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