, city that is the seat of the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets still, I think in the 1890s. What if a race of superior beings come down and decide they want to take it over? And that, you know, politically, but imaginatively, that appealed to HG. And again, you know, in the context of sort of the pinnacle of the empire, again, people don't know World War One is exactly when it's going to start, but they feel it's coming.
12:26 Speaker 05 So when you're at the top, there is also that anxiety about what comes after. And I think this book and that reversal of the people who feel the most secure, losing their security in a horrific way, really is one of the reasons this book strikes a chord with audiences in the 1890s.
12:43 Dan Snow? And what I love about it, we'll come on to the broadcast in a second. What I love about it is he invents science fiction, he invents alien invasion. He talks about poison gas, he does all these things, he's warning and playing with the British, their fear of being overthrown, of crushed as surely as they did the Tasmanians. And then in the end, the invaders, they die off because they can defeat humans, but they can't defeat bacteria, the little smallest and little tiny microscopic beings of planet Earth. And so I like that because this is a period in the 1890s when humans just were convinced that there was a pyramid and they were absolutely at the top of it, right? The Earth and everything on it was for them to shape and dominate. And H U R saying, no, don't forget. And that feels very modern as well, like we talk about how we are now dependent on the sea and the microscopic life in the world's ocean, or whether it's pollinating insects
13:28 Dan Snow? and the collapse that we face as they go down in number. Again, that feels in the 1890s like an extraordinarily modern way of looking at the world.
13:36 Speaker 05 And he was, H G Wells was a science teacher. I mean, his training was in science and education. So he understood these things at a degree that most people didn't. I agree that it's remarkably forward thinking that he's able to come up with this. Again, he's pulling in these ideas into all of this first run of books about evolution, which is still a pretty new idea. I mean, that underlies the time machine, that underlies even War of the Worlds. You know, there was this concept, which turns out not to be how it works, but this theory that the planets get older as they move away from the sun. You see that reflected in the novel, the idea that Mars is used up as a planet and the Martians need to leave, need to colonize our planet because their resources are dying out. So, you know, the notion that planets age and die doesn't quite work out that way, but
14:21 Speaker 05 the notion that you could so deplete the resources of your home world that you need someplace else to live. And then you go there and you transform it, you terraform it, you bring your red weed and your ecology to try and change the place to support your own form of life. I mean, these are concepts that we're just now catching up with, right? So he was remarkably ahead of his time as a storyteller, but it's because he was plugged into what was going on in the scientific community and paying attention.
14:48 Dan Snow? As you say, it all shows if you're paying attention, if you care to look and read and listen and learn, it's all there, folks. Let's come forward to the 1930s now in the US, which in some ways is similar, in some ways different. People in the 1930s, were they familiar with it in the US? Why does it find in its new iteration such a sort of fertile audience?
15:05 Speaker 05 Well, it's interesting because everything that makes the book cutting edge in 1898, 40 years later, is making it seem kind of dated. I mean, science fiction to begin with, it doesn't have the cultural footprint in the late 1930s that it does now. This was the age of pulp magazines and comic strips, and it was sort of becoming a new thing. But Flash Gordon and the Attack from Mars was a serial that was in the theatres at the time War of the Worlds happens. It's really for children. People had read this book, they were aware of the book, but it was seen as kind of outdated, actually. It had been reprinted in some pulp magazines, but people didn't so much believe that Martians could actually exist anymore. That aspect of it was fading, and it may have had its
15:48 Speaker 05 day if it didn't come back in a remarkable way, thanks to Orson Welles. But it's a time similar to Britain in the late 1890s of great anxiety, although the reasons for that anxiety are different. It's sort of a rising empire, not empire about to cross the peak. This is a period where we're moving toward another world war, and people in the United States and around the world are very much feeling that. So you have this new technology of the radio that is in people's homes, that is bringing them not just the news and what's going on with a greater speed than has ever been possible before, but you have the actual voices and the sounds, because that was one of the things that radio, particularly in
16:32 Speaker 05 the US, was selling to the public, the idea of this direct connection to things that are happening. We didn't, really for commercial reasons, unlike in Britain, unlike in most other countries where, you know, the BBC regularly would record speeches or events and then play them back. The American radio networks didn't want to do that. Everything that aired in the United States had to air live. That was sort of how they said that that's more authentic. And so if a news event doesn't happen in time to be recorded, they would reenact it with actors. And this was somehow seen as more authentic, because it was live, even though it was fake. So on the one hand, it's already, you can't trust everything you're hearing on the radio. On the other hand, audiences are being trained to equate, you know, what's coming over the radio with something that's happening right now. And so you're hearing-
17:18 Speaker 05 Adolf Hitler's voice, you're hearing FDR's voice, you know, you're hearing these things that suddenly make you feel more connected to events, whether you're living in the middle of the country and it's in Washington, or it's in London, it's in Berlin, it's wherever. So the series of diplomatic crises and events, the Anschluss in 1938, Munich crisis happens in September, right before the War of the Worlds. American radio coverage, particularly of the Chugselacken diplomatic crisis, is much more intense, in some ways, much more detailed than what you're getting in European countries, because there's censorship there that is not present in the United States. So people are feeling really connected and it's raising this level of tension. The
18:03 Speaker 05 Great Depression is not over, and in fact, it has a resurgence in 1937, 1938. So there is economic anxiety. And then there's a major devastating hurricane on the East Coast, also in September 1938, right before the War of the Worlds. So you have a series of events, many of them brought to you by the radio, that are giving you reasons to be afraid and to realize that distant events can affect your life, and also training you to listen for that "We interrupt this broadcast" because that's going to bring you the latest frightening bit of news.
18:35 Dan Snow? Okay, so the nation sits around their wireless sets, their radios. 1938, people don't have TVs in their homes. They are, as you say, they're used to doing that. If there's an earthquake, they'll interrupt the broadcast, tell you about the earthquake. So tell me about this broadcast on the 30th of October, 1938, one of those storied and mythologized broadcasts in history. So Brad, I need you to give it to me, what exactly happened here?
18:59 Speaker 05 It's a big story. So it's October 30th, it's the night before Halloween. That's very important because this is kind of a Halloween prank. Orson Welles is 23 years old. He's not yet the actor and the film director that we know today. He's a theater director primarily. So he's known in the New York world. He's frequently a voice on the radio, but he's not yet an international celebrity. CBS Radio Network has given him this opportunity to air a weekly series of Adaptations of classic works of literature. So they do Shakespeare, they do Robert Louis Stevenson. They start off with Dracula. They land on H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, really because Orson Welles,
19:39 Speaker 05 again, like H. G. Wells, being somebody who really has his antenna up and is an artist who is aware of what's going on in the world, has been paying attention to all of these radio events and crises and how the public is glued to their radio sets. And he wants to capture that in a dramatic broadcast. I don't believe, even though he claimed this later on, I don't think Orson Welles was trying to trick people, but he was trying to capture some of that intensity and excitement to make an old book seem new again by making it sound like a news report. So he has this idea. He wants to do a news type show. His collaborators suggest this book is the perfect material to do that. They give it to one of their writers who hates the book, really can't stand it, thinks it's outdated, thinks it's not going to work.
20:24 Speaker 05 But they say, no, this is our book. And so all of the collaborators that Wells is working with in the Mercury Theater, from the writer to the actors to the sound effects people, pour all of their creative energies into this project because they think it's not going to work. So they have to do everything that they can to make this forty year old fantasy story sound realistic. And so eight PM on the East Coast, October thirtieth, the broadcast begins with this monologue taken from the H. G. Wells novel. We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century, this world was being watched by intelligences greater than ours and yet as mortal as our own. And then after these initial announcements that, you know, this is a Ricky Theater dramatization of the War of the Worlds.
21:08 Speaker 05 For about forty minutes, you're not going to have a station break, you're not going to have any interruption telling you what this is. The next half hour plus is all news announcements and broadcasts from military units and shortwave radio operators and things like that. It's all constructed. If the novel invents the alien invasion science fiction genre, in some ways, this broadcast, I think, invents found footage. You know, things like the Blair Witch Project, and this is the first time anybody's doing something like that. So the broadcast begins and you have these.
21:41 Speaker 05 Musical interludes that are exactly as boring and inoffensive as people want to listen to on a Sunday night when they're trying to relax, getting interrupted by these news bulletins about gas explosions on Mars and then something landing near Princeton, New Jersey, which is very comparable in location and topography compared to New York City, that woking is to London. It's actually kind of scary. I've spent a lot of time in Princeton and then to actually go to see where the Martians originally landed, they're very similar. So you have these news bulletins, you have these interruptions and an interview with a Princeton professor who's an astronomer, played by Arsene Wells, although you're not
22:21 Speaker 05 supposed to know that. And they go to the site where what they think is a meteor has landed and it's this amazing sequence where the spacecraft opens up and you realize that you're not dealing with a meteor, you're dealing with an alien invasion. And from then on, for the members of the audience, for people who have tuned in late, who didn't know what they were in for, they are having a very different experience from anything that anybody intended at this point.
22:48 Dan Snow? Listen to Dan Snow's history. More alien invasions after this.
22:58 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
23:40 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalized, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves.
24:23 Dan Snow? Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, helping to power millions of conversations every day. Ready to transform your customer support? Go to decagon.ai/dansnow to see what Decagon can do for your team. That's decagon.ai/dansnow. Check Decagon out at decagon.ai/dansnow.
24:52 Speaker 06 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA,
25:37 Speaker 06 Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
25:41 Speaker 07 This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.
26:20 Dan Snow? So Orson Welles is directing. It's like he's a conductor and he's kind of bringing this bit now, bringing that bit. Wait now, a bit of silence. I mean, it's a very, very live project.
26:30 Speaker 05 It is. I mean, it's a studio in the CBS building, 45 Madison Avenue, right in downtown Manhattan. And you can just picture it. I mean, Welles is standing in the center, as you say, like a conductor at a music stand. He's got his actors around a microphone before him. He's got a live orchestra, conducted by Bernard Herrmann, who would go on to be one of the great film composers of all time. Off to Welles's left, I think, the control room is to his right. He's got that window where he can see everybody there, working the dials and switches and everything like that. But Welles is in command, he's in the center. And, you know, he had been, even though this is his production, he's the star, he's the director. He had been remarkably distanced from the actual development of the show because he was doing a stage play that was not going well.
27:15 Speaker 05 And he was trying to save that while his collaborators were putting this all together. And he gets to the studio about six hours before airtime on Sunday and decides to change everything, decides to, you know, put his stamp on it and rewrite the script and bring in new fake news bulletins and change the musical cues. And so he's the person controlling it now as they're going on to the air. And so there's that great moment that I think is the most effective of the show. And we know from various accounts, from people who listened and who believe this to be real, that it was the thing that was most convincing to them, which is when you have this scene set in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, near Princeton, where the Martians had landed. And the alien spacecraft opens up and the Martians come out and then they have their
27:59 Speaker 05 heat ray, and this is right from the H. G. Wells novel where the heat ray comes out and is incinerating everybody. You have this remarkable soundscape of police sirens and people, the actors in the studio chattering. And you get the sense that you're in a much larger space than you're actually in. And then the sound of the heat ray, which is of course constructed by the sound effects team. And then you have, you know, one of the unsung heroes of this project, really, who's the actor by the name of Frank Reddick, who was one of the great radio actors of the era, a lost craft in a lot of ways, particularly in the United States. And he had listened to the famous recording of the Hindenburg disaster the year before, which had also happened in New Jersey, when
28:41 Speaker 05 there was a radio announcer who happened to be on the scene describing what he thought was going to be a routine landing. And then the airship catches fire, the hydrogen explodes. And it's that, you know, people, everyone knows, oh, the humanity and all the passengers, you know, all that's and, and so Frank Reddick replicates that announcer's voice, what he's saying, you know, in the Hindenburg broadcast, it's, they say, you know, it's bursting into flames in War of the Worlds. He says, they're turning into flames when they get hit by the heat ray. So there's that emotion, you're seeing this event through this reporter's eyes and his performance sells it better than any certainly digital special effect you could have in this era. And the heat rays sweeping across to Frank Reddick and,
29:24 Speaker 05 you know, he's about 20 yards to my rep. And then they cut it. And that's the moment when, you know, the last thing you want in radio is dead air, because that's when people change the channel, turn the dial, right? But Wells, in that studio, 45 Madison Avenue, was standing there like a conductor with his arms outstretched, holding the pause for, I believe, six full seconds. And everybody in the room is, you know, getting more and more anxious, like, you know, come on, let's get this going. But he holds it and holds it and holds it. And then he gives the cue for the announcer to say, you know, we interrupt the broadcast because we have technical difficulties. We'll return you to Grover's Mill at the earliest opportunity.
30:04 Speaker 05 And that's the moment from these, you know, from letters that people wrote who listened to the broadcast and wrote about it, or talked about it later, you know, hearing what they thought was the reporter die on air, that silence signifying death was so affecting that if you were tuning in under the right circumstances, it was very difficult to process what you were hearing rationally. And that was the moment that pushed a lot of people over the edge.
30:29 Dan Snow? Okay. Well, Brad, how many people were pushed over there? Because this is what we, hey, we're all brought up with this idea that the whole of the US went completely bonkers and started running around the streets worrying about a Martian invasion. What do you think really was the reality? Did that many people think this was real?
30:42 Speaker 05 The short answer is no. Quite a few did, but not the entirety of the United States. I mean, it's very difficult to give you a number for the reason that things like ratings, opinion polling are in their infancy. So figuring out how many people were listening just to begin with is was extraordinarily difficult. The best estimate that we have is that it was about an audience of maybe six million people, of which one million for some period of time believed that this was real. But that's guesswork in the extreme. So I don't know how much faith to put into those numbers. What I can tell you is that the majority of the radio audience were not listening to Orson Welles because this was not very popular. It was seen as very sort of what we would call highbrow, more for
31:26 Speaker 05 a refined taste. Again, people who would listen to Shakespeare on a Sunday night. The vastly more popular show on a competing network was The Chase in Sanborn Hour starring Edgar Bergen, who was a ventriloquist with his dummy Charlie McCarthy. And I've been doing, talking about this subject for many, many years. I still haven't figured out how you can do a ventriloquist act on the radio. Nevertheless, it was extraordinarily popular. And so that had, you know, maybe five or six times the audience and most people were listening to that. And so of the subset that heard this, an even smaller subset believed it to be true. But it is certainly the case that I think, under the right conditions,
32:07 Speaker 05 given the environment, given how well this show was put together, how accurately it
32:14 Speaker 05 Replicates what a news broadcast of that era sounded like. And given the fact that nothing like this had been done on American airwaves, to the extent that this pushed the idea of a fake news broadcast. I mean, there had been famously, there had been one over the BBC back in the 20s that had a similar response. This was a new thing in America. And so when I was going through, I had the opportunity to be one of the first, really the first researcher to go through and analyze all of the letters that listeners sent to Orson Welles in response to this broadcast. The people who were frightened tended to write that night. They tended to write immediately after. They were so angry. And there's one from a woman who sort of fills both sides of the page, you know, Orson Welles, you're horrible, terrible person. You scared me
32:58 Speaker 05 after that, da, da, da. And at the very bottom of the last page, she just sort of squeezes it upon thinking about it. I must say it was marvelous and accept my congratulations. So you can see how there was this emotional response that then, you know, she thought about it a little bit and cooled off and still sent the letter, which is amazing. But people would write these letters and would really be trying to document their experiences in many cases to justify why they reacted in the way that they did. And I started noticing that you referred to the mythology around this about people fleeing their homes and, you know, taking up arms and all the other sort of stuff, which did happen in rare instances.
33:38 Speaker 05 But I started noticing that in first in college dormitories, but in apartment buildings and in tight neighborhoods. And I eventually began to realize that it was virality of it, that it was the spreading of it, that in an environment where a lot of people are living close together, if one person tunes in late and then tells five people and they haven't heard, you know, the first part of the show, they don't have context, their context is somebody they trust telling them that this was a real matter for concern. And so that then created these pockets of hysteria scattered around the country. So it wasn't this tidal wave of terror, as one of the newspapers called it, but there were
34:22 Speaker 05 pockets where in many cases it was some You know, the part of the country calling a relative who lived in New Jersey where this event has happened and saying, uh, you gotta go. And then some of the people who fled or the professors who went looking for the meteor that somebody told them had landed near Princeton, they never actually heard the show. So a lot of what got into the newspapers as the, you know, people fleeing in response to a radio show were not people who actually heard the broadcast. They had been told from someone they trusted to get out of town and they went.
