Orson Welles and Martians Shaped My Teaching Career
My close encounters with radio’s War of the Worlds in four acts
It’s been eighty-four years since Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air players frightened America with their radio broadcast making it sound, to listeners who tuned in after the introduction, like Martians were really landing in New Jersey.
It happened on Sunday, October 30th, and it was in the form of dramatized news interruptions of a fake musical program, which eventually became an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 science fiction novel, War of the Worlds.
I wasn’t there to hear the broadcast when it first aired, but as soon as I learned about it, I was fascinated. The story of the broadcast that pranked so many people revisited me every now and then for the next thirty years. I feel like it’s trying to tell me something.
Act One: A TV movie about a radio show of a science fiction book!
It started for me in 1975, when I was eight years old. It was almost Halloween. My grandmother, (my mom’s mother), along with my mom and I, decided to watch a brand new TV movie that had been advertised on ABC TV for weeks: The Night That Panicked America. Here is the original trailer and the first scene of the movie:
