10.06
1930s
On the night before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles directed the Mercury Theatre in their live radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic novel, The War of the Worlds.
By mimicking a news broadcast, the show was quite realistic sounding for its time, and some listeners were famously fooled into thinking that an actual Martian invasion was underway in the United States.
There was widespread confusion, followed by outrage and controversy. Some later studies have argued that the extent of the panic was exaggerated by the contemporary press, but it remains clear that many people were caught up, to one degree or another, in the confusion.
According to U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the Air Force’s files often mentioned the panicked aftermath of the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast as a possible reaction of the public to confirmed evidence of UFO reality.