The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is partnering with I Heart Radio to bring you a brand new podcast series, Induction Ball, this show brings you back to the induction ceremony for some of the most powerful moments on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame stage featuring inspiring speeches direct from the artist themselves, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction vault available now with new episodes every Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Ever wondered why there are two ways to spell doughnut's or why some people think you can find water underground just by wandering around with a stick? Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost preorder at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.

Welcome to stuff you should know the production of iBOT Radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles to be Chuck Brian over there. It's just the two of us patching it up your. Man, I think Jerry's inclusion. We're still patching it up. How do you mean? I mean, did she really ruin the batch scene for us? Sure.

She's very maternal. And Georgie. Oh, yeah. You were headed down a kind road for a second.

I was with Jerry. Yeah, that doesn't sound like me.

So for all of you who are just tuning into the first time, welcome. This is stuff you should know to everybody else who's tuning in for the multiple times. Welcome. This is stuff you should know.

Yeah, we never do that. Some shows do that. What? They welcome new listeners. Yeah. And kind of say what they do. And I mean, we've literally never done that. That's fine, that's lame high, which he does that any friends of ours? Yeah, I mean, the guys on the flophouse, they've been podcasting as long as we have. And every single episode, they say who they are and what they do. No.

OK, well, do you want to do that this one time? No, I'm Chuck Bryant and this is Josh Clark and this is a podcast where we explain things in a lighthearted and fun and sometimes even funny way.

I disagree with all of that. Oh, boy. So what we're going to talk about today, because I think we need to talk about this one in a slightly somber tone, Chuck. It's a blemish in the history of America, really, if you think about it. Well, yeah. And you know what?

I've never actually had listened to it until this week. Same here. And it was it's a lot of fun to actually listen to. I would recommend it. Yeah.

Especially in a dark room where that's all you're concentrating on. Not like a second screen kind of thing, like where you're really listening to this radio play.

Yeah. Try to put yourself there a little bit like what it must have been like and well, not 1898. That's when the book came out. Yeah.

But in 1938, I mean, what, 40 years later, just in that 40 year stretch?

I mean, think about the difference between 1980 and 2020, not ridiculously different period.

It's just gotten to 98.

Exactly. Oh, it's gone downhill. And don't think they had nothing to do with Reagan's election in 1980.

But the difference between 1898 in 1938.

Yeah. Ah, it's just like two different worlds. Man two different worlds, comma. War of the.

So I guess we should start with the book written by the great H.G. Wells.

It was the very first alien invasion story to hit the bookshelves, and that's a pretty remarkable thing. It was a serialized thing at first in magazines and Pearsons in the UK and then Cosmo here in the U.S. and then they finally slapped all those serialized versions together into a book. And it sold pretty well.

Yeah, it's never been out of print since that first edition in 1898. That's pretty respectable. I expect as much for our book as well.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll be still being published in 40 years or 100 years. Yeah, 140 years.

Yeah, well let's hope so in this book. And like you said, first alien invasion story ever published, which is, you know, just the fact that this is a completely new premise, new conceit made it, you know, kind of scary. But in the book, H.G. Wells describes like this, this alien invasion. And part of the thing that was so scary about it, at least at the time, from what I can gather, is that it was about like the breakdown of society.

And we're talking like Victorian era England society, where like rigid social rules and customs and mores and guidance for all behaviour at all times was like the norm.

So the idea of that breaking down was scary in and of itself. I think that made the book kind of scary to contemporary readers. Would that be right? Readers back then? And that was one big theme that was explored, another one that he explored in that at least I think whoever wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica article on it said that the main point of this, the main subtext was learning how humans dominion over animals can be, you know, cruel and thoughtless, because all of a sudden with these alien invaders who were just wiping us off the map, we were we were like, you know, domesticated animals to them.

Yeah. So the shoe was on the other horse. And sure, it caused or at least it was intended to cause people to take kind of a hard look at Animal Farm to make sort of a social statement about how we treated animals. Yeah. And so that was in 1898. If you flash forward to Orson Welles in his Mercury Theatre version. He this is you know, like you said, we're right in the middle or we're in the Great Depression and we're headed towards war, and it's sort of an uneasy feeling in the United States as a whole.

