This episode of The Mercury Theater on the Air was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938. The first two thirds of the 62-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program’s realism. There followed sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of which has been debated. Many Americans were listening to Edgar Bergen; however, when Bergen’s opening comedy routine ended and gave way to a musical interlude, many people may have started turning the radio dial to see what else was on. Those people found a radio show that sounded like a real account of an alien attack. The show did issue a disclaimer at the beginning of the show, but the people tuning in late did not hear that announcement and so a small panic did occur.
In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage in the media. The program’s news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers (which had lost advertising revenue to radio) and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.[1] Despite these complaints—or perhaps in part because of them—the episode secured Welles’s fame as a dramatist.
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