The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is the October 30, 1938 broadcast of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, directed by and starring Orson Welles, adapting H. G. Wells's novel of a Martian invasion as a sequence of simulated live news bulletins interrupting a fictional dance-music program. Some listeners who tuned in after the broadcast's opening announcement mistook the dramatization for real news of an actual invasion, and newspaper reports the following days described widespread panic, though later scholarship has argued that contemporary press accounts significantly exaggerated the scale and severity of that panic. The broadcast is widely regarded as a landmark demonstration of radio's persuasive power as a medium and remains one of the most famous single broadcasts in the history of American radio.