So he thought, perfect time to go in there, put a fresh coat of paint on this thing and scare the bejesus out of the American public by doing really something that they had never heard before, which was sort of a verité style production. Yeah.

And I mean, it's easy to overlook today, but radio is still rather new. At the time in 1938, it was like, you know, cutting edge technological medium and it was not fully defined. So the idea of creating this, I guess Hoke's broadcast is the best you can call it.

Yeah. This fictionalized version, that was what would you call it, man?

I hate that word so much.

You know, it's really taken on a banteng here lately. Yeah. I mean, it's it's verité. It's it's you know, of a faux documentary style. Right. Thing that no one had ever heard.

Like, there's no way when people heard this they would think, oh, this is you know, I know Christopher Guest. This is sort of a scary version. I've seen Blair Witch. I know what's going on here.

I recognize Lenny from Laverne and Shirley anywhere. I know it's not real. Yeah.

So they were they weren't prepared for this in 1938 when Orson Welles he was already a big name in radio as the voice of the Shadow, which was a big hit. And his Mercury Theater was pretty, pretty well respected at the time.

Yeah, it's like a live stage theater. So they'd only had this show for a few months by the time October 1938 rolled around. But their whole jam was they were on CBS and CBS had them do our long radio adaptations of classic like novels like Treasure Island. They they did around the world in 80 days. And so since it was October, they wanted to do something spooky around Halloween, something that they decided. Yeah. So so they were like, well, what's the most boring, scary book there is?

And they said, H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds. So they decided to adapt it. Yeah.

So they got together. They're rehearsing. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a sec. But there wasn't a strong feeling among the cast and crew and the production group that thought it was going to be awesome, because I think probably because they had never done anything like this, they had never heard anything like this.

They thought, is this even going to be any good in a couple of different sources in the production, went to a radio critic ahead of time. It's like, thanks a lot. And they said, by the way, this is going to be a real stinker.

If they said apparently two different people in the in the production said that this will put everyone to sleep. And I don't I don't have the impression that it's strictly because they didn't have any frame of reference to judge it against because no one had done this before, from what I can gather. Originally, it was going to be really bad and really terrible. And the production and the cast and crew knew this. They knew that they were marching toward embarrassment with the early versions of the of the script.

Yeah.

So Orson, he's sort of distracted. He's got a stage production going on. He's got his partner in his group, John the Great John Houseman. He all know from the Paperchase, kind of a legendary actor. He was his one of his original partners. And he got together with Howard. Is it Kotch? I never know if it's going to be a Katra. Coke doesn't matter.

All right, KOKH And he was the writer who was adapting the novel. And they were like, we got to make this thing better. And one thing I think we can do this was housemen talking.

I'm not going to do John Houseman, but everyone knows how he sounds. Right.

When I came across John Houseman, being involved is like, I can't wait.

I don't even remember. I mean, he was just very serious and sort of all I can think of is Paperchase. And what was the TV commercial? It was it. I want to say it was like Schwab or Merrill Lynch. I think it might have been Merrill Lynch maybe, I don't know. But one of those finance firms he did he voice for.

Yeah, he was very famous for having a very high pitched, squeaky falsetto voice. And he talked very, very fast. And actually, I know who was it was FedEx.

And Dunkin Donuts was well known for its rage. He was the time to make the doughnuts guy right with the MUSKETT. So Halsman and Kotch Coke went in there and he said one of the things we should do probably to make this a little more scary and a little more believable, that it's an actual broadcast is, you know, time passes in the book and we can't do that here. So let's just get rid of all that stuff. So it gives the appearance that it's going down right now.

Yeah, that was enormously a huge change. And I don't know if he did that to to help the pacing move a little fast or what. But that was that will pan out to be a really important difference in the original script that Howard K. turned in and the one that they ended up doing. And then even beyond that, some of the other changes came just hours before broadcast, because apparently, if you worked with Orson Welles, you should be on the lookout for him to come in at the last minute and be like all the stuff we've been practicing for a week or two.

