Selects: The Great War of the Worlds Panic Myth
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Hi there everyone, it's me Josh and for this week's Select I've chosen our episode on the War of the Worlds myth from November 2020. One of the great myths of the 20th century is that Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast set off a mass panic in the United States as rubes from all corners of the country grabbed their shotguns and ran senselessly through the streets and prayed death would be swift. Well it turns out America's less gullible than that.

Instead, we're gullible about the idea that we're gullible. Think about that one as you enjoy this episode. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. It's just the two of us batching it up without Jerry. Oh, man. I think Jerry's inclusion, we're still batching it up. How do you mean?

I mean, does she really ruin the batch scene for us? Sure. She's very maternal and judgy. That's true. Oh. Yeah. You were headed down a kind road for a second. I was. With Jerry? Yeah. Yeah.

That doesn't sound like me. So for all of you who are just tuning in to the first time, welcome. This is Stuff You Should Know. To everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times, welcome. This is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, we never do that. Some shows do that. What, they welcome new listeners? Yeah, and kind of say what they do. I mean, we've literally never done that.

That's fine. That's lame. Hi, we're... Who does that? Any friends of ours? Yeah, I mean, the guys on The Flophouse, they've been podcasting as long as we have, and every single episode they say who they are and what they do. Oh, okay. Well, do you want to do that this one time? Well, I'm Chuck Bryant, and this is Josh Clark, and this is a podcast where we explain things in a lighthearted and fun and sometimes even funny way. I disagree with all of that. Oh, boy. Okay.

So what we're going to talk about today, because I think we need to talk about this one in a slightly somber tone, Chuck. It's a blemish in the history of America, really, if you think about it.

Well, yeah. And you know what? I've never actually had listened to it until this week. Same here. And it's a lot of fun to actually listen to. I would recommend it. Yeah, especially in a dark room where that's all you're concentrating on, not like a second screen kind of thing, like where you're really listening to this radio play. Yeah, and try and put yourself there a little bit, like what it must have been like.

in, well, not 1898. That's when the book came out. Yeah. But in 1938, I mean, what, 40 years later, just in that 40-year stretch, I mean, think about the difference between

1980 and 2020, not ridiculously different periods. It's just gotten crappier. 1898, exactly. Oh, yeah, it's gone downhill. And don't think that had nothing to do with Reagan's election in 1980. But the difference between 1898 and 1938 are, it's just like two different worlds, man. Two different worlds, comma, war of the. Yeah.

So I guess we should start with the book written by the great H.G. Wells. It was the very first alien invasion story to hit the bookshelves. And that's a pretty remarkable thing. It was a serialized thing at first in magazines and Pearsons in the UK and then Cosmo here in the US. And then they finally slapped all those serialized versions together into a book and it sold pretty well.

Yeah, it's never been on a print since that first edition in 1898. That's pretty respectable. I expect as much for our book as well. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being published in 40 years. Or 100 years. Yeah, 140 years. Yeah, well, let's hope. So in this book, and like you said, first alien invasion story ever published, which is, you know,

Just the fact that this is a completely new premise, new conceit made it, you know, kind of scary. But in the book, H.G. Wells describes like this alien invasion. And part of the thing that was so scary about it, at least at the time, from what I can gather, is that it was about like the breakdown of society. And we're talking like Victorian era England society.

society where like rigid social rules and customs and mores and guidance for all behavior at all times was like the norm. So the idea of that breaking down was scary on in and of itself. I think that made the book kind of scary to contemporary readers.

Would that be right? Readers back then. And that was one big theme that Wells explored. Another one that he explored in that, at least I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on it, said that the main point of this, the main subtext was learning how humans' dominion over animals can be

You know, cruel and thoughtless because all of a sudden with these alien invaders who were just wiping us off the map, we were like, you know, domesticated animals to them. Yeah. So the shoe was on the other hoof. And sure, it caused or at least it was intended to cause people to take kind of a hard look.

at a pre-animal farm to make sort of a social statement about how he treated animals. And so that was in 1898. If you flash forward to Orson Welles in his Mercury Theater version, this is, like you said, we're right in the middle or we're in the Great Depression and we're headed towards war. And it's sort of an uneasy feeling in the United States as a whole. So he thought, perfect time to go in there

put a fresh coat of paint on this thing and scare the bejeebus out of the American public by doing something that they had never heard before, which was sort of a verite-style production.

