When Mars Attacked New Jersey: Halloween Night 1938

 

        Explosions shake the earth.  A fiery object falls from the sky and crashes through the roof of a farmhouse.  Flames leap skyward as a small New Jersey town burns.

On the radio a newsflash interrupts a broadcast of popular dance music with an urgent bulletin.  It is 8 pm on October 30, 1938--the night before Halloween.

The news bulletin reports, “Professor Farrell of Mount Jenning Observatory has detected explosions on the surface of Mars,” and then abruptly switches back to playing orchestral dance tunes.  

But within moments, listeners to WCBS Radio, the northeast’s largest and most powerful station at the time, are informed that a large meteor has crashed into the small town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey.

Around 9 pm the radio broadcast cuts to a reporter live on the scene in Grover’s Mill who frantically retracts his previous statement and says that it was not a meteor which crashed in town, but rather it had been several large cylindrical metal objects from the planet Mars that had landed in farmer’s fields around the small rural town.

“It’s indescribable; it’s so awful,” the reporter screamed across the radio airwaves, “their eyes are black and gleam like a serpent’s.”

The Martians are depicted as walking around in large metallic war machines with laser-like weapons that the reporter described as   “heat-rays” laying waste to everything that crossed their path.  

A full scale battle between 7,000 New Jersey National Guardsmen and hundreds of hostile Martian invaders in the fields around Grover’s Mill is described over the WCBS airwaves to an estimated 12 million listeners across the New York City metropolitan area.  

Grover’s Mill is a small community, part of West Windsor Township located in Mercer County, New Jersey, a couple miles outside of Princeton.  

What those 12 million listeners across the United States were actually listening to was a radio stage play produced and performed by famed actor, producer and director Orson Welles.

Welles, who was only twenty-three at the time and had not yet gained immortal fame for his work on legendary films such as Casablanca and Citizen Kane was desperately trying to boost ratings for his syndicated radio entertainment program, The Mercury Theater Show, and although he wanted his Halloween program to at least sound believable to his listening audience, prior to the broadcast Welles said he feared that the Halloween production would, “bore people and put them to sleep.”

Radio Broadcast of War of the Worlds Complete with Orchestra (1938)

        Welles, for the listening entertainment of his radio audience, was broadcasting a modernization of H.G. Wells sci-fi classic novel War of the Worlds.  And even though, prior to the 8 pm broadcast of the show the CBS radio station had announced that the following was a production by, “Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater depicting War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells”, many listeners either tuned in after the disclaimer was broadcast or simply neglected to pay attention to the disclaimer at all, and therefore believed that what they were hearing was actually real!

As it turned out, Orson Welles' modernization of War of the Worlds definitely did not put anyone who heard it to sleep as he had originally feared.

Some researchers estimate that out of the 12 million listeners who heard the War of the Worlds broadcast that night on either WCBS in the metro-New York area or on one of its affiliated syndicates across the United States, that fully ten percent of those listeners (or an astonishing 1.2 million people!) actually believed that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians!

The next day, particularly in New York, newspapers reported mass panic across the area over the supposed Martian invasion.

Stampedes of panicked, screaming New Yorkers were reported as having been running through the streets of Manhattan for at least four hours on Halloween night 1938.  It was said that there were mass suicides all across the northeast over fears of an impending Martian conquest of the United States.

That night, in small towns across New Jersey, citizens rushed outside and stared skywards on the lookout for flaming cylindrical crafts plummeting to the earth from Mars as described in the radio broadcast.  Armed civilians roamed the streets on Halloween night, it was reported, prepared to defend their homes, their families and themselves from invading Martians.

In New Jersey, ground zero for the supposed Martian invasion, National Guardsmen that night reported for duty at bases all across the state wanting to know where they would be ordered to deploy to fight the Martians.

Police departments were besieged by panicked callers all night long who mistook any loud sound they heard for an explosion or misidentified any lights they saw in the night sky as invading Martian spacecraft.  The Trenton, New Jersey police department, not that distant from Grover’s Mill itself, fielded no less than 2,000 emergency phone calls regarding attacks about Martians that night!

Some towns on the east coast, most notably Providence, Rhode Island, ordered that all lights be turned off and that the city be placed under blackout conditions so that it would be more difficult for the Martians to spot as they descended from outer space.

Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lasted for approximately four hours on the night of October 30-31, 1938.  In the middle of the broadcast there was an intermission, during which time, another disclaimer stating that the broadcast was only an updated rendering of H.G. Wells' classic novel War of the Worlds was aired.  But by then the damage had been done and rumors regarding the truth behind the Martian attack on New Jersey were spreading like wildfire.

Years later a resident of Grover’s Mill who was only eight years old at the time of the broadcast would recall that, “droves of people came down in their cars to try and see what the Martians looked like, while other people clogged the roads trying to get out of town.” (Asbury Park Press 10/30/2016).

Of course, not all listeners were fooled, and many did actually listen to the disclaimers that were aired both before and during the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and realized right from the beginning that the whole thing was simply an evening’s Halloween entertainment.

But at a time when radio was on the cutting edge of news broadcast technology and when American’s were just getting used to hearing live reports of events happening in real time being broadcast straight into their living rooms such as the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937 or the Great Hurricane of the northeast earlier in 1938, it is no wonder that many were panicked by the seeming authenticity of Welles’ radio program.

Newspaper Reporters Grill Welles' over his Radio Broadcast

Of course, newspaper editors seeking to prove that they were a more reliable and trustworthy news source than their upstart radio competitors wasted no time in slamming Orson Welles’ and CBS for the chaos and panic that their program caused.

On October 31, 1938 the headline in The New York Daily News blared “Fake Radio War Stirs Terror Through U.S”; the Boston Globe reported that a, “fake radio play had terrified the nation,” and the New York Herald Examiner’s headline read: RADIO FAKE SCARES NATION!

On and on, all across the United States, but especially in New York and New Jersey, newspapers execrated Orson Welles in particular, and radio news broadcasts in general, as irresponsible, unreliable, fake and phony frauds.   

In fact, today, many historians question whether the War of the Worlds hoax of Halloween 1938 actually generated as much panic across the eastern seaboard as history remembers, or if it was simply a slander campaign conducted by newspaper editors against the burgeoning industry of radio broadcast, which depicted the reaction to the War of the Worlds hoax as much more panic-stricken and fearful than it actually was.

Given over eighty years of hindsight it is difficult to tell how believable and fear inducing Orson Welles radio re-creation of the War of the Worlds truly was for the majority of those who heard it on Halloween night in 1938.

Whatever the truth is behind the whole thing this much is certain.  The night that Martians supposedly landed in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, Halloween night 1938, definitely is memorable.  Today, in Grover’s Mill a plaque stands commemorating that one odd and singular event from so long ago that made a small, rural town in New Jersey famous, if only for a night, as the place where Martians attacked the Garden State.