Forget all of that. We're we're doing this instead. And part of that, from what I can tell, is that he was trying to shake up the actor, shake them out of whatever complacency they'd worked themselves into with rehearsal and to get this rather more terrified performance. And apparently it worked. I mean, I can't imagine I didn't hear any rehearsals or anything like that. I would love to have compared, you know, the week before to, you know, the actual broadcast.

But everyone delivered these really great, really great performances. And they really nailed by Showtime the realism in a lot of ways, not just in the performances, but also in just little details like they you know, they were they were doing a mock radio program, which we'll talk about a little more in detail in a second. But they were they were pretending to have news bulletins break. So they were they were doing the things that news bulletins did.

One of the things that stuck out to me was one of the eyewitnesses. So it's an actor, but one of the eyewitnesses is like being interviewed by a news reporter on the scene. And they start to talk in the news. Reporter goes, can you can you speak, speak more loudly and move into the microphone, please? And the I think the actor actually says, how's that? And the guy repeats himself and then the actress to repeat himself what he was originally saying.

So it has that veneer of, you know, authenticity just from little details like that that, you know, really stood out to me when I was listening for him. But if you're if you're not listening for him, you just it makes you buy into the whole thing that much more.

Yeah. And the other big change that Welles brought along was stretching out the first two halves of the thing such that it went past it went 40 minutes and radio at the time, every 30 minutes, like on the half hour, they would check in with a station, ID check and listeners, even though radio was new, were well honed to the station break every 30 minutes. And so when ten minutes past the half hour go by in there and there ain't no station break that really makes people kind of buy in to what they're listening to is possibly real.

And then you add to the fact that there were no sponsors for the show. Yeah. So they weren't cutting to Casper or for me and me these ads.

Right. All of a sudden they couldn't remember any sponsor.

Can you imagine John Housman saying made with Modahl?

No, I thought it'd be made with Modahl. That's a much better Housman. I had something in my throat. So yeah, there were no sponsors. So basically, it really came across as something that was super, super realistic sounding.

Right. So all that is to say that they had really by the time this broadcast aired at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 30th, 1938, they they they were not going to be the laughing stock. And this is not going to be embarrassing. It was going to be pretty awesome, actually. Did we take a break? I think so, Chuck.

And then we'll come back and we will reveal the broadcast after this.

Hi, I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and together we host a show called Stuff You Missed in History Class.

As the name suggests, we talk about some things that maybe either you didn't remember from history class or they weren't covered at all. There have always been women in history. There have always been black people and other people of color. There have always been people all over the LGBTQ spectrum as a part of the historical record. Tracy, we've had some really interesting episodes recently. What's one of your favorites? The history of beekeeping, which we had to abridge, because that's very involved.

How about you?

I really, really enjoyed researching our episode on Seneca Village, which was a settlement in what became Central Park that was mostly populated by black people who actually owned the property there. And unfortunately, their time there was kind of a race. So if this kind of material sounds good to you, come listen to the show. We have new episodes on Mondays and Wednesdays and then a behind the scenes Minnesota on Friday and bonus classic episode from the archive on Saturday.

You can find us on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen.

I'm Kate Berlant. I'm Jaclyn Novak. We're comedians, best friends and consumerist hogs hemorrhaging cash in the wellness world. That's why we made a podcast, PWG, A Quixotic Quest for Wholeness. Here's a little snippet of us trying out a top dollar massage gun on our muscle manipulation episode.

Press on wants. Now press the update. Now, here we go, honey. Oh, whoa. It's working. It's working. Do you want to know the story of the guy who created this device?

No, no. Just through this person. I'm sorry. I'm here with this free product.

They say float it out and then go deep about it and then go, oh, the right inner thigh has pain. I repeat, the right inner thigh has pain. Whoa.

The tension in the calves is reaching an all time, but we suffer from no ailments. We are looking to heal. For us, salvation lies in the next product, practice or potion. This is our hobby. This is our hell. This is our naked desire for free products. This is poop. That's pee dialogue.

Poop on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. OK, so we've reached Showtime Air Time, 8:00 p.m. Sunday, October 30th, 1938, Mercury Theatre on the Air began broadcasting its adaptation of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds.