Yeah, and I mean, it's easy to overlook today, but radio was still rather new at the time in 1938. It was like a cutting-edge technological medium, and it was not fully defined. So the idea of creating this, I guess, hoax broadcast is the best you can call it. This fictionalized version that was...

What would you call it, man? I hate that word so much. I know. It's really taken on a bad tang here lately. Yeah, I mean, it's verite. It's, you know, a faux documentary style thing that no one had ever heard. Like, there's no way when people heard this, they would think, oh, this is, you know, I know Christopher Guest. This is sort of a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch.

I know what's going on here. I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere. I know it's not real. Yeah. So they weren't prepared for this in 1938 when Orson Welles, who was already a big name in radio as the voice of The Shadow, which was a big hit, and his Mercury Theater was pretty well respected at the time. Yeah.

Yeah, it was like a live stage theater. So they'd only had this show for a few months by the time October 1938 rolled around. But their whole jam was...

They were on CBS, and CBS had them do hour-long radio adaptations of classic novels like Treasure Island. They did Around the World in 80 Days. And so since it was October, they wanted to do something spooky around Halloween. Something not boring. Yeah. So they were like, well, what's the most boring, scary book there is? And they said H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. So they decided to adapt it.

it? Yeah, so they got together. They're rehearsing. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a sec, but there wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and crew and the production group that thought it was going to be awesome because I think probably because they had never done anything like this. They had never heard anything like this. And they thought, is this even going to be any good in a couple of different

in the production went to a radio critic ahead of time. It's like, thanks a lot. And they said, by the way, this is going to be a real stinker.

They said apparently two different people in the production said that this will put everyone to sleep. And I don't have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't have any frame of reference to judge it against because no one had done this before. From what I can gather, originally it was going to be really bad and really terrible. And the production and the cast and crew knew this. They knew that they were marching toward success.

embarrassment with the early versions of the script. Yeah, so Orson, he's sort of distracted. He's got a stage production going on. He's got his partner in his group, the great John Houseman, who you all know from The Paper Chase, kind of a legendary actor. He was one of his original partners. And he got together with Howard, is it Koch? I never know if it's going to be a Koch or a Koch.

Doesn't matter. All right. K-O-C-H. And he was the writer who was adapting the novel. And they were like, we got to make this thing better. And one thing I think we can do, this was Hausman talking. I'm not going to do a John Hausman, but everyone knows how he sounds. Right when I came across John Hausman being involved, I was like, I can't wait. I don't even remember. I mean, he was just very serious and sort of all I can think of is paper chase. And what was the TV commercial? Was it?

I want to say it was like Schwab or Merrill Lynch. I think it might have been Merrill Lynch, maybe. I don't know. But one of those finance firms he did, he voiced for. Well, yeah, he was very famous for having a very high-pitched, squeaky falsetto voice. And he talked very, very fast. And actually, I know who it was. It was FedEx and Dunkin' Donuts that he was well-known for. That's right. He was the time to make the donuts guy. Right. With the mustache. So, Hausman and Koch Coke went in there and he

He said one of the things we should do probably to make this a little more scary and a little more believable that it's an actual broadcast is time passes in the book, and we can't do that here. So let's just get rid of all that stuff so it gives the appearance that it's going down right now.

