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Orson Welles

Remembering the night that panicked Americ
Orson Welles of the Mercury Theater
By BOB FULTON, bfulton@indianagazette.net
Published: Sunday, October 26, 2008 5:16 AM EDT

Martians landed in New Jersey on an October evening 70 years ago, bent on spreading death and destruction.

At least that's what the terrified citizens of rural Grovers Mill believed. Residents pumped a wooden water tower full of buckshot, mistaking it for a long-legged Martian fighting machine. Their hair-trigger response was typical on the night that panicked America.

Radio star Orson Welles and his fellow performers with the CBS network's ``Mercury Theatre on the Air'' were so convincing in their Halloween-eve adaptation of H.G. Wells' ``The War of the Worlds'' that listeners across the land fled their homes, certain that Martians had launched an invasion.

Massive traffic jams resulted, and frantic callers paralyzed communications lines. A Princeton University study later estimated that 1 million people truly believed the nation was under attack.

In the evening mists, alarmed Grovers Mills farmers fired on what they were positive was a Martian fighting machine. They wound up riddling a rather unimposing 25-foot water tower.

``Yes, but on a foggy October night when rumors of Martians are around, I can understand how that would appear to be an ominous presence,'' said Doug Forrester, former chairman of The War of the Worlds Commemorative Committee.

The spindly water tower still stands adjacent to Grovers Mill pond where, according to the play, the invaders first landed. Nothing there now suggests the terror that gripped local residents - and ultimately much of the nation - when the 23-year-old Welles, already renowned for his role as ``The Shadow,'' orchestrated one of the most famous hoaxes in history.

THE RESULTING panic was real, even if the invaders existed only in the imaginations of those who took flight or shot up an innocuous water tower. The citizens of Grovers Mill, historically portrayed as simple folk who were easily duped, reacted no differently than the more sophisticated residents of metropolitan areas.

``The response here was about the same as the rest of the country,'' said Bill Hart, president of the historical society in Plainsboro, ``a stone's throw'' from Grovers Mill. ``There were people in this area who I've spoken to over time who absolutely believed that this was a Martian invasion. One of them, Lolly Dey, who was 16 at the time, was at a church singalong when someone burst in and shouted, `The Martians have landed at Grovers Mill.' She said there was panic, and she went running home. I heard a story about a doctor here in town who loaded his shotgun and went outside. He was ready. But there were other people in the area who didn't believe it at all. So there were mixed reactions. People here responded the same way people elsewhere in the country did.''

Howard Koch, who later co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the film classic ``Casablanca,'' made Grovers Mill the focal point of the play. A newcomer to the Mercury Theatre - ``The War of the Worlds'' adaptation was only his third assignment - Koch was paid $125 a week to draft scripts from literary works. (The script does bear Welles' imprint, for it was his decision to employ the news-bulletin style that injected hair-raising realism into the broadcast.) Koch established the location for the first Martian landing purely by accident after obtaining a road map at a New Jersey gas station.

``I spread out the map, closed my eyes, and put down the pencil point,'' Koch wrote in ``As Time Goes By,'' his 1979 memoir. ``It happened to fall on Grovers Mill. I liked the sound; it had an authentic ring. Also, it was near Princeton where I could logically bring in the observatory and the astronomer, Professor Pierson, who became a leading character in the drama, played by Orson. Up to then hardly anyone had ever heard the name of this small hamlet surrounded by farmland; overnight the name of Grovers Mill was heard around the world.''

THE BROADCAST that lifted Grovers Mill from obscurity and scared the wits out of listeners from coast to coast began at 8 p.m. with, innocently enough, a program of dance music from a New York City hotel. Break-ins, which constituted the body of the play, were interspersed throughout, in the manner of genuine bulletins. The chilling presentation that resulted offered a striking contrast to the competition on NBC, popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wise-cracking dummy, Charlie McCarthy.

``People channel surfed back then, just like they do today,'' Hart said. ``Most people were tuned in to Charlie McCarthy - that was the most popular show - but after a few opening jokes he switched to a singer who was apparently not that good. So a lot of people turned the dial on the radio and they came in at some point during `The War of the Worlds' re-enactment.''

Consequently, many listeners missed the introduction that clearly established the fictional nature of the broadcast and overlooked obvious clues that what they were hearing was indeed a dramatization. For example, events were unfolding at an implausible pace.

``Listening to it today, it isn't too difficult to see that it's fictional,'' Forrester said. ``The time frames are collapsed. It talks about events that happen days apart within a matter of a few minutes. So if a person listened carefully, it wouldn't be a problem.''

But it was a problem because thousands heard only fragments of the broadcast blindly accepted the reports as fact and then rushed into the streets, spreading what they thought was the truth. Many of those who panicked heard the news secondhand and then relayed it to others, who in turn passed it on. A cascade effect took place, engulfing the nation in a wave of hysteria.

WHAT AT first blush seemed an ordinary broadcast morphed irrevocably into an extraordinary one when a bulletin interrupted the music: A meteor had crashed to earth near Princeton, killing hundreds. Upon investigation, the meteor was discovered to be a cylindrical spacecraft whose occupants, according to a commentator at the scene, unleashed a dreadful weapon: ``A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they're turning into flame!''

That beam of light - the so-called heat ray - later set the surrounding field ablaze. Another announcer soon broke in with the following report: ``Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message. At least 40 people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.''