34:52 Dan Snow? And just to remind people, it was not taped and then played out later. So if you missed the broadcast, you missed the broadcast.
34:58 Speaker 05 Exactly. No one hears this until it's released on vinyl record in the 1960s. So 30 years after now, transcripts were published in the newspapers the next day and later in book form. So that was the format in which it existed in the public mind. But reading it, you know, the soundscape, everything I was talking about earlier about the silence and the sound effects, none of that comes through on paper. That cuts both ways because on the one hand, there's this mythology that grows up around it when people can't listen to it. They can't evaluate it for themselves. But if you're just reading it in cold print the next day as most people were, because again, this is not a show that many people heard to begin with, but it's on the front page of the newspapers across the country and then around the world.
35:42 Speaker 05 So everybody's reading about it the next day and they're reading this transcript. And what I noticed from going through the letters is that what drives a lot of the written response from people is not listening to the initial show. That's a subset of it. It's people who are outraged and terrified by the thought that so many of their fellow Americans could fall for what they're reading in the newspapers. Cause you know, and two, you're reading it from the very beginning. You're not coming into it in the middle of it. You're not surrounded by people who are believing this is real. You're reading this alien invasion story, beginning with the announcement. And so a lot of people in the United States, as is the case throughout our history, were quick to believe
36:27 Speaker 05 the worst of the rest of the country. And in this period where people know World War II is coming, people are aware of what's happening. In countries like Nazi Germany, how the Nazis use radio and mass media for propaganda purposes. Americans like to believe we are exceptional. We are somehow immune from these sorts of things. Well, here's a piece of evidence that we are just as persuadable as any other country that has been, you know, subjected to radio propaganda. And that is what really, even more than the broadcast itself, that's what terrifies the country in the aftermath of this.
37:04 Dan Snow? Don't go away. More War of the Worlds after this.
37:16 Speaker 02 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
37:47 Speaker 07 This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.
38:25 Dan Snow? Why do the newspapers make such a big deal of it the next day? Is it partly because the newspapers love to discredit the radio? And they want to show that it's dangerous and transgressive and perhaps destabilizing?
38:34 Speaker 05 I don't know how much that influenced the initial reporting. Certainly, that comes out in the editorial comment after the fact. Um, you know, Orson Welles and his collaborators would talk about this later on that they believed, you know, because they're after the broadcast happens and they leave the CBS building, there are these accounts of, you know, reporters who have descended on the building shouting all these questions at Welles and his producer, you know, did you know about all the suicides? Did you know about all the car accidents? Like, you know, none of which was true, but they were on the receiving end of terrifying questions that made them think that they killed all these people. And they detected a certain amount of malice in those questions. You have to begin with the fact that this is an event that nobody expected that's
39:18 Speaker 05 happening on a Sunday night. By the time most newspapers are aware of it, it's basically already over because people are calling into police stations, they're calling into radio stations and newspaper offices, trying to verify what they're hearing over the radio, because that's the only way you could do it. And so newspapers suddenly start getting these calls about, well, there's a meteor that's landed in New Jersey. Well, there's some sort of natural disaster. There's an invasion, you know, aliens, like they're all these sorts of different versions of it that are coming into them. And they're trying to make sense of it in very few hours before they have to put out the morning newspapers. So trying to make sense of such a complex event in such a narrow frame of time is basically
40:02 Speaker 05 impossible, given the tools that they had. And they also then have these heli-type machines that are bringing in the wire service reports from all over the country. And all the newspapers throughout the cities and towns scattered across the United States are sending out their most extreme unusual examples of fright. So somebody runs into a church service screaming about the end of the world. Uh, somebody goes, tries to commit suicide. I mean, so they're getting all of this evidence that suggests that this is a much bigger event than is actually the case. And the mistake that the newspapers made
40:40 Speaker 05 Understandably was to sort of connect the dots that should not have been connected and to present this as a tidal wave of terror when it was all these discreet sort of pockets. So yes, in the days to come, there was a lot of newspaper columns and editorials talking about how you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the radio, comparing this to the situation in Germany. But a lot of that is written from a position of ignorance, again, because people hadn't heard the show. There was no serious reporting trying to figure out exactly what had happened. So they just sort of went with the initial version of it. And that then enters our popular culture. But it gives you a seriously distorted picture, I think, of what happened that night.