Yeah, that was enormously, a huge change. And I don't know if he did that to help the pacing move a little faster or what. But that would pan out to be a really important difference in the original script overall.

that Howard Kay turned in and the one that they ended up doing. And then even beyond that, some of the other changes came just hours before broadcast because apparently if you worked with Orson Welles, you should be on the lookout for him to come in at the last minute and be like, all the stuff we've been practicing for a week or two, forget all of that. We're doing this instead. And part of that from what I can tell is that he was trying to

shake up the actors, shake them out of whatever complacency they'd worked themselves into with rehearsal, and to get this rawr,

more terrified performance and uh apparently it worked i mean i can't imagine i didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that i would have loved to have compared you know the week before to you know the actual broadcast but everyone delivered these really great um really great performances and they really nailed by showtime um the realism in a lot of ways not just in the performances um

But also in just little details, like they, you know, they were doing a mock radio program, which we'll talk about a little more in detail in a second. But they were pretending to have news bulletins break in. So they were doing the things that news bulletins did. And one of the things that stuck out to me was –

And one of the eyewitnesses, so it's an actor, but one of the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news reporter on the scene. And they start to talk and the news reporter goes, can you speak more loudly and move into the microphone, please? And I think the actor actually says, how's that? And the guy repeats himself. And then the actor has to repeat himself what he was originally saying. So it has that veneer of...

you know, authenticity just from little details like that, that, you know, really it stood out to me when I was listening for him. But if you're, if you're not listening for him, you just, it makes you buy into the whole thing that much more. Yeah. And the other big change that Wells brought along was stretching out the first two halves of the thing

such that it went past, it went 40 minutes. And radio at the time, every 30 minutes, like on the half hour, they would check in with a station ID check and

And listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed to this station break every 30 minutes. And so when 10 minutes passed, the half hour go by and there ain't no station break. That really makes people kind of buy in to what they're listening to as possibly real. And then you add to the fact that there were no sponsors for this show. Yeah. So they weren't cutting to a –

Casper or MeUndies ads, all of a sudden I couldn't remember any sponsor. Can you imagine John Hausman saying, made with Modal?

No, I thought it would be made with Modal. That's right. That's a much better houseman. I had something in my throat. So, yeah, there were no sponsors. So basically it really came across as something that was super, super realistic sounding. Right. So all that is to say that they had really – by the time this broadcast aired –

at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30th, 1938. They were not going to be the laughingstock, and this is not going to be embarrassing. It was going to be pretty awesome, actually. Should we take a break? I think so, Chuck, and then we'll come back and we will reveal the broadcast after this. Welcome to Stonish and Noah. Welcome to Stonish and Noah.

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Okay, so we've reached showtime, airtime, 8 p.m. Sunday, October 30th, 1938.

Mercury Theater on the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. And at the very beginning, it's introduced as much. There's an announcer who says that. I think that's lost probably to time somewhat.

Because everyone probably thinks that they just tried to trick everyone. But no, they actually introduced it as what they're doing. You know, this is a radio place one year in the future. Right. Right. And yeah, Orson Welles. So it's introduced by an announcer. Orson Welles comes in, does the introductory essay. And then they did something really smart and interesting, especially for the time.

They went to a musical program that was supposedly being broadcast from the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza. So if you were just tuning in right then, you would have no idea that this was Mercury Theater on the air. You would have no idea that this was a teleplay. You would think that you were listening to something that was pretty regularly broadcast, which was live music at some like ballroom in a hotel somewhere in New York, and

that they set up like a radio transmitter to transmit out over the radio. That was pretty frequent. But this was part of the show. Like if you hadn't paused it, that is, right? Right, exactly. But that was a huge part of the show because that lulled listeners into kind of complacency and listeners who tuned in late and missed that introduction thought that this is what they were listening to. And then the first news bulletin hits.

Yeah, and that's where things start to get really interesting. They break in, you know, one of these interrupt your previously scheduled programs kind of things. Right, right. And they come in with these bulletins, but they're not super long at first because they treat it kind of how it would be in real life. It's just sort of a breaking story. Something's going together. It was fairly obtuse. And they didn't like, you know, say Martians are attacking us right now, everyone, from the get-go. Right.