And at the very beginning, it's introduced as much as there's an announcer who says that I think it's lost probably to time somewhat because everyone probably thinks that they just tried to trick everyone. But no, they actually introduced it as what they're doing. And, you know, this is a radio play one year in the future. Right. Right.

And yeah, Orson Welles. So it's introduced by an announcer. Orson Welles comes in, does the introductory essay, and then they did something really smart and interesting, especially for the time they went to a musical program that was supposedly being broadcast from the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza. So if you were just tuning in right, then you would have no idea that this was Mercury Theatre on the air. You would have no idea that this was a teleplay.

You would think that you were listening to something that was pretty regularly broadcast, which was live music at some like ballroom in a hotel somewhere in New York that they set up like a radio transmitter to transmit out over the radio. That was pretty frequent. But this was part of the show.

Like if you had paused it. That is right. Right. Exactly.

So but that was a huge part of the show because that lulled listeners into kind of complacency. And listeners who tuned in late and missed that introduction thought that this is what they were listening to. And then the first news bulletin hit. Yeah.

And that's where things start to get really interesting. They break in. You know, one of these interrupts your previously scheduled programs kind of things. Right? Right.

And they come in and with these bulletins, but they're not super long at first because they treat it kind of how it would be in real life. It's just sort of a breaking story. Something's going together. It was fairly obtuse. And they didn't like, you know, say Martians are attacking us right now. Everyone from the get go right sort of left it up to the listener to kind of piece it together. A little by little, they would go back to the Meridian Room for a bit.

And it wasn't for very long. But because, you know, they couldn't waste too much time. But it was long enough. It wasn't for like 10 seconds. They did it for like a minute, minute and a half. Right.

It made it seem right then like that was what you were listening to that that was the program in the bulletin was, in fact the bulletin rather than the opposite being true.

Yeah. So eventually you start to piece together what's going on and you have this attack in New Jersey, of all places, and Princeton University.

They had like a Princeton astronomer on. They have government officials and they kind of dole it out a little by little until about the 17 minute, 17 and a half minute mark.

And then that's when it really kind of gets super scary and people really see the full picture of what's going on.

So, Chuck, I feel like we should read a little bit of the script. There's this one part starting about the 17, 30 minute mark, I think he said where they are, as I like to say, they tore the lid off the sucker.

Do you want to be announcer or Philipps? I'll be the announcer. All right. OK, but I want you to do Phillips is Sammy Davis Jr. so here's the announcer. Wait, hold on. I'm getting on my tap shoes. OK, OK.

You ready, Kenny Mamdouh Habib.

I'm not going to do it that way. OK, so let me give you a little bit of background real quick. So these news bulletins up to this point have basically said there's some weird thing that landed. They thought it was a meteorite at first that landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. And then later Bulletin said that, oh, actually, there's some weird technical, like weird things emerging from this thing we thought was a meteorite. So now we're back at Grover's Mill.

So I'm the announcer.

We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what's happening on the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. And that was kind of like they were breaking in to let you know that. And then they go back to more piano for some reason. And then we now return you to Carl Phillips at Grover's Mill. Ladies and gentlemen, am I on my own? Ladies and gentlemen, here I am back of a stone wall that adjoins Mr. Williams garden. From here, I get a sweep of the whole scene.

I give you every detail as long as I can talk, as long as I can see more. State police have arrived. They're drawing up a cordon in front of the pit, about 30 of them. No need to push the crowd back. Now they're willing to keep their distance. The captain is conferring with someone we we can't quite see who. Oh, yes. I believe it's a Professor Pearson. Yes, it is. Now they've parted.

The professor moves around one side studying the object. Well, the captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I can see it now. It's a it's a white handkerchief tied to a pole, a flag of truce. If those creatures know what that means, what anything means. Wait, something's happening.

You can cut in any time, you can take a rainbow wait, sorry, humped shape is rising out of the pit.

I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet. There's a jet flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on. Good Lord, they're turning into flame.

Oh, God. Oh, my God. Now the whole field's caught fire in the woods. The barns, the gas tank, automobiles spreading everywhere. It's coming this way, about 20 yards to my right.

