An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report.

By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of how legendary it would eventually become. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name.

Wells’s 19th-century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national radio. Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. “The War of the Worlds”-Orson Welles's realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth-is broadcast on the radio on October 30, 1938.

Prank invasion intro