How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. "Far fewer people heard the broadcast - and fewer still panicked - than most people believe today. some percentage of that 1 million people ran out of their homes." Just this past weekend, our colleagues at Radiolab devoted their very first live hour to a "deep dive into one of the most controversial moments in broadcasting history: Orson Welles' 1938 radio play about Martians invading New Jersey."Īccording to Radiolab, about 12 million people were listening when Welles' broadcast came on the air and "about 1 in every 12. Morning Edition, for instance, reported in 2005 that "listeners panicked, thinking the story was real." Many supposedly jumped in their cars to flee the area of the "invasion." OK, as far as we know that hasn't happened.īut we wanted to issue that faux alert because 75 years ago tonight, as our friend Korva Coleman pointed out on the NPR Newscast, Orson Welles and his troupe of radio actors interrupted the Columbia Broadcasting System's programming to "report" that our planet had been invaded.Įver since then, it's been accepted as fact that the broadcast scared the dickens out of many Americans.
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