Very nice and seemed OK. That was great shock, so you mentioned or I should say Phillips, the reporter on the scene, mentioned, right, Professor Pearson. And he's this he ends up being the main character. And he's he's in he's an astronomer, was interviewed earlier on in the he's on the scene as it happens. And the program just keeps going like that. Like there's another there's a main announcer who I played, I thought rather well, great.

Thank you. And you seem to have quite a future as a Foley artist, if I may say so.

Thank you very much. I've been practicing. You want to hear my machine gun? I've been doing that one since I was like six. All right.

How about walking through the forest? All right, now, how about a good punch to the face? Oh, wow, that was good. Thank you. I'd punch myself in the face, OK, I'm dedicated. That's dedicated to the art of Foley. And so the announcer just keeps bringing in more and more news as this thing goes on and unfolds of like now, these things aren't just in New Jersey. They're in Chicago. They're like out west.

They're they're starting to invade everywhere and they're killing people left and right. That you said there was a government official that reads the statement is actually they say that it's the secretary of the interior, which I thought was particularly genius because, I mean, probably not that many people were familiar with the secretary of the interior. Yeah, totally. Harold Ickes. Yeah. But they had him sound like FDR. So that would kind of play on everyone's, I guess, unconscious or I'm sure there were people who are like this on just like FDR.

But at the very least, it would kind of evoke that government authority, the reality of like a government figure, you know.

Yeah. So meanwhile, on the other stations, there's one that's running opposite, which is a really, really popular radio show at the time, probably the most popular chase in Sandborn hour, which had the very, very famous ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy.

And we talked about that on our ventriloquism episode.

Remember that they started out on radio, which is hysterical.

I don't even know why they would even bother with the dummy part.

Just you wouldn't need two voices. That's what he did. You wouldn't even have to wear pants. No, no. You sit around in your spaghetti stained undershirt and in. Yeah. Naked from the waist down, maybe some socks. Doing a couple of voices. That's right. As your contract. Edgar Bergen, what do you think about that, Charlie?

Ah, don't get me started. Like, that's it. I could be a famous ventriloquist on the radio. You just you just did it. I think Hollywood's going to come and call.

But the real sort of interesting factoid here, I think, is that people were channel surfing back then. When you cut to commercial, just like we used to do when we didn't have Porres buttons and fast forward buttons.

And what is the pause button you keep mentioning? I've never heard of this. You've never pause television? No. Wow. You need it.

I don't believe I've ever paused anything in my life. It's funny.

We were Emilian. I've been watching that German sci fi series Dark, which is very challenging to follow. And there's a lot of rewinding like, wait, wait, who was that? What did they just say? And we rewind it a bit and do that again and or, you know, of course, I got to go the bathroom opposite.

And I was thinking about how not too long ago.

You just if you miss something, you missed it, you just peed the count or you peed yourself on the couch. Yeah. Mm hmm. There was no clear like, let me go back and clear this up. It's like, what did he say? I have no idea. Guess we'll never know. There's no to turn it up.

I guess I should probably stop watching the show altogether. You go walk up to the VCR and President Jack.

But at any rate, back then, let's say Charlie McCarthy goes to break and now word from Mark Potter and they flip it over to War of the Worlds at this point in the broadcast when the S is hitting the fan and it's going to scare the pants off of people in 1938.

Well, yeah, even more than I think that they would have dialed over even before that. So they might have like a news bulletin and then maybe some of that music from the Meridian Room. So it really would have caught them. And there were supposedly a substantial number of people who did dial over. And we're like, wait, wait, what what is going on here? And now we come to the reaction, the response, because if you picked up the paper the next day in America, just about anywhere in any major city, you're going to find huge blaring headlines like the one that the New York Daily News printed in tall, bold letters, fake radio war, Sturt's terror through the U.S..

Yeah, stories of of shock and hysteria, stories of people taking their own life. Stories of people dying from heart attacks. The AP said a man in Pittsburgh found his wife with poison in her hand and said, I'm going to I'd rather die this way than like that. And, you know, talking to Wells afterward, in the aftermath of this, he apologizes publicly, says they didn't intend to do this. We had we didn't know it was going to cause a panic.

