(A) number of people have begun to wonder whether or not they will ever regain any sense of economic security. The complexity of modern finance and government, the discrepancies shown in the economic and political proposals of the various ‘experts…’ prolonged unemployment among millions of Americans—these together with a thousand and one other characteristics of modern living—create an environment which the average individual is completely unable to interpret.Op-Ed piece from today’s newspaper? No, it’s an excerpt from Hadley Cantril’s book Invasion from Mars (1940), explaining why so many people believed Earth was being attacked sixty-one years ago this Halloween Eve. We all pretty much know the story—some of it, anyway: Orson Welles does a fake newscast, millions panic, a legend is born. But there’s a little more to things that that.Welles’ Mercury Theatre of the Air had been a distant second to The Chase and Sanborn Hour, featuring Edgar Bergen (Murphy Brown’s father) and Charlie McCarthy (his dummy: that’s right, the NCIS of its day was a ventriloquist act… on the radio). Welles had been doing a series of adaptations of literary works and decided the next one would be H.G. Wells’ novel. He got Howard Kotch (who would later co author the screenplay for Casablanca) to write the script (for which Welles would take sole credit for years), changing the location from England to New Jersey, using real landmarks and voice actors who sounded like real life newscasters and politicians. It was clearly announced at the beginning of the show that it was just that night’s regular program; nevertheless, once people got hooked, they never bothered to change the channel to see if anyone else was broadcasting this “news event.”Welles’ friend, critic and commentator Alexander Wolcott, told him the panic happened because “…all the intelligent people were listening to the dummy and that all the dummies were listening to (Welles).” Many people, once they were “in” on the joke, took it in stride, but not everyone was amused. One angry listener wrote to Welles saying, “…I would not insult a female dog by calling you a son of such an animal. Your conduct was beneath… the moral perception of a bastard son of a fatherless whore…” And then he got personal. When it was revealed that a 1949 rebroadcast of the original script in Ecuador was just “a joke,” the crowd in the street, already panicked, turned angry and set fire to the building housing the radio station. Twenty people were killed and a dozen more were injured.It has been said that Wells’ book was a critique of English colonialism (at the time, they were the world’s preeminent superpower), letting the nation builders get a taste of what it feels like to have your own nation rebuilt. There is also a small plot point that has never been explored in any adaptation of the book (although it was alluded to in Spielberg’s version) concerning Martian dietary habits:Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins… let us suffice it to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal…Yes, that’s right: Wells’ Martians were also extraterrestrial vampires.It’s easy to say, looking back from almost a century later, such a thing could never happen today: those were simpler times (and much simpler people); in a media-savvy, information overloaded world like this one, nobody is that gullible.But ‘fess up: how many of you thought that little Falcon might have actually been in that “runaway” balloon?Read Cantril’s excerpt again. And watch the skies!
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