“The War of The Worlds (1938) Radio broadcast.

Reviewed by Peter Lao.

What seems to be friendly music is only to be interrupted with odd and terrifying news that Astronomers detecting blue flames spurting out of the surfaces of Mars on the radio in 1938, the broadcast of Orson Welles. The broadcast soon brought more news that a “meteor” landed on the location of Grovers Mill. They soon said that the “meteor” was actually a spaceship, soon revealing, what they described as a tentacled alien martian, emergin from the crater of impact. The broadcast than terrifyingly covers that the martian brought it’s three legged-death machine, which is seen to destroy many soldiers surrounding it, telephone line communications, and unleashing a vast amount of toxic gas that was unstoppable.

What gets to me from this story is that it highlights the power of media. Even though it was H.G Well’s story “The War of The Worlds” being broadcasted through the radio, and not a real situation, it created mass hysteria, chaos, and panic. Even though 6 million people have heard it, it was known that almost one million people that intercepted this broadcast were sent into a wide state of panic. Even though this was never meant to trick anyone, the way media described the notion, the highly exaggerated and overdramatized the whole event of aliens were powerful enough, through radio media to cause people to believe, which highly reflects situations of today’s media as well. One thing that also got me was the fact that they stated that this whole broadcast was indeed only a simple dramatization at the start, yet people still though it was real. Maybe people tuned in the broadcast after the beginning?

However, whatever it was, don’t always believe what you see or hear in media at first notice.