Daily Mail UK Feature by William Hazelgrove on the War of the Worlds Broadcast

The Real Carnage behind Orson Welles War of the Worlds Broadcast By William Elliott Hazelgrove

When I researched Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America, I found it hard to believe that intelligent people could believe Martians had landed on earth and were exterminating people with poison gas and heat rays. But in going through hundreds of newspapers and eyewitness accounts, I found out that through a perfect storm of events, millions of Americans did believe in fact the end of the world was at hand. Here is how it happened. At 8 PM Eastern on Halloween eve, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his seventeenth episode of Mercury Theatre on the Air from a CBS studio high up in the Manhattan skyline. The twenty-three-year-old proclaimed genius was putting on a radio play based on an old novel by HG Wells called War of the Worlds. It was a fantastic story about Martians coming to earth and incinerating and gassing humans with heat ray guns and tentacles pumping out poisonous gas. Who would believe such a story from a man who raced around Manhattan in an ambulance to get from one radio show to another on time and had made his mark as the voice of The Shadow. Martians…really? But people did believe, in fact, up to twelve million people listened and believed Martians had landed and were exterminating the human race. The entire country had been on edge from Hitler’s threat to invade the Sudetenland weeks before and touch off World War II. The depression had dragged on. Radio had grown with ninety percent of the population possessing a radio and Congress had just required all cars to have an AM radio with the AM Amplitude Act. The radio show Amos and Andy was so popular utility companies reported people didn’t flush toilets during the show and movies stopped to play the latest episode along with a show featuring a dummy who belched out theatrics named Charlie McCarthy. The Golden Age of radio was in full swing as BREAKING NEWS BULLETINS peppered the American people with news of imminent war, natural catastrophes, and horrific crimes. People were waiting for the other shoe to drop as autumn closed in on Halloween and leaves scraped down sidewalks. Mercury Theatre on the Air’s seventeenth show began on October 30, 1938, at 8 PM Eastern. Orson Welles used a revolutionary breaking news format for his radio show which was really a broadcast in a broadcast. The beginning starts with Ramon Roquello and his orchestra playing in the ballroom of a local New York hotel when suddenly the first breaking news bulletin pulls listeners to Grovers Mill New Jersey where a Martian cylinder has landed. When the cylinder opens the Martians begin incinerating people. Orson’s on the spot reporter, Frank Reddick, is vaporized on the air as Orson holds up his hands for quiet in the studio and begins six seconds of dead air. This is the terrifying heart of the broadcast where the third wall of radio is pierced, and radio itself becomes part of the story. Six seconds of dead air convinces the listeners they have just heard a man burned alive and die. Now the Martians are heading for New York and the rest of the country. By now, people have left their radios, jumped in their cars, subways, taxis, started running, hiding, anything to get away from the awful terror Orson Welles unleashed from his broadcast that used the real names of towns and streets. Police stations and CBS switchboards lit up with frantic callers halfway into the broadcast. CBS executives and the police try to gain entrance to the studio to stop the broadcast, but Orson’s partner, John Houseman, keeps the door locked so Orson can make it to the station break and finish unleashing the terror. The Manhattan switchboards are overwhelmed with calls and police stations are overrun by people with their belongings demanding gas masks and demanding to know where to escape the murdering Martians. Traffic becomes a demolition derby as motorists listen and drive seventy miles an hour through stoplights and don’t stop for the police. Suddenly, everyone was speeding while the 126 affiliates of CBS spread Orson Welles broadcast from coast to coast. A Hollywood executive and his wife driving in the Redwood Forest in California hear the broadcast and try to get back home to their children but run out of gas. They write later that all they could do was wait to be incinerated by the invading Martians. People run out of restaurants without paying their checks. Bartenders leave customers to drink as much as they want. A man just out of surgery jumps out of his hospital bed, dresses, and drives himself home bleeding all over his car. A woman who had a baby is left when all the nurses run into the hallway and start crying. Another woman who had just been married finds herself alone at her reception and has the band strike up the Charleston while she dances for a half hour. A man comes home to find his wife staring at a bottle of cyanide at her kitchen table saying she would rather poison herself than let the Martians get her. A man gets a call from his crying daughter at college and drives the hundred miles to her college in his Studebaker, takes the doors off his car, and packs it with crying girls, tying some down across the hood and the trunk, and then driving full speed back down the highway. A bus full of people in North Carolina stops and a man jumps on and tells the driver Martians are killing everyone, and it is the end of the world. The bus driver, in a fit of panic takes his passengers on the wildest ride of their lives while trying to get away from the Martians. A young actress in Manhattan runs out of her apartment and falls down the stairs and breaks her arm. The next day she is featured all over the nation in front page articles proclaiming her a war casualty. People run into churches and scream that it is the end of the world while panicked congregations run out. In theatres, people shout Martians are killing everyone and the theaters empty out in minutes. A ma who has had an affair confesses to his wife only to find out later the broadcast wasn’t real. People in Concrete Washington run for the mountains after a power failure occurs during the broadcast. People run out of apartment buildings with wet blankets over their heads while hospitals all over the country admit people for shock and heart attacks. Men in Grovers Mill New Jersey, where the Martians land, ride around with shotguns and shoot up a water tower they think is one of the murdering Martians. The military issues an alert stating Martians are not invading and that there is no danger. Operators across the country answer calls saying four words. There are no Martians. Phone lines clog all over the country as people try and call loved ones for last goodbyes. Panic spreads as ten million people from the Charlie McCarthy show begin twisting the dial when Eddie Nelson begins to sing, and they land on War of the Worlds. Many people don’t even hear the broadcast but are told by family members to run for their lives. A man drives through his garage door, then looks at his wife and says, “Well, at least we don’t have to fix it.” The big newspapers tell the tale the next morning. RADIO PLAY TERRIFIES NATION, RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION, FAKE RADIO WAR STIRS TERROR THROUGH US. The terror continues until the morning when the hoax is revealed. Orson and CBS receive death threats and lawsuits are launched while the FCC surveys the damage and considers censoring radio. A press conference is held where Orson Welles pleads innocent, but this does nothing to quell the anger at Welles and CBS. It takes the famous columnist, Dorthy Parker, in an editorial to proclaim Welles a genius for showing how gullible, uneducated, and ignorant Americans are to believe such a ridiculous radio show. The columnist proclaims Orson a hero for showing what Adolf Hitler could do with the radio. Orson comes out smelling like a rose with a contract from RKO to go to Hollywood where he will make the greatest film ever, Citizen Kane. Years later during a bond drive, Orson is attacked in a hotel lobby by a man screaming he would kill him if he ever saw him again. Later, it was found his wife had committed suicide on the night of the broadcast of the War of the Worlds. Many have said Orson Welles never intended to create the mass panic of War of the Worlds. Part magician, thespian, conman, genius, the War of the Worlds broadcast was Orson’s greatest sleight of hand. Of course he meant to do it.

