The Martian panic sixty years later: what have we learned?

The 'War of the Worlds' panic happened sixty years ago, but its lessons are as relevant today as back then.

Shortly after 8 o'clock on Sunday evening, October 30, 1938, many Americans became anxious or panic-stricken after listening to a realistic live one-hour radio play depicting a fictitious Martian landing at the Wilmuth farm in the tiny hamlet of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Those living in the immediate vicinity of the bogus invasion appeared to have been most frightened, although the broadcast could be heard in all regions of the continental United States and no one particular location was immune. The play included references to real places, buildings, highways, and streets. The broadcast also contained prestigious speakers, convincing sound effects, and realistic special bulletins. The drama was produced by a 23-year-old theatrical prodigy named George Orson Welles (1915-1985), who was accompanied by a small group of actors and musicians in a New York City studio of the Columbia Broadcasting System's Mercury Theater. The actual broadcast script was written by Howard Koch, who loosely based it on the 1898 book The War of the Worlds by acclaimed science fiction writer Herbert George (H.G.) Wells (1866-1946). In the original Wells novel, the Martians had landed in nineteenth century Woking, England. Sixty years after the 1938 event, it remains arguably the most widely known delusion in United States, and perhaps world history, and many radio stations around the world continue to broadcast the original play each Halloween eve.

During this sixtieth anniversary year of the Martian panic, it is timely to reflect on the lessons we can glean from the incident, applying the wisdom that six decades of hindsight can provide.

Human Perception and Memory Reconstruction Are Remarkably Flawed

Today many people seem to forget that the Martian "invasion" illustrates far more than a short-term panic. It is a testament to the remarkable power of expectation on perception. A person's frame of reference has a strong influence on how external stimuli are interpreted and internalized as reality (Buckhout 1974). Perception is highly unreliable and subject to error (Loftus 1979; Wells and Turtle 1986; Ross, Read, and Toglia 1994). This effect has long been known to be pronounced under situations of stress, ambiguity, and uncertainty (Sherif and Harvey 1952; Asch 1956; Krech, Crutchfield, and Ballschey 1962). This message cannot be over-emphasized and continues to go widely unheeded, as visual misperceptions are a common thread in many reports of such diverse phenomena as religious signs and wonders, UFOs, and Bigfoot.

In his famous study of the Martian panic, Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril discusses the extreme variability of eyewitness descriptions of the "invasion." These examples have been usually overlooked in subsequent popular and scholarly discussions of the panic. One person became convinced that they could smell the poison gas and feel the heat rays as described on the radio, while another became emotionally distraught and felt a choking sensation from the imaginary "gas" (Cantril 1947, 94-95). During the broadcast several residents reported observations to police "of Martians on their giant machines poised on the Jersey Palisades" (Markush 1973, 379). After checking various descriptions of the panic, Bulgatz (1992, 129) reported that a Boston woman said she could actually see the fire as described on the radio; other persons told of hearing machine gun fire or the "swish" sound of the Martians. A man even climbed atop a Manhattan building with binoculars and described seeing "the flames of battle."

The event also reminds us that the human mind does not function like a video camera capturing each piece of data that comes into its field of vision. People interpret information as it is processed. These memories are not statically locked away in the brain forever, but our memories of events are reconstructed over time (Loftus and Ketcham, 1991). Cantril (1947) cited the case of Miss Jane Dean, a devoutly religious woman, who, when recalling the broadcast, said the most realistic portion was "the sheet of flame that swept over the entire country. That is just the way I pictured the end" (181). In reality, there was no mention of a sheet of flame anywhere in the broadcast.

The Mass Media Are a Powerful Force in Society

Not only does the Martian panic demonstrate the enormous influence of the mass media in contemporary society, but in recent years an ironic twist has developed. There is a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic, as described by Cantril, was greatly exaggerated (Miller 1985; Bainbridge 1987; Goode 1992). The irony here is that for the better part of the past sixty years many people may have been misled by the media to believe that the panic was far more extensive and intense than it apparently was. However, regardless of the extent of the panic, there is little doubt that many Americans were genuinely frightened and some did try to flee the Martian gas raids and heat rays, especially in New Jersey and New York.