ATTACK FROM MARS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 November 1938, Page 5

ATTACK FROM MARS

ASSUMED BY AMERICAN LISTENERS BROADCAST OF WELLS’ PLAY TAKEN AS REALITY PANIC IN MANY AREAS By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. NEW YORK, October 30. New York residents, who after their Sunday dinners had settled down to a quiet evening at home listening to the radio, were mildly surprised when a programme of dance music was interrupted by a news bulletin that an observatory professor had just noted a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars. Surprise became in turn amazement, consternation and panic, when bulletins followed relating the landing of a meteor in a nearby New Jersey town, killing 15,000 persons, and then the discovery that it was not a meteor, but a metal cylinder containing strange creatures from Mars, armed with death rays to fight the inhabitants of the earth. Hundreds of hysterical listeners rushed from their homes with wet towels and handkerchiefs over their faces to protect them from the gas raid against New York, which was believed to be imminent. Hundreds of. others sought refuge in the city parks. Many began moving the furniture from their houses. Thousands deluged the police, newspapers and radio stations with frightened inquiries regarding the best precautions to take against the death ray. The police, unable to reach the radio station by telephone, sent a squad car there, and discovered it was just a dramatisation of H. G. Wells’s fiction fantasy, “The War of the Worlds,” listeners having failed to hear or having misunderstood the preliminary explanation. The radio play, which was carried over the coast-to-coast Columbia network, initiated a regular radio programme with break-ins for the play s material just as there would be if an attack had actually occurred. MAD RUSH INTO ACTION Despite the fantastic nature of the reported occurrences, many ' listeners, probably because of the recent war scare in Europe, during which American programmes were frequently interrupted for the latest news bulletins, did not even question the authenticity of the reports, but madly rushed into action to save their lives. One telephone company reported that never before had there so many calls in one suburban area over a single hour. Hospitals and penal institutions reported that they turned off the radios because of panic among the inmates. One man telephoned to the police that his brother, who was ill in bed, heard the broadcast, leaped out, donned hat and coat over his pyjamas, jumped into a cap and vanished. Another caller' insisted that he had gone on to the roof, where he could see a huge smoke cloud from bombs drifting over the city.. The Associated Press reported that similar panics of a milder nature occurred throughout America. Coincidentally, a partial power failure in one suburban New Jersey district caused the lights to go dim an Acker for an hour after the broadcast, increasing the panic. The listeners’ mistake was due chiefly to the fact that the adapter of the play used an American instead of an English locale and also the names of actual American civil and military officials. THE END OF THE WORLD. The following illustrates the extent of the panic:— At Birmingham, Alabama, groups gathered in the streets and prayed. At Indianapolis a woman ran into a church screaming, “New York is destroyed. It is the end of the world. The services wtere dismissed immediat<At' Los Angeles the police were swamped with calls from persons with New Jersey relatives. At St Louis three inebriates heard the broadcast in a restaurant, and it took other patrons who. were not fooled 20 minutes to persuade them to get off their knees and cease praying. At Chicago the newspapers received numerous calls seeking a list of casualties. Many families at Baltimore moved \their belongings into the street in preparation for the evacuation of the city. A dozen families living in the same flat at Orange, New Jersey, loaded their possessions into cars and drove off to the mountains to escape the poison gas. Officials at the Columbia broadcast station, irked by the situation, heatedly maintained that it was four times announced during the play that it was all fictitious, but, as one Brooklyn policeman commented, “Those radio guys use highfalutin’ words nobody can understand.”