☞Ladies & gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin…

☞Ladies & gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin…




☞Today in History -- On today’s date 84 years ago, beginning at 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, October 30, 1938, the infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast caused widespread fear & panic when listeners mistook the adaptation of the 1898 science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” by Herbert George “H. G.” Wells (1866-1946) for actual breaking news. 

☞Directed & narrated by actor, director, writer, & producer George Orson Welles (1915-1985), “The War of the Worlds” was a 62-minute broadcast for his “Mercury Theatre on the Air” that was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins which unintentionally suggested to some listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress.

☞In the aftermath of the broadcast, there was widespread outrage in the media. 

The news-bulletin format of the program was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers (which had lost advertising revenue to radio), leading to a public outcry against Orson Welles & his cohorts & to calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.

 Despite these complaints -- or perhaps in part because of them -- the episode secured Orson Welles’s lasting fame as a dramatist.

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