And then, you know, if you look over the years, more interviews, it sort of seems like Wells is a little more like.

You know, we thought it would be pretty fun to scare people, and I didn't know if it was going to cause a panic, but we definitely intended it to have this effect on people, whereas Halsman and Kotch were like, no, we really didn't mean it. So it was sort of conflicting reports from the production on what they thought was going to be the result.

Right. And I read an interview with John Landis, the great director who worked with Welles on a project that never got made toward the end of Welles life. And he didn't say that. Welles admitted to him that he meant to, but he got to know him enough, that he was like, yes, if you watch this this initial press conference where he's apologizing because the whole country was ripped apart in chaos and were running wild in the streets and, like, nearly rioted because of his broadcast, he is not at all.

He's just as happy as a lark that this all happened, of course, even though he's pretending to apologize. And he said that was just this is Orson Welles. Did you say apologize?

It's a it's a new version on testing out. I like it. It's kind of. Yeah, it's at least as good as apologize. So this was just a couple of days in the news cycle. It wasn't the biggest deal in the world, even though it was fairly sensational story writing for four newspapers.

And it might have just gone that way had it not been for a Princeton University social psychologist a couple of years later named Hadley, Cantril and Cantor released a book on the real effects of this thing and basically said that, you know, people were praying, crying.

They were frantically trying to escape death from the Martians. Six million people listen to this thing and at least one six of them were frightened or disturbed. And I have the evidence right here. Yeah, the evidence that he had was based on a series of interviews with one hundred and thirty five people, almost all of them were in New Jersey, which remember, that's where the the crux of the invasion and destruction being described took place, because Grovers Mill, New Jersey, is actually a real town in Jersey.

So he went to Jersey because he was in Princeton. So he went where he was and interviewed one hundred and thirty five people. And he he said, were you scared by this broadcast? And the participant would say, yes. And he'd say, You're in my study. And he'd ask the night, were you scared? Were you scared by this broadcast? You know, he'd be like, you're not in the study. That's crazy. And so, yeah, he said in the in the methodology that he selected a hundred out of the hundred and thirty five because they had been scared by the broadcast.

And so he took this these interviews of people in New Jersey and he extrapolated it to the rest of the country and he said, yeah, this is this is real. This is a really great example of people being fooled into into terror and panic. And, you know, the response is when this happens, like we saw after the World War of the Worlds broadcast, people will run out into the street. They will flee the city. They will call their friends and neighbors.

They will they may attempt suicide. They may die of a heart attack. Like The New York Times reported, 20 or so people in New York alone needed to be treated for for shock and hysteria. This is what happens when somebody toys with the public trust. And, yeah, it's pretty nuts. The end. Yeah, that was what that was the end of Hadley's Hedley's book, right?

Yeah. Not the end of this episode. So this is what this specific study is. What if you've ever taken a mass media or a communications college class? You've probably studied War of the Worlds largely because of this study. Basically, it might have just come and gone if it weren't for this this academic paper that were put out. And all of a sudden for decades and decades it's reported on is like a cautionary tale almost of responsibility and media, even fictional media.

And, you know, as recently as 2013 PBS American Experience documentary said this was the case, are old pals at Radiolab in 2008, did an episode about this where that was the case. But there are a few problems with this paper beyond the supremely bad methodology behind just getting scared New Jersey people to go in there and give their report was they found up. We they ended up finding real ratings for this thing and not a ton of people even heard it.

It turns out so.

So his six million estimate was way, way, way, way off. And they did a survey during the program that said two percent of respondents said that they were listening in some markets, like big cities like Boston, even preempted this thing for local programming. So it wasn't a ton of people, it wasn't a ton of people being scared and like just literally losing their minds with fear and panic and things swing so far.

The other way that the narrative became, you know what? No one was really scared at all in what newspapers really did was they put out hit pieces on a competing medium like radio and how you shouldn't trust it anymore.

So so what happened over the last within some time within the 21st century, sometime in the 2010s, the the the myth that America lost its mind, went bonkers and ran wild in the street because they were panicked by the War of the Worlds broadcast was shown to be a myth that it didn't happen.

