The article “The Invasion from Mars: Radio Panics America”, author and source unknown, is a review of the Orsen Wells’s, “War of the Worlds” phenomena, and the first mass communication study researching this event, Hadley Cantril’s (1940)The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. The event referenced above was a dramatic radio broadcast of a fictional alien invasion. The broadcast aired on October 30th, 1938, and created wide spread panic among …showed first 75 words of 796 total…

…showed last 75 words of 796 total…the Wells’s broadcast and more by the social/political situation of the audience. Compound that with the naivete of the populace towards the belief that broadcasting was a “pure” medium, and we could see how such a panicked situation could occur. I wouldn’t argue that War of the Worlds was a brilliant broadcast, but I find it unlikely that any contemporary fictional mass communication could inspire such mass hysteria, no matter how brilliant.