The War of the Worlds

Creator: Anonymous

Alien conspiracy theories have been around for a while now, with people accusing the American government of hiding secrets from the public, mainly at Area 51. But how would the public react if aliens really were confirmed to exist? I don’t mean the shaky footage released from the Pentagon; I mean explicit confirmation.

Luckily, we don’t have to guess. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles created what some journalists called “nationwide hysteria” with his radio show, Mercury Theatre on the Air. He was performing a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a science fiction novel written in 1898 where Martian aliens invade Earth. His adaptation included fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey, describing the aliens as “large as a bear” and “[glistening] like wet leather.” The alleged Martians had walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at humans, even annihilating a force of 7,000 National Guardsmen along the way.

An illustration of a Martian war machine, from a 1906 version of The War of the Worlds.

Of course, none of this was really happening, but Welles’s actors certainly made it seem like it was. Among them was actor Kenneth Delmar, who acted as “the Secretary of the Interior” and described the government’s efforts to combat the “Martians”. Conveniently, Delmar was known for his accurate impressions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The following morning, fittingly on Halloween, newspapers all across the country displayed the same headlines. Welles had created nationwide panic.

Welles had heard reports of mass stampedes, suicides, and death threats. He said, “If I’d planned to wreck my career, I couldn’t have gone about it better.”

Journalists bombarded Welles with questions, although most of them were essentially the same thing. Did he know that his broadcast would cause such hysteria? Did he intend to fool the public as much as he did?

At the time of recording, Welles definitely did not expect such an extreme reaction. However, as the years went by, Welles playfully said that he knew exactly what he was doing. He did have a hope to at least fool some listeners, supposedly “in order to teach them a lesson about not believing whatever they heard over the radio.” But they never intended to actually deceive anyone, denying it even long after it would have any legal risk. They even had doubts about whether the broadcast would be listened to in the first place. In the end, though, it had caused people to flee their homes and fear for their lives.

What does this say about the public? We’d like to think that we know better now, but there really isn’t much to support that claim. If aliens really were discovered and the government was truly hiding it, they’d probably be making the right decision by covering it up. All it would do is cause more chaos than needed; the public is clearly not reliable with extreme reactions.

Copyright © 2020 LOGICAL Minds. All rights reserved.