And that was the new understanding for a little while, just a few years, until another guy came along and said, you know what? They're actually both both are right and both are wrong in a lot of ways. Should we take a break and talk about the truth? Always being somewhere in the middle? Mm hmm. Hey, my name's Crystal. My name is Cody Johnston. And I'm Robert Evans, and we're here today to promote our show Worst Year Ever, a podcast where we talk about 20, 20, a.k.a. the worst year ever.

Our purview is wide and bleak. We talk about the election. We talk about the administration. We talk about protests, other things to which my co-host will now describe to you.

We talk about how to survive a horrible state violence. We talk about how to fight Nazis as part of a community. And we talk about like, you know, election stuff with the politics and things.

If you love politicians, you'll tolerate this show. Listen to worst year ever on the radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer and autumn of 2020, the city of Portland, Oregon, became the center of a vast media blitz. Thousands of viral videos showing marching federal agents and police officers tear gas, black clad anarchists and fires went viral all over the Internet. What didn't go viral was the truth, because the story of Portland's Black Lives Matter movement and of the Portland protests of 20 is so much stranger than I think the mainstream media would ever be willing to cover.

I was there.

And more importantly, the people that I talk to for my new show, Uprising A Guide from Portland, where they're through their experiences, you'll learn the truth both about Portland and about what's coming for the rest of the United States in the next few years.

Listen to Uprising, a guide from Portland on November. Twenty third on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, I said the truth is always somewhere in between, that's not always the case with everything in life, obviously, but that's that's a saying for a reason. And that's definitely seems to be the case in this case with a gentleman named a Brad Schwartz. He's a probably the leading war of the Worlds scholar. And he went back and he went and investigated the letters and the cables that that came in. They were at the University of Michigan archives.

And these are the letters that actually came in to Welles and the Mercury Theatre in the days after the broadcasts. And what he contends, and I agree, is that this is what you need to be reading, is what people were really thinking at the time that weren't just cherry picked in the town where that got attacked in New Jersey, who were obviously they were going to be freaked out more than anyone in the country.

Right. So one of the things that he points out is, you know, everybody been, you know, since around 2010 or maybe a little earlier, everyone had been wailing on Hadley Cantril for his terrible, terrible methodology. But they the the revisionists were also kind of doing the same thing. They were making all sorts of suppositions, like the idea that the newspapers had basically conspired to target radio, its rival, to show how irresponsible it was and how it shouldn't be trusted with the news that is really newspapers that should be handling the news.

And maybe you can listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio, but that's about it, that that was all supposition. That was as much supposition as Hadley Cantril extrapolated his findings in New Jersey to the rest of the country and a Brad Schwartz. One of the reasons I think he's doing a good job is because he's he's saying, no, we're if you actually sit down and read these letters in these cables that were coming in in the days after, they really probably paint the most accurate picture anyone's ever found to this to this point of how it was actually received.

Like you can see almost in real time at the time, what people were saying about this in their letters to Orson Welles into the Mercury Theatre on the air.

Yeah. And it was a range of feelings. It was everything from people who said, you know what, we knew it wasn't real, but it was really scary and super awesome. I don't know if they said things like super awesome.

He said that a number of people wrote in who actually made fun of the people who fell for it and said that, you know, they're they're gullible, they're they're rubes. And one writer even said they should be sterilized and disenfranchised.

Yeah. Because they'd shown that in an actual emergency they were undependable. They would just run around like chickens with their heads cut off in the streets. Yeah.

And Shwartz sort of draws a line between what was going on back then to us today with this whole fake news hoax garbage that we have to listen to day in and day out. And basically said this was the first viral phenomenon and media was the War of the Worlds broadcast, and it was a mixed bag. Some people loved it. Some people did think it was real and panicked. But it certainly was not this widespread panic across the country like you were talking about.

Yeah, he said less than a quarter of the letters described what he would consider panic, but even most of those weren't actually angry when they were writing the letter. A lot of them are thrilled like you got Buddy.

