, United States (USA) (American Colonies)
1938 - October 30 – Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds is broadcast, causing panic in various parts of the United States.

Martian Men Attack U.S.! Thousands Flee in Panic!! But Twas Only Wells and Welles

By Charles A. Grumich
NEW YORK, Oct. 31 (AP) - A horrible fantasy of war waged on the United States by fearsome, space-conquering men from Mars brought near panic to that part of the nation's radio audience which was not tuned in last night on Charlie McCarthy's rival radio program.

In the double-quick tempo of the news broadcasters, the fiction of a Columbia program became so realistic that hysteria prevailed among listeners throughout the United States and Canada.

Demands for investigation and correction came today with the belated reports of almost fantastic panic.

Senator Clyde L. Herring (D-Ia.) said he planned to introduce in Congress a bill "controlling just such abuses as was heard over the radio last night... Radio has no more right to produce program like that than someone has in knocking on your door and screaming," he added.

City Manager Paul Morton of Trenton, N.J., near the locale of the fictional invasion, said he would demand an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission "with the view of preventing recurrence of what happened."

LISTENERS FRANTIC
Some apartment houses in New York were emptied hurriedly by frantic listeners to the program - and by second and third accounts that multiplied the impending peril.

A woman in Pittsburgh tried suicide, saying "I'd rather die this way than like that."

At a high point in the program the electric power failed at Concrete. Wash., a town of 1000, and the lights went out in most of the homes. Many thought the invasion had reached the west coast. Women fainted and men prepared to take their families to the mountains.

Switchboards in newspaper offices and police stations everywhere were swamped with calls from terrified people, many of them weeping.

Some reported they could smell the gas and see the flames started by the attackers.

People gathered in groups to pray for salvation.

All over the metropolitan area, panicky persons jumped into their automobiles and headed for the open spaces to escape the hypothetical bombing of New York.

Church services here and elsewhere were broken up by the intruders who screamed the world was coming to an end...

"Is it true? Were 40 men killed in New Jersey? Or 7000 in New York? Are men from Mars attacking New York with deadly other-worldly weapons and gas? Was the world coming to an end?"

NO MARTIAN IN SIGHT
There wasn't a Martian in sight and the hysteria subsided almost as quickly as it started. But listeners viewed the broadcast with mixed feelings, principally that they had been untowardly frightened and duped.

The broadcast was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' imaginative "War of the Worlds," further dramatized by Orson Welles, the 23-year-old Broadway theatrical prodigy. Welles Americanized the locale and situations.

Four times during the program, CBS pointed out, the announcer stressed that the story was nothing but fiction.

This comforting reiteration either escaped many of those who tuned in for the full program or was lost entirely to part-time listeners or late tuners-in, for it failed to prevent a hysteria unknown to the United States since the World War.

Many of those who were blissfully listening to Charlie McCarthy's foolishness on NBC network doubtless were caught up in the furor of neighbors dashing out of their houses, some with personal belongings, and heading for havens against invasion from an unknown foe armed with strange death-dealing implements from another and presumably hostile planet.

ACTOR IS SORRY
Welles, who startled the theater last season by portraying a Caesar in modern dress with Fascist leanings, was overcome by the unbelievable reaction to his presentation of the Wells thriller-turned-horrifier.

All he could say after the broadcast was "I'm sorry."

The Mercury Theater of the Air program started out in routine fashion with announcements and a few bars of music.

Suddenly - "We interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin... Twenty minutes before eight, Professor Farrell of the Mt. Jennings Observator, Chicago, Ill., reports several explosions of the incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars."

This was the buildup for a dramatization that eventually had the Martians landing in meteor cars with the shock of an earthquake in the vicinity of Grovers Mills (fictitious locale), New Jersey. ... A 30-second pause for studio music... Then the octopus like Martians, using the dread "heat-ray" and then, by telephone from the scene, the report of 40 persons dead there... The Martians eventually succumbed to germs that we worldings are immune to.

The four cautionary announcements that it was fiction were lost and forgotten in the realism of the portrayal, and its faithful similarity to the style of the "newscasters," and in the realistic manner of breaking into regular programs with broadcasts of hot news.

Columbia declared afterward it had no intention of misleading listeners and when it became evident that part of the audience had been disturbed by the performance, five announcements were made over the network later in the evening to reassure those listeners.

The Delta Democrat-Times
Greenville, Mississippi
October 31, 1938

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