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- The scene around the supper table at the Hunsuckers'
rural Indiana farmhouse was panic on Halloween evening 1938.
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- Sarah, 19, had heard that day that the world was about
to fall prey to evil Martian invaders. The aliens had taken Grover's Mill,
N.J., and much of the East Coast, according to radio reports the night
before.
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- CBS reporters had described extraordinary episodes such
as Martians zapping 7,000 National Guardsmen with death machines about
half the size of the Empire State Building.
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- Sarah hadn't heard the reports, but her mother had tuned
in to the hourlong radio program. She was trying to calm her children,
who were in an uproar about the imminent end of the world.
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- During supper, when Sarah and her husband gathered with
her family for dinner, her mother told her brood that according to the
Bible, nobody knew when the world was going to end.
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- The Holy Book had made no mention of aliens.
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- "It had all of us scared to death, because we just
knew the world was going to come to an end," said Sarah Hunsucker-Bryan,
now a supervisor at Dan Echols Senior Center in North Richland Hills. "Mother
tried to convince us that it couldn't be true because the Bible didn't
say it."
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- News traveled slowly in the countryside outside Madison,
Ind., so the Hunsuckers had yet to learn that it was all a hoax -- a radio
rendition of H.G. Wells' classic novella War of the Worlds. It had been
scripted and updated by Howard Koch and broadcast by Orson Welles' Mercury
Theatre on the Air, which performed on- air plays from New York several
times a month.
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- Across the country, hysteria broke out among hundreds
of thousands of listeners. Many gathered weapons or fled their homes. Some
committed suicide.
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- Had they not tuned in midshow, they would have heard
Welles announce at the beginning that it was fiction. But enough of the
estimated 32 million listeners had panicked that Welles made a public apology,
and legislation was enacted that for a long time outlawed news- report
formats in radio entertainment.
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- Commercial radio was less than 15 years old, and people
listened to it much like today's families tune in to watch their favorite
situation comedies.
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- "People weren't as sophisticated about the media
in those days, and so they weren't quite as hip about these things as we
like to think we are today," said John Mark Dempsey, assistant professor
of journalism at the University of North Texas in Denton. "Everything
was new, and here was this brilliant young guy trying something that had
never been done before. It kind of backfired."
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- Americans already were jittery. Adolf Hitler had spent
the previous three years militarizing Germany, and Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini was moving troops into parts of Africa. France had aligned with
the Soviet Union, Austria had been taken over by Germany and Hitler was
threatening Czechoslovakia.
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- War was imminent, and on everybody's mind.
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- Welles' show began as any other broadcast, with dance
music and the occasional news bulletin. The first, mildly interesting,
announcement -- "We interrupt this program to bring you a special
report" from scientist Richard Pearson (played by Welles) -- described
mysterious explosions on Mars.
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- "Bulletins" told of observatories worldwide
on watch for more mysterious hydrogen gas from the Red Planet, of seismic
activity in a New Jersey town, and of the discovery of a half- buried cylinder
made from extraterrestrial materials.
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- CBS correspondent Carl Phillips detailed Pearson's approach
toward the craft, waving a white flag, and then he exclaimed in panic about
monsters that killed hundreds of onlookers with ghastly heat rays.
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- The broadcast, punctuated by lost transmissions, frightened
cries by reporters and the ominous warnings of scientists, described more
alien aircraft landing throughout the East Coast.
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- It ended with a monologue by Welles, as Pearson, about
the world coming to an end.
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- "At the time, there might have been five or six
radio stations on the air even in all of Dallas-Fort Worth, so there was
a large number of people who listened to one station," Dempsey said.
"A lot of people heard that broadcast."
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- Within a few days, news made it to the Hunsuckers' farm
that the show was fictional. A preacher at Sarah's church used it as a
springboard that Sunday for his sermon about the end of the world, she
recalled.
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- But for a few exciting, spooky moments, she had thought
the end was near.
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- It was the ultimate Halloween trick, she said. "It
was a frightening experience."
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- Karen Brooks, (817) 685-3806 Send comments to <mailto:kbrooks@star-telegram.com
kbrooks@star-telegram.com
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