twenty, Welles already had a reputation as a talented actor. In the 1930s, as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s second New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration launched the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Writer/director John Houseman was tapped to head its Negro Theatre Unit; he in turn asked Welles to direct a play for him—a version of Macbeth with an all-black cast set in nineteenth-century Haiti. Their success in this and other FTP productions prompted Welles and Houseman to found Mercury Theatre in 1937; through it they staged more innovative productions, like a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and a leftist opera, The Cradle Will Rock. A year later they took Mercury Theatre to the airwaves, and on October 30,1938—forty years after the publication of H. G. Wells’s slim novel of cataclysm—they made history with a daring adaptation of The War of the Worlds.

Welles directed the broadcast, Houseman was the producer, and Howard Koch wrote the screenplay. To make Wells’s text more relevant to American listeners, Koch switched the setting of the interplanetary battle from London to rural New Jersey (the landing site was the sleepy hamlet of Grover’s Mill), and from there the Martians went on to attack New York City. Mercury Theatre of the Air’s The War of the Worlds aired during the golden age of radio, the era of Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,” when the radio was the American public’s most intimate source of news. Contemporary coverage included the threat of Nazi expansionism throughout Europe, the Hindenburg disaster, and terrifying accounts of British schoolchildren donning gas masks in war drills. Such news reports haunted the minds of Americans, and Welles and his colleagues deliberately studied them, distilling a formula for terror.

In 1938, October 30 fell on a Sunday, when the majority of American radio listeners were tuned in to The Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy Show. It was this show’s custom to take a musical break after twelve minutes of ventriloquism, during which time listeners routinely surfed the radio waves looking for something more lively. Welles’s broadcast banked on this likelihood. Although the introduction to the hour clearly announced a production of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, and it was repeated three times during the broadcast that it was an adaptation of the novel, that information was lost on frightened listeners who in their panic missed the information.

Welles’s The War of the Worlds began innocently enough with a government weather report, followed by a shift to the Park Plaza Hotel in New York City, where listeners heard the Ramon Raquello Orchestra. After thirty seconds of music, an announcer broke in with the familiar phrase: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this broadcast.” The first news flash detailed mysterious explosions on the surface of Mars, theorized to be meteorites, then the “regularly scheduled program” picked up and Raquello’s orchestra continued mid-bar.

Welles played several roles, among them Professor Richard Pier-son, the “famous Princeton astronomer,” and on-the-scene reporter Carl Phillips. The Phillips monologue clinched it for listeners. While narrating his observations of the landed aircraft and its emerging, tentacled pilot, Philips shakily uttered, “It’s indescribable” and “I can’t find words,” adding a chilling dimension of realism. His report was suddenly cut off after he screamed, “There’s a jet of flame! It’s coming this way!” A number of other actors participated in the broadcast as townspeople describing the carnage, scientists making astronomical observations, military men discussing matters of strategy, and the Secretary of the Interior.

Not long into the broadcast, listeners started calling their local police stations seeking advice, and the nation’s switchboards soon were jammed. Many hysterical people actually claimed to have seen Martians. One woman in Grover’s Mill called the police department, screaming, “You can’t imagine the horror of it! It’s hell!” Despite Mercury Theatre’s own announcements and numerous press releases by the Associated Press during the broadcast, as well as widespread transmissions from police dispatchers identifying the program as fiction, the panic reached epidemic proportions. People crowded the streets of New York, churches overflowed, and highways were clogged with terrified motorists trying to escape the attack.

The following day, the New York Times headline read: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,” with the subtitle “Many Flee Homes to Escape ‘Gas Raid From Mars’—Phone Calls Swamp Police at Broadcast of Wells Fantasy.” Welles claimed to have had no knowledge of the panic caused by the broadcast, although later reports describe him rushing to finish the show