You sort of left it up to the listener to kind of piece it together little by little. They would go back to the Meridian Room for a bit. And it wasn't for very long because they couldn't waste too much time. But it was long enough. It wasn't for like 10 seconds. They did it for like a minute, minute and a half. Right. It made it seem right then like that was what you were listening to, that that was the program and the bulletin was in fact the bulletin rather than the opposite being true. Yeah. So eventually you start to piece together what's going on and you have –

And this attack in New Jersey, of all places, and Princeton University, they had like a Princeton astronomer on, they have government officials, and they kind of dole it out little by little until about the 17 minute, 17 and a half minute mark.

And then that's when it really kind of gets super scary and people really see the full picture of what's going on. So, Chuck, I feel like we should read a little bit of the script. There's this one part starting about the 1730 minute mark, I think you said, where they, as I like to say, they tore the lid off the sucker. Do you want to be announcer or Phillips? I'll be the announcer. All right. OK, but I want you to do Phillips as Sammy Davis Jr.,

So here's the announcer. Wait, hold on. I'm getting on my tap shoes. Okay. Okay. You ready, Candyman? Uh-huh. Sure, babe.

I'm not going to do it that way. Okay, all right. So let me give you a little bit of background real quick. So these news bulletins up to this point have basically said there's some weird thing that landed. They thought it was a meteorite at first that landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. And then later bulletins said that, oh, actually, there's some weird tentacle, like weird things emerging from this thing we thought was a meteorite. So now we're back at Grovers Mill. So I'm the announcer. Mm-hmm.

We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what's happening on the Wilmoth farm, Grover's Mill, New Jersey. And that was kind of like they were breaking in to let you know that. And then they go back to more piano for some reason. And then we now return you to Carl Phillips at Grover's Mill. Ladies and gentlemen, am I on? Am I on? Ladies and gentlemen, here I am back of a stone wall that adjoins Mr. Wilmoth's garden. From here, I get a sweep of the whole scene.

I'll give you every detail as long as I can talk, as long as I can see. More state police have arrived. They're drawing up a cordon in front of the pit, about 30 of them. No need to push the crowd back now. They're willing to keep their distance. The captain is conferring with someone. We can't quite see who.

Oh yes, I believe it's a Professor Pearson. Yes, it is. Now they've parted. The professor moves around one side studying the object while the captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I can see it now. It's a white handkerchief tied to a pole, a flag of truce. If those creatures know what that means, what anything means. Wait! Something's happening!

You can cut in any time. Who can take a rainbow? Oh, wait. Sorry. A hump shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on. Good Lord, they're turning into flame. Oh, God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Now the whole field's caught fire. The woods, the barns, the gas tanks of automobiles are spreading everywhere. It's coming this way, about 20 yards to my right. Very nice. And scene. Okay. That was great, Chuck. So you mentioned, or I should say Phillips, the reporter on the scene mentioned Professor Pearson. And he ends up being the main character.

And he's an astronomer that's interviewed earlier on, and he's on this scene as it happens. And the program just keeps going like that. Like, there's another, there's a main announcer who I played, I thought, rather well. Great job. Thank you. And you have quite a future as a Foley artist, if I may say so. Thank you very much. I've been practicing. You want to hear my machine gun? I've been doing that one since I was like six. All right. How about walking through the forest?

All right, now how about a good punch to the face? Oh, wow. That was good. Thank you. I punched myself in the face. Oh, okay. I'm dedicated. That's how dedicated to the art of foley that I am. Oh, man.

So the announcer just keeps bringing in more and more news as this thing goes on and unfolds of like, now these things aren't just in New Jersey, they're in Chicago, they're like out West, they're starting to invade everywhere and they're killing people left and right. You said there was a government official that reads the statement. It's actually that they say that it's the secretary of the interior, which I thought was particularly genius because, I mean,

Probably not that many people were familiar with the Secretary of the Interior. Yeah, totally. Harold Ickes. Yeah. But they had him sound like FDR so that it would kind of play on everyone's, I guess, unconscious. Or I'm sure there were people who were like, that sounds just like FDR. But at the very least, it would kind of evoke that government authority, the reality of like a government figure, you know?

