Mercury Theater: War Of The Worlds (10-30-1938)

<p>The best of Science Fiction radio.</p> <p>"The War of the Worlds" is an episode that is directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898) of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode is famous for causing panic among its listening audience, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.</p> <p>The episode opens with an introductory monologue based on the beginning of the original novel, after which the program takes on the format of an evening of typical radio programming being periodically interrupted by news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of live music and are relatively calm reports of unusual explosions on Mars followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an object falling on a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. The crisis escalates dramatically when a correspondent reporting live from Grover's Mill describes creatures emerging from an alien craft, which are incinerating police and onlookers with a heat ray until his audio feed abruptly goes dead. This is followed by a rapid series of news updates detailing the beginning of a devastating alien invasion and the military's futile efforts to stop it. The first portion of the episode climaxes with another live report from the rooftop of a Manhattan radio station. The correspondent describes crowds fleeing clouds of poison smoke released by giant Martian "war machines" and "dropping like flies" as the gas approaches his location. Eventually he coughs and falls silent, and a lone ham radio operator asks, "Is there anyone on the air? Isn't there... anyone?" with no response. The program takes its first break thirty minutes after Welles's introduction.</p> <p>The second half of the show shifts to a conventional radio drama format that follows a survivor (played by