The attackers were purported to be the ``vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.'' Cylinders were soon reported falling throughout the United States. The aliens, armed with poisonous gas and their incinerating heat ray, eventually advanced on New York City. A broadcaster positioned on a rooftop described the scene: ``The enemy is now in sight above the Palisades. People are running toward the East River, thousands of them, dropping like rats. Now the smoke's reached Times Square. People are falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue ... Fifth Avenue ... 100 yards away ... it's 50 feet ...''

Brief coughing followed, then silence.

THE PANIC began even before the Mercury Theatre players had completed their broadcast at the WABC studio in New York. In nearby Newark, N.J., more than 20 families fled their neighborhood with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces as protection against the poisonous gas. Others barricaded themselves inside their homes. Fifteen people were treated for shock and hysteria at St. Michael's Hospital in the city.

``The scene in Newark, as it was described to me, was one of complete chaos, hundreds of cars racing down streets, disregarding traffic lights to the bafflement of police,'' wrote Koch, who was so exhausted by the task of completing a 60-page script in six days that he fell asleep immediately after the broadcast. Koch learned of the panic the following day when he overheard conversations about an invasion while walking down the street. Like many Americans in 1938, Koch viewed with a growing sense of unease the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis. He rushed into a barbershop and asked, ``Are we at war?'' Koch's jaw likely dropped to the floor when he was shown a newspaper story detailing an attack from Mars.

Incredibly, no deaths were ever linked to the broadcast, although there were certainly some close calls. For example, a Pittsburgh man came home in the middle of the broadcast to find his wife in the bathroom, a bottle of poison in her hand. ``I'd rather die this way than like that,'' she told him.

Others sought divine deliverance from the Martian hordes and prayed in the streets. Telephone operators were besieged. The New Jersey State Police were so swamped with calls that a squad of troopers equipped with gas masks and riot guns were dispatched to the ``invasion'' site. According to the Trenton Times, they arrived to find nothing but a ``dilapidated mill overrun with hundreds of would-be rescuers and thrill-seekers,'' many of them armed.

``There was a black gentleman on the porch with a shotgun,'' recalled John Gentz, a state trooper who was on duty that night. ``The patrol knew the gentleman and said, `What are you doing?' He said, `The Martians are coming. I'm going to get them before they get me.'''

WHEN ACCURATE information about the cause of the panic was finally obtained, the following message was disseminated via New Jersey State Police teletypes: ``Note to all receivers - WABC broadcast as drama re this section being attacked by residents of Mars. Imaginary affair.''

But many listeners couldn't be convinced the invasion was imaginary. The electric company in Providence, R.I., received scores of calls from alarmed customers, urging them to turn off all lights so the city would be safe from attack. A man packed his family into a car, headed for the shore and accidentally drove off the end of a pier (no one was hurt). A woman in New Jersey's Hamilton Township believed that poisonous fumes were seeping into her living room and began stuffing wet towels and rags around all the doors and windows.

The intensity of the hysteria was such that a man rushed into the Press Club in Princeton and claimed he had seen Martians piling out of a rocket, each armed with a death ray. Sentinels atop a Manhattan building peered through binoculars and described to those below the destruction of New Jersey. And a woman in Cranbury, N.J., told her husband that her last wish was to see her parents in Pennsylvania. They jumped in the car and, despite the wife's shriek of warning, the husband backed it right through a closed garage door. With a shrug he said, ``We won't be needing it anymore.''

Pandemonium reigned in parts of New York City. Traffic in many areas came to a standstill and people were running, helter-skelter, for what they thought was their lives.

``I didn't tune in that program until it was half over, but when I heard the names and titles of federal, state and municipal officials, and when the `Secretary of the Interior' was introduced, I was convinced it was the McCoy,'' said Bronx resident Louis Winkler. ``I ran out into the street with scores of others and found people running in all directions.''

Earth's destruction seemed at hand.

DOOMSDAY WAS averted in the play when the Martians were wiped out by bacteria to which they had no resistance. As Welles' character put it, the invaders were ``slain, after all man's defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in his wisdom put upon the earth.''

Welles then closed the broadcast with the following: ``This was the Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying `Boo!' If your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. It's Halloween.''

But millions of people were not amused; they were indignant. Lawsuits were filed and violence threatened (one listener vowed to ``get some dynamite and blow up that station''). H.G. Wells himself was furious with the reworking of his 1898 novel.

``It was implicit in the agreement that it was to be used as fiction and not news,'' he said. ``I gave no permission whatever for alterations that might lead to belief that it was real news.''

While Welles expressed regret that the broadcast precipitated widespread panic, he was astonished that it had. He assumed Wells' story was too tame for 1938 audiences.

``Far from expecting the radio audience to take the program as fact rather than a fictional representation, we feared that the H.G. Wells classic, which has served as an inspiration for so many moving pictures, radio serials and even comic strips, might appear too old-fashioned for modern consumption,'' Welles said. ``It was our thought that perhaps people might be bored or annoyed at hearing a tale so improbable.''

Fact is, the production that thrust sleepy little Grovers Mill into the national spotlight was anything but boring. Even judged by today's standards, the quality of the presentation is impressive.

``It was a very well-written script, the sound effects were first-rate and so were the actors,'' Hart said. ``They had excellent credentials in terms of theater. These were talented people who were used to convince an audience that a story was real.''

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre cast succeeded beyond their wildest dreams that Halloween eve when they scared the wits out of America. It is a tribute to their mastery that for one night more than a million sane, intelligent residents of planet Earth - including a band of gun-toting farmers in Grovers Mill, N.J. - believed that a Martian invasion force had really landed.

http://online.indianagazette.com/articles/2008/10/26/news/10004477.txt