Wall Street Journal Review of Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America

William Elliott Hazelgrove’s richly anecdotal “Dead Air” is the story of Welles’s landmark October 1938 radio broadcast and the nationwide panic that resulted. Welles’s “you are there” adaptation, crafted to imitate a breaking-news bulletin, sent a tremor of panic into listeners across the country who believed it to be a real report of a flying-saucer invasion. Mr. Hazelgrove has scoured regional newspapers of the time to provide a ground-level view of the hysteria that Welles’s radio drama instilled—on the night before Halloween, no less. According to “Dead Air,” police switchboards lighted up across the nation; in Indiana, a woman ran into a church screaming: “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world!” At a Harlem police station, “thirty people arrived with all their possessions packed and told officers they were ready to be evacuated.” In New Jersey, where the fictional invasion was supposedly taking place, some listeners loaded up their cars and took to the road. Mr. Hazelgrove has provided a granular history of this landmark in fake news, placing us inside CBS’s Studio One, where Welles orchestrated every detail to his exacting standards, then outside the studio doors, where confusion reigned until media stories of the stunt set minds at ease. 17 BOoks we read this week The caution and conscience of John Dickinson, spies in the library, spooky audiobooks for Halloween and more. Welles, for his part, worried that his budding career was over; he spent the days after the broadcast pondering potential jail time and lawsuits. The young auteur was widely censured for his dangerous gambit; an FCC investigation was floated but came to nothing. Hollywood was paying attention, however. Almost three years later, “Citizen Kane” was released, and Welles’s legendary career in film had begun. Mr. Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California

Hemingways Attic Hell and Glory in Cuba and The Writing of the Old Man and the Sea

PUBLICATION JULY 1 2025

Publishers Weekly Review of Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrifed America

In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove (Writing Gatsby) chronicles the mass hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens’ poisonous gas, and even one woman’s attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria’s scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that “Americans were essentially gullible morons” and earned Welles the national recognition he’d yearned for. It’s a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. (Nov.)

