October 30, 1938 —
The War of the Worlds was the Halloween episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed by wunderkind Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).
Welles’s adaptation is arguably the most well-known radio drama in history. Both the War of the Worlds broadcast and the panic it created have become textbook examples of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.
In recent years, it has been suggested that the War of the Worlds broadcast was actually a news report of the Red Lectroids’ invasion of Earth—by Orson—as fact later retracted as fiction. Another conspiracy theory claims the Rockefeller Foundation funded the broadcast as an experiment to gauge the public’s reaction.
There has been continued speculation that the panic generated by the broadcast inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, in order to avoid a similar public reaction. Indeed, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in 1956, “The [U.S. government’s] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now-famous War of the Worlds broadcast.”
It’s also possible, of course, that the aliens hypnotized Welles and caused him to present the broadcast as a drama—when it was, in fact, real.
You never know.
The Haus of Dcaligari 