Yeah. So meanwhile, on the other stations, there's one that's running opposite, which is a really, really popular radio show at the time, probably the most popular, Chase and Sanborn Hour, which had the very, very famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy. And we talked about that on our ventriloquism episode. Remember that they started out on radio. Yeah, which is...

I don't even know why they would even bother with the dummy part. Just do two voices. You wouldn't even have to wear – that's what he did. You wouldn't even have to wear pants. No. No. You'd be naked from the waist down. Just sit around in your spaghetti-stained undershirt and, yeah, naked from the waist down, maybe some socks, doing a couple voices. That's right. There's your contract, Edgar Bergen. What do you think about that, Charlie? Oh, don't get me started. Yeah.

Like, that's it. I could be a famous ventriloquist on the radio. You just did it. I think Hollywood's going to come a-calling. But the real sort of interesting factoid here, I think, is that people were channel surfing back then when you cut to commercial, just like we used to do when we didn't have pause buttons and fast-forward buttons and everything.

What is this pause button you keep mentioning? I've never heard of this. You've never paused television? No. Wow. You need to catch up. I don't believe I've ever paused anything in my life. It's funny. We were, Emily and I have been watching that German sci-fi series Dark.

which is very challenging to follow. And there's a lot of rewinding, like, wait, wait, who is that? What did they just say? And we rewind it a bit and do that again. Or, you know, of course, I got to go to the bathroom. Let me just pause it. And I was thinking about how not too long ago,

You just, if you miss something, you missed it. You just peed the couch. Or you peed yourself on the couch, yeah. There was no clear, like, let me go back and clear this up. It's like, what did he say? I have no idea. Guess we'll never know. There's no internet to even look it up.

I guess I should probably stop watching this show altogether. You go walk up to the VCR and press eject. But at any rate, back then, let's say Charlie McCarthy goes to break. I know, word from Mark Bonser. And they flip it over to War of the Worlds at this point in the broadcast when the S is hitting the fan. And it's going to scare the pants off of people in 1938. Yeah.

Well, yeah, even more than I think that they would have dialed over even before that. So they might have caught like a news bulletin and then maybe some of that music from the Meridian Room. So it really would have caught them. And there were supposedly a substantial number of people who did dial over and were like, wait, wait, what? What is going on here? And now we come to the reaction, the response. Because if you picked up the paper the next day in America –

just about anywhere in any major city, you're going to find huge blaring headlines like the one that the New York Daily News printed in tall, bold letters. Fake radio war stirs terror through the U.S. Yeah, stories of shock and hysteria, stories of people taking their own life, stories of people dying from heart attacks. The AP said a man in Pittsburgh found his wife with poison in her hand.

and said, I'm going to, I'd rather die this way than like that. And, you know, talking to Wells afterward in the aftermath of this, he apologizes publicly, says they didn't intend to do this. We had, we didn't know it was going to cause a panic. And then, you know, if you look over the years, more interviews, it sort of seems like Wells is a little more like

You know, we thought it would be pretty fun to scare people. And I didn't know if it was going to cause a panic, but we definitely intended it to have this effect on people. Whereas Hausman and Koch were like, no, we really didn't mean it. So it was sort of conflicting reports from the production on what they thought was going to be the result.

Right. And I read an interview with John Landis, the great director who worked with Wells on a project that never got made toward the end of Wells' life. And he didn't say that Wells admitted to him that he meant to, but he got to know him enough that he was like, yes. If you watch this initial press conference where he's apologizing because the whole country was ripped apart in chaos and were running wild in the streets and like nearly rioted because of his broadcasts,

He is not at all. He's just as happy as a lark that this all happened. Of course. Even though he's pretending to apologize. And he said that was just, this is Orson Welles. Did you just say apologize?

It's a new version I'm testing out. I like it. It's good. It's kind of, yeah. It's at least as good as Apologize. So this was just a couple of days in the news cycle. It wasn't the biggest deal in the world, even though it was fairly sensational news.

Story writing for newspapers. And it might have just gone that way had it not been for a Princeton University social psychologist a couple of years later named Hadley Cantrell.