Revisiting the Titanic

The Hubris of Titanic Strikes Again

We have heard this story before. The five souls lost in a technological breakdown of our most sophisticated effort to explore the seafloor and gaze at the Titanic. Titanic was a perfect example of hubris gone bad. A maiden voyage of an unsinkable ship steaming into an icefield full speed with the thought that electric sliding doors would save everyone by sealing off the sea in the bulkheads. It was the cutting edge technology of its time much like our Space Shuttle. And yet, she strikes an iceberg and five compartments are ripped open and sealed her fate. Titanic quickly became the posterchild for tempting fate by declaring science had conquered risk. We thought we had learned our lesson with more lifeboats and taking heed of wireless ice warnings. But maybe not. After 1985 discovery of Titanic we decided we could tempt fate again and descend almost three miles to the floor of the ocean to look at the last time hubris killed almost 1600 people. But we were secure that our technology would allow us to go where people were not meant to and we could offer that not only to explorers and scientist but for the people who could afford a 250,000 price tag. The very rich onnce again would ride the waves much like in 1912 and for an enormous amount of money descend to that wreck of the Gilded Age. But we found once again our assumption that we had conqured the hostile seas was flawed. Five people bitterly proved that there are some places humans have no business going...like the bottom of the Atlantic to stare at another example of human folly. And the very same shock has now descended as people contemplate how the very richest among us the very brightest could have placed themselves in harms way. Maybe the lesson of Titanic has not been learned. That we will never conquer our enviorment. That there are some places where human gall and hubris will not mitigate the risks. Yes we have a come a long way but so had the people in 1912. A wireless set that could send out a signal 2000 miles. A ship with electric bulkhead doors that could seal up on the flick of a swtich. Just the size of Titanic prohibited the idea of her sinking. But she did sink in less than three hours after hitting the iceberg and she settled to the ocean floor. She should have been a monnument to the idea of tempting fate to declaring all battles won with the planet and human supremacy allowing us to go wherever we want. But of course we ignored the biggest lesson of Titanic. Never assume anything.

The New York Road Not Taken

I never did go to New York. A young writer just out of college I stayed in Chicago although I had been to New York many times. I even went for a full week and stayed in Brooklyn right before Christmas and slogged around from one agent to another dropping off horrible manuscripts until one annoyed agent burst out, "this is not how its done." Nothing came of my week in New York and I went back to Chicago to be the struggling writer. But I am haunted by the might of been of going to NY. I should have. I should have taken my shot in the big apple. If for nothing else to see what would have happened. It is where you go when you are young and want to make it as an artist. I knew that every time I went there. This is where I should be. All the big writers it seemed were launched there. The brat pack of McInerny Brett Eastion Ellis were born there. That was my group. My time. But I didnt make the leap. I stayed in Chicago and cranked out my prose and sent three queries a week to NY publishers but never followed them. The letters came back and rejected all that I had sent them. And then of course I got married and had kids and that door closed. The window to go was when I was broke, hungry and desperate. Which was of course the reason I didnt go even though I do remember considering it and talking about it with friends and family but I never did it. The closest I would come would be the week I stayed there and long weekends where I caroused with friends who had moved to NY. Thinking back I could have easily proposed I move in with them, but I never did. And when I finally broke through and had a two book deal with Bantam and a big advance and a big agent I went to NY and had dinner with my publlisher and agent in an upper east side restaurant and then went out and got smashed and the next day walked Manhattan on a Sunday and bought two first edition Fitzgerald collections of short stories and then flew back home. And now twenty five books later one could make the case I did the right thing by staying put and producing the work. Some say NY is so hard that the creativity dries up with the struggle to survive. Some are crushed by the Big Apple. Many return with their tale between their legs. But others, others are launched into the stratosphere from that hot melting pot of creativity that is New York and end up in the stars. You never know, but I wish I had found out.