Orson Welles
Few people remember now-a-days the panic that struck the United States on the evening of October 30, 1938, seventy-three years ago to the day. Orson Welles was the director of "The Mercury Theater On The Air" which was broadcast live by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS today). It is hard to imagine how a radio broadcast could cause so much havoc, but Welles' adaptation of H.G. Wells' "War Of The Worlds" was disguised as a program of dance music, inter-spaced with news bulletins of a Martian invasion. Like today's channel surfers, radio listeners would spin the radio dial looking for other programs when they got bored with what they were listening to. It was no wonder that most of them missed the introduction of the broadcast, and took the news-bulletins to be real, and many of them fled to the hills for protection. Keep in mind that the program was transmitted live from coast-to-coast. Well the rest as they say is history. In this edition of Endyr's Planet we are featuring the complete radio broadcast of 1938 just as America heard it on that faithful evening. Please click on the widget below to hear the complete broadcast of Orson Welles' "War Of The Worlds".
