The War of the Worlds

On 30 October 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air adapted Wells's forty-year-old novel for radio. The clever, and cruel, decision was the format: instead of narrating a story, they staged an ordinary music programme repeatedly interrupted by increasingly urgent news bulletins reporting something landing in New Jersey.

The next morning the front page of The New York Times read: "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact."

The story went round the world and has never left. Americans fleeing their homes. Wet rags pressed to faces against Martian gas.

Later research tells a duller and far more interesting story.

The Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril estimated around six million people heard the broadcast, and that perhaps 1.2 million were frightened or disturbed by it. Frightened is not the same as fleeing. Nothing approaching a nationwide panic has ever been substantiated.

Modern scholarship goes further: the panic was largely manufactured after the fact by newspapers, which had a commercial motive. Radio was taking their advertising revenue, and a story proving that radio was reckless and dangerous was extremely convenient.

So the most famous fact about The War of the Worlds is not really about the novel at all — it is about a radio play, and it is mostly wrong, and it survives because it was useful to the people who printed it.

A story about an invasion became a story about how easily a story spreads.

The novel has been adapted continuously for more than a century in radio, film and television — most famously the 1938 Welles broadcast, and again as a 2005 feature film directed by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Cruise.