And Cantrell released a book on the real effects of this thing and basically said that people were praying, crying. They were frantically trying to escape death from the Martians. Six million people listened to this thing, and at least one-sixth of them were frightened or disturbed. And I have the evidence right here.

Yeah. And the evidence that he had was based on a series of interviews with 135 people. Almost all of them were in New Jersey, which remember, that's where the crux of the invasion and destruction being described took place because Grovers Mill, New Jersey, is actually a real town in Jersey. Yeah.

So he went to Jersey because he was in Princeton. So he went where he was and interviewed 135 people. And he said, were you scared by this broadcast? Yeah.

and the participant would say, yes, and he'd say, you're in my study. And he'd ask the next one, were you scared? Were you scared by this broadcast? And they'd say, no. He'd be like, you're not in the study. That's crazy. And so, yeah, he said in the methodology that he selected 100 out of the 135 because they had been scared by the broadcast. And so he took these interviews of people in New Jersey and he extrapolated it to the rest of the country. And he said...

yep, this is real. This is a really great example of people being fooled into terror and panic. And, you know, the response is when this happens, like we saw after the War of the Worlds broadcast, people will run out into the street. They will flee the city. They will call their friends and neighbors. They may attempt suicide. They may die of a heart attack.

Like the New York Times reported, 20 or so people in New York alone needed to be treated for shock and hysteria. This is what happens when somebody toys with the public trust. And yeah, it's pretty nuts.

That's the end. Yeah. That was the end of Hadley's book. Right. Yeah, not the end of this episode. So this is what, this specific study is what

If you've ever taken a mass media or a communications college class, you've probably studied War of the Worlds largely because of this study basically. It might have just come and gone if it weren't for this academic paper that were put out. And all of a sudden for decades and decades, it's reported on as like a cautionary tale almost of responsibility in media, even fictional media.

And as recently as 2013, PBS American Experience documentary said this was the case. Our old pals at Radiolab in 2008 did an episode about this where that was the case. But there were a few problems with this paper beyond the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared New Jersey people.

to go in there and give their report was they found up, they ended up finding real ratings for this thing. And not a ton of people even heard it, it turns out. Right, so his six million estimate was way off. Way, way, way off. They did a survey during the program that said 2% of respondents said

said that they were listening and some markets like big cities like Boston even preempted this thing for local programming. So it wasn't a ton of people. It wasn't a ton of people being scared and like just literally losing their minds with fear and panic. And things swing so far the other way that it, the, the,

narrative became, you know what? No one was really scared at all. And what newspapers really did was they put out hit pieces on a competing medium like radio and how you shouldn't trust it anymore. So what happened over the last...

Within sometime within the 21st century, sometime in the 2010s, the myth that America lost its mind, went bonkers and ran wild in the street because they were panicked by the War of the Worlds broadcast was shown to be a myth that it didn't happen. And that was the new understanding for a little while, just a few years until another guy came along and said, you know what, we're going to do this.

Actually, both are right and both are wrong in a lot of ways. Should we take a break and talk about the truth always being somewhere in the middle? Mm-hmm. Welcome to Stonish and Noir. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.

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All right. I said the truth is always somewhere in between. That's not always the case with everything in life, obviously. But that's a saying for a reason. And that definitely seems to be the case in this case with a gentleman named A. Brad Schwartz. He's probably the leading War of the Worlds scholar. And he went back and he went and investigated –

The letters and the cables that came in, they were at the University of Michigan archives. And these are the letters that actually came in to Wells and the Mercury Theater in the days after the broadcast. And what he contends, and I agree, is that this is what you need to be reading is what people were really thinking at the time that weren't just cherry picked in the town where that got attacked in New Jersey, who were obviously they were going to be freaked out more than anyone in the country.

Right. So one of the things that he points out is, you know, everybody been, you know, since around 2010 or maybe a little earlier, everyone had been wailing on Hadley Cantrell for his terrible, terrible methodology. But.

