The War of the Worlds broadcast

1938NotableContested

Orson Welles's Halloween-eve radio drama, staged as news bulletins about a Martian invasion, frightens some listeners and becomes a lasting lesson in the power of broadcast media.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → First fired clay figures → First pottery → Copper smelting → Bronze Age begins → Shang dynasty → Zhou dynasty and the Mandate of Heaven → Spring and Autumn period → Warring States period → Zhengguo Canal → Qin unifies China → Han dynasty → Magnetic compass for navigation → Gilbert's On the Magnet → Leyden jar → Franklin's kite experiment → Electric battery → Electromagnetism → Electromagnetic induction → Maxwell's equations → Radio waves detected → Radio → First radio broadcast of voice and music → The War of the Worlds broadcast

Contested history

Consensus: The 1938 broadcast frightened some listeners, but the nationwide mass panic described in next-day newspapers was far smaller than reported.

Some listeners were genuinely frightenedEstablished

Contemporary letters, calls to police and radio stations, and Hadley Cantril's 1940 survey-based study document real fear among a minority of listeners.

Millions fled their homes in a nationwide panicUnsupported

Later media historians found few verified cases of flight or harm and argue newspapers, competing with radio, exaggerated the story.