41:24 Dan Snow? Yeah, as we're trying to incorporate new forms of media and people engagement and fake news and propaganda and virality, what's your thinking about the legacy and the lessons of this broadcast?
41:35 Speaker 05 It really is the first time that Americans, certainly, and maybe around the world, are dealing with what has become the problem of the 21st century, which is how do you operate as a society, much less as a democracy, when you have technologies that exist that can spread lies much more convincingly than truth and in some cases make them sound more convincing than truth? The people who fell for this broadcast in a lot of ways did so because it tapped into these fears and anxieties that they had. So most of the people who were frightened, and we know this from some of the survey research that was done after the fact, did not understand that the show was about aliens. They thought it was the Germans coming to invade or some sort of natural disaster,
42:20 Speaker 05 whatever they were most afraid of. Radio is the theater of the mind, right? So if you're not seeing it, if the announcers are only talking about war machines and invaders and they're not using the words Martians or aliens as they are after a certain point in the show, you can imagine any threat that is most terrifying to you. So that population selects itself and is most affected by what happens. Now, of course, we have not just the distribution of news and information has changed, where we all have social media platforms and we are all distributors as well as producers to a certain extent, but we have generative AI technologies that can create any sort of image, any sort of text you want, whether or not it's tied to the truth.
43:05 Speaker 05 And that is... Supercharging, sort of the same human psychological dynamics that are on display in this event. The human psychology hasn't changed. The technology is what's bringing out this side of us more and more. So, you know, one of the reasons I love to talk about this subject and have been talking about it since I finished my undergrad was that the one thing that we know could help people interpret this correctly, even if they were, you know, in those sort of more terrifying circumstances when they tuned in late, was education, was a certain amount of mental training. Even if you knew the H.G. Wells novel and you knew sort of the tropes of science fiction, you were listening to this and you could sort of plug it into what you knew. A certain degree of scientific knowledge,
43:50 Speaker 05 you know that like, you know, you can't shoot a spacecraft off of Mars and conquer the entire eastern seaboard in 40 minutes. It just doesn't make physical sense. There were those sorts of things that trained people to interpret what they were hearing more and more in the right way. And then the aftermath of War of the Worlds, even though relatively few people heard the show, the story and the way it became a part of American popular culture for a long time, it's this thing in the back of people's minds. So, three years later, when Pearl Harbor is attacked, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that people did not believe the initial news reports because they thought it was another War of the Worlds. I've seen accounts even as late as 1963, the Kennedy assassination. You know, there were people who had been alive in the late 1930s who heard the initial
44:33 Speaker 05 news reports about the president being shot in Dallas and didn't believe it or were skeptical about it because they had been trained to wait for additional information to verify the alarming news report. And so, I think I like to keep this story alive. I think the story will always remain alive in this era because the story of how people fell for the broadcast itself and then also how the story got distorted and exaggerated and how people saw their own fears in it, whether they were frightened by the broadcast or not. That hasn't gone away. And the only thing, the only defense against that is to get people training themselves to be more skeptical, to be more discriminating about the information that comes to them, to not believe, you know, something that particularly
45:18 Speaker 05 ties into what you're most emotionally responsive to, what most frightens you, what most hangers you, triggers you in any way. That's what made War of the Worlds such a phenomenon in 1938. And that's what has become our great challenge in the 21st century.
45:32 Dan Snow? Well, that's right. And we will be our best version of ourselves right here because if you don't believe what Brad has said, you can go to the University of Michigan Library, which has a digitized collection of all these letters written to Orson Welles that Brad mentioned earlier. And the link is in the show notes. People can read them for themselves. They are one of the best archive letters I have ever read in my life. You've got to go over there. It's brilliant. I mentioned something in the introduction there. And Brad, people can also go and read Broadcast Hysteria, Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and The Art of Fake News. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, buddy.
46:04 Speaker 05 It was my pleasure. Thank you.
46:08 Dan Snow? Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
46:54 Speaker 08 Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.
47:24 Speaker 06 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound? Means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
48:07 Speaker 06 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
48:15 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
Previous Pirates: The Pirate Hunts Next Is James I an Underrated King? Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
