Was panic over War of the Worlds hyped up by the media? asks Jonathan Sale


WHAT PLANET WERE THEY ON?


T


he Daily Chronicle began the saga with the words: “Dead men from Mars”. It soon turned out that they weren’t men and they weren’t dead but it was the right


planet.”A message received from Mars – remarkable story from Woking” was a typical splash from the early Mars-attacked editions of the evening papers. Again, it wasn’t a message but a crew of alien invaders that lurked in a projectile from the Red Planet. “The Martian came out and massacred an entire battalion of the Cardigan Regiment,” added the next day’s Sunday Sun. All that was fake news or, rather, fiction news from early chapters in The War of the Worlds, the still-gripping 1898 novel by HG Wells in which blood-drinking monsters with death rays stalked humans living in rural locations along the railway line out of Waterloo. On October 31, 1938, the Orson Welles wireless adaptation prompted this front page headline in the New York Post: “US probes ‘invasion’ broadcast: radio play causes wide panic”. Professor Patrick Parrinder, author of HG


Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, points out that nobody who read the book in 1898 seemed to panic. “I have an extremely dog-eared first edition in


which the original owner recorded his opinion in pencil on the last page: ‘awful rot’. On the other hand, Nature and The Spectator took it seriously as imaginative science. “As for the Orson Welles broadcast, there is some controversy nowadays about how ‘real’ the panic was and how much it was blown up by the media in retrospect.” The original radio waves of the original broadcast would have reached Mars in at most 20 minutes and, by now, will be entertaining any listeners on a far-off planet 83 light years away from us, such as the planet known to its friends as PSO J318.5-22, a gas giant with six times the mass of Jupiter in the Capricorn constellation. Let’s hope it gets a good reception there in both senses.


16 | theJournalist Meanwhile, back on earth, The War of the


Worlds has continued to be fought, with new editions of the book, films, television adaptations and, of course, radio versions. The answer to David Bowie’s query, ‘Is there life on Mars?’ is yes, in a way. While most radio waves merely disappear into the ether, the Orson Wells production began making waves of a different kind while the programme, which shifted the location from Britain to the US, was still being transmitted. The documentary format was rather too


authentic for many listeners. The broadcast, on the evening before Halloween, began with some innocuous dance numbers by Raymond Someone and his Otherwise Forgotten Orchestra – then suddenly: “We interrupt this programme…” And what an interruption: an explosion had just been detected on Mars, followed by a mysterious object crash-landing in flames near


Princeton. This turned out to be a large cylinder, the top of which was unscrewed from the inside to allow non-human creatures to emerge, and… the microphone went dead, as did the reporter. According to Welles later, the nation panicked:


“Highways were jammed with cars, people who were in the cities were going to the hills and those people who were in the hills were going to the cities.” A tsunami of terror swept over the nation, particularly over parts of it specifically named in the broadcast. Worried citizens phoned the police and government departments, desperate for information about “eyewitness reports” of aliens on stilts stomping around the country. At the press conference next day, Welles played the innocent. The talented 23-year-old claimed to be bewildered by the kerfuffle. For a start, he declared, it had been announced as an event dated in 1939, ie the following year, which was surely a clue that it couldn’t be happening in


The interplantary war runs beyond a century


THE WAR of the Worlds has never gone out of print since it was published – it first saw the light of day as a serial in magazines and newspapers in 1898.. With its setting


shifted from Surrey to New York State, it morphed in 1938 into a new life form in the Orson Welles radio version that had gullible listeners heading for the hills in terror. Mutating into La


Guerra de los Mundos, the radio version leapt down to Chile and then to Ecuador. In Britain, the


BBC provided non- inflammatory radio versions in


1950 and 1967. Back in the US, in


1953 Paramount launched the first film, which was remade in 2005 by Steven Spielberg.


In 2012, two straight- to-DVD mini-movies were battling


it out. Over the


decades, there came a Classics Illustrated


comic, a graphic novel from Best-Sellers Illustrated and an iPad adaptation. Jeff Wayne gave us his


musical versions, with the album in 1978 and his latest stage show currently invading the nation. The interplanetary


war goes on: from the Warner Brothers’ weekly TV series in 1983 to the BBC three-parter with Rafe Spall in 2019 (“and beyond”, as Wellsian mastermind Peter J Beck puts it). Wells’s yarn is the


galaxy’s gift that goes on giving.


RAJKO SIMUNOVIC / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26