30DW2-2 - Day 25: Fact or Fiction

Picture this.

It's October 30, 1938.

You've just finished dinner, cleared the table and helped mom do the dishes. The pots and pans are left for later because the clock in the kitchen indicates it's time for the family's favourite CBS radio program.

Dad switches the radio on, tunes in the station, and everyone sits back in anticipation of what's to come.

But as the show begins it is interrupted by a news bulletin. Are your ears playing tricks? The newscaster is trying to maintain his composure as he relays developments associated with alien spaceships hovering over the Earth. This can't be. But they're interviewing eye-witnesses. Wait, a spaceship has landed. My God a heat ray as incinerated the nearby crowd.

Fact or fiction?

Well, it really did happen. The radio broadcast, that is, not the alien invasion. It was a radio play performed by the Mercury Theatre Players, produced and narrated by Orson Welles, based on the science-fiction tale War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

Talk of your practical jokes, this was the ultimate.

The radio play was so believable many listeners actually thought Martians were invading earth. Only at the very end of the broadcast did Wells break character and advise listeners that their performance had been a Halloween concoction the equivalent of, as he put it, "dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying boo."

Sure, and he had half the northeastern United States and parts of Canada in an uproar. Some people fled their homes in panic.

When I think of Fact or Fiction this is what I think of because listeners at the time really had no idea.

The latest movie treatment of War of the Worlds - the one with Tom Cruise - was pretty good, despite Tom Cruise. But as the following trailer from the first version in 1953 indicates it was - in a tribute to Nicky and Mike - pretty cheesy.

Warp on over to We Work for Wells and see how the rest of our alien friends handled the prompt today. I don't think there's any cause for panic.