The revisionists were also kind of doing the same thing. They were making all sorts of suppositions, like the idea that the newspapers had basically conspired to target radio, its rival, to show how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be trusted with the news. That it was really newspapers that should be handling the news. And maybe you can listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio, but that's about it. That that was all supposition. That was as much supposition as...

Hadley Cantrill extrapolated his findings in New Jersey to the rest of the country. And A. Brad Schwartz, one of the reasons I think he's doing a good job is because he's saying, no, if you actually sit down and read these letters and these cables that were coming in in the days after, they really probably paint the most accurate picture anyone's ever found to this point of how it was actually received. Like you can see

almost in real time at the time, what people were saying about this in their letters to Orson Welles and to the Mercury Theater on the air. Yeah, and it was a range of feelings. It was everything from people who said, you know what, we knew it wasn't real, but it was really scary and super awesome. I don't know if they said things like super awesome. He said that a number of people wrote in who wrote,

actually made fun of the people who fell for it and said that, you know, they're gullible, they're rubes. And one writer even said they should be sterilized and disenfranchised. Yeah, because they'd shown that in an actual emergency, they were undependable. They would just run around like chickens with their heads cut off in the streets.

Yeah, and Swartz sort of draws a line between what was going on back then to us today with this whole fake news, hoax, garbage that we have to listen to day in and day out. And basically said this was the first viral phenomenon in media was the War of the Worlds broadcast. And it was a mixed bag. Some people loved it. Some people did think it was real and panicked. But it certainly was not this widespread thing.

across the country like you were talking about. Yeah, he said less than a quarter of the letters described what he would consider panic, but even most of those weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter. A lot of them were thrilled. Like, you got me.

Right. But he did say that, yes, there are cases that you see in these letters and cables that describe people panicking. So that did happen in some cases. Most of it seems to have been isolated in New Jersey. So if Hadley Cantrell had not extrapolated his findings—

and had interviewed more people who had different reactions to the broadcast. But if it had just been like an investigation into the reaction in New Jersey, that study or that book would have been much more useful. But the fact is he just screwed the methodology up so badly that it's basically useless.

But he wasn't, he didn't make up the panic that he described necessarily. He may have exaggerated it. Who knows? But it did, it does seem to have actually happened in some cases, but it was sporadic, few and far between, certainly not organized and certainly not seen across the rest of the country like it was reported on by the papers the next day. Yeah, which sort of leads us to the story of the poor pulses of Manhattan. This Manhattan couple,

They did fall for it. They were very scared. Apparently, as the story goes, they got their last $6 together and got on a train to get the heck out of New York.

assuming not going west into New Jersey. They went north toward Connecticut, got as far as they could on what little money they had, get off the train. And, you know, there's a bunch of other passengers that they're telling, you know, they're warning everybody of what's happened. Right. And this one guy,

there goes over and gets the and i just pictured this in the movie it's like no one's listening to this guy and he he picks up the newspaper basically the tv guide it's like it's the dunkin donuts guy he says hey guys it says right here uh war of the worlds broadcast is supposed to be on at that hour um like it just says right here in the newspaper it's a it's a radio play everyone no one right everyone no nobody okay and then he just goes and gets on a train and leaves and

But they feel bad for them that the other people that were, you know, that had gathered together, they loaned them or gave them, I guess, some money and chipped in and got them back to New York City. And then later, Estelle Paltz wrote a 15-page letter the next day to Orson Welles that was very admiring and said how thrilled she was. But I can't imagine what else is in that 15-page letter. It's a lot of pages. I know. Hell of a story. Yeah.

I think is what Jesus kept saying. Just over and over and over. Right. So that was one of the letters that Abraham Schwartz turned up in that trove. And it very clearly describes a couple panicking because they mistook the War of the Worlds broadcast. But again, this was not like across the nation like the papers reported. And Schwartz actually explains to the papers basically –

as a combination of a couple of things. One is a bias. I can't tell if it's selection bias, volunteer bias, or confirmation bias, but the bias is as follows. If you're in a newsroom and all of a sudden your phone starts ringing off the hook,

and you're getting 150% more calls that night, and all of them are people asking about this Martian invasion and what's going on, and is this real or is this a hoax, or have you guys heard anything about this? And some of those calls are even from the local police who are also getting similar calls, and now they're calling you to find out. Then it seems like there's a lot of people calling and freaking out about this Martian thing. But if you step back, if you zoom out,

And look at that number of people that actually called the newsroom. It's just this minute fraction of the population of whatever town it is. So it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out. But to the people answering the phone in the newsroom who are getting swamped with calls, way more calls than usual, it did seem like that.

So that combined with anecdotal reports that no one followed up on from the wire services, that people were attempting suicide or having heart attacks or whatever, that just being reported and relayed as fact is,

led everybody to believe that this was actually happening out there in the country, that people were running wild. Maybe not my town because I stuck my head outside of the newsroom and I didn't see anything, but I hear they're going crazy in Chicago right now or I hear they're really going nuts in Milwaukee or whatever. And that's how it got reported and that's what everyone thought happened. People who lived through this thought that this happened the next day. Orson Welles thought his career was in jeopardy the next day because he accidentally made America go berserk.

And that's how that myth began, and that's how it stood. And A. Brad Schwartz basically traced it back to lazy reporting. So myth busted, thanks to A. Brad Schwartz and us. And us, for sure. I'm glad you included us. So there's an interesting footnote here, though, because this actually did kind of play out that way. Eight years later in—was it eight years later? Yeah, 1948 in Ecuador. Around about—

So this is in Quito, Ecuador. These broadcasters recreate the Orson Welles radio play. And they did a version that went a lot further than his did and got other radio stations to join in and add to the reporting, which really pretty brilliant move there to increase like you turn the station and it's happening over there too. Right. And this really did scare people. They really did take to the streets and panic.

There was public panic going on, and then the crowd finds out that it's fiction, and they get angry and actually turn into an angry mob and burn down the local newspaper building that had the radio station inside of it, killing six people.

Yeah, six people died, 15 people were injured. Like they knew that the staff was in that building and they set the building on fire to try and kill them. A bunch of people escaped out of the back, but a lot of people didn't escape. And the two people who were responsible for the broadcast, including Ecuador's most beloved and trusted presenter, were indicted for it. Like they're morally safer, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And they were indicted for their role in this. Like people died because of it. And this actually does seem to have happened in Ecuador. Amazing. Yeah. So there you go. The idea that America fell into chaos and panic after the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 is largely myth. Go forth and spread the gospel, everybody. Unless you're in Ecuador and then you're like, no, it actually happened here.

And since I said that actually happened here, I think Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail. So this is from Tom in the UK. Did you see this email? I don't think so. It's great. It's one long sentence.

And I'm going to try and read it in how I think Tom speaks. As a candy man. As Tom from the UK. Because just the way he wrote it, I think Tom probably talks a little bit like this. This isn't Tom from the UK who was our tour manager when we did our UK tour, is it? No. Well, shout out to that Tom. Yeah, he was great. This is an engineer. And this is what he has to say. All right. Sup, Josh and Chuck.

Tom, engineer from the UK, Stoke-on-Trent, big fan of the show, been binging for about two years and got through all of them. All of you lot, even Jerry, have got me through a lot these last couple of years. And I put a few people onto your podcast, wanted to email you lot for a while, and finally managed to get round to emailing a load of things to people about stuff that really doesn't matter.

All the best, Tom.

Boy, oh boy, Tom, that was great. And Chuck, that was a fantastic Stoke-on-Trent accent. The most accurate I've ever heard. And the first.

Tom, that was a great email. You're right, Chuck. I love that email so much. I had so much fun. You were right to choose that one. So thanks, Tom. Thanks for writing in. Thank you for including us in your list of people you harass via email. And keep listening, okay? And keep writing in. Maybe we'll make this a regular thing, Chuck. I would love that. Yeah. So Tom, write in again.

And if you want to write in too, we want to hear from you. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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