He did right. But he did say that, yes, there are cases that you see in these letters and cables that that describe people panicking. So that did happen in some cases. Most of it seems to have been isolated in New Jersey. So if Hadley Cantril had not extrapolated his findings and had, you know, interviewed more people who had different reactions to the broadcast, but if it had just been like an investigation into the reaction in New Jersey, that study or that book would have been much more useful.

But the fact is, he just screwed that screw the methodology up so badly that it's it's basically useless. But he wasn't he didn't make up the panic that he described necessarily. He may have exaggerated it. Who knows? But it did it does seem to have actually happened in some cases, but it was sporadic, few and far between, certainly not organized and certainly not seen across the rest of the country like it was reported on by the papers the next day.

Yeah. Which sort of leads us to the story of the poor pulses of Manhattan. This Manhattan couple, they did fall for it. They were very scared. Apparently, as the story goes, they got their last six dollars together and got on a train to get the heck out of New York. Assuming not going west into New Jersey, they went north toward Canal. It got as far as they could on what little money they had get off the train and, you know, there's a bunch of other passengers that they're telling, you know, they're warning everybody of what's happened.

Right. And this one guy there goes over and gets a just pictured this in the movie is like no one's listening to this guy and he picks up the newspaper. Basically, the TV guide is like the Dunkin Donuts guy.

He says, hey, guys, this is right here. We're the world's broadcasters supposed to be on at that hour. Like it just says right here in the newspaper. It's a it's a radio play. Everyone, no one but everyone now nobody, OK? And then he just goes and gets on a train and leaves, but they feel bad for them. The other people that were, you know, that had gathered together, they loan them or gave them, I guess, some money and chipped in and got them back to New York City.

And then later, Estelle Paulette's wrote a 15 page letter the next day to Orson Welles that was very admiring and said how thrilled she was. But. I can't imagine what else is in that 15 page letter. It's a lot of pages. I know a hell of a story, I think is what she says over and over and over. All right. So so that was one of the letters that abridged shorts turned up in that trove. And like it very clearly describes a couple of panicking because they mistook the War of the Worlds broadcast.

But again, this was not like across the nation, like the papers reported. And Schwarz actually explains the papers basically as a combination of a couple of things. One is a bias. I can't tell if it's selection bias, volunteer bias or confirmation bias, but the bias is as follows. If you're in a newsroom and all of a sudden your phone starts ringing off the hook and you're getting a hundred and fifty percent more calls that night. And all of them are people asking about this Martian invasion and what's going on.

And is this real or is this a hoax or have you guys heard anything about this? And some of those calls are even from the local police who are also getting similar calls and now they're calling you to find out. Then it seems like there's a lot of people calling and freaking out about this Martien thing. But if you step back, if you zoom out and look at that number of people that actually called the newsroom, it's just as my new fraction of the population of whatever town it is.

So it wasn't a bunch of people freaking out. But to the people answering the phone in the newsroom who are getting swamped with calls, way more calls than usual, it did seem like that. So that combined with anecdotal reports that no one followed up or followed up on from the wire services, that people were attempting suicide or having heart attacks or whatever, that just being reported and relayed as fact led everybody to believe that this was actually happening out there in the country, that people were running.

Well, maybe not my town, because I stuck my head outside of the newsroom and I didn't see anything. But I hear they're going crazy in Chicago right now. I hear they're really going nuts in Milwaukee or whatever. And that's how it got reported. And that's what everyone thought happened. People who lived through this thought that this happened the next day. Orson Welles thought his career was in jeopardy the next day because he accidentally made America go berserk.

And that's how that myth began and that's how it stood. And in a Bradshaws basically traced it back to lazy, lazy reporting. So myth busted. Thanks to Brad Schwartz and us. And us, for sure, I'm glad you included us, so there's an interesting footnote here, though, because this actually did kind of play out that way eight years later. And night was eight years later. Yeah. Nineteen forty eight in Ecuador. So this is in Quito, Ecuador.

These broadcasters recreate the Orson Welles radio play, and they did a version that went a lot further than his did and got other radio stations to join in and add to the reporting, which really pretty brilliant move there to increase. Like you turn the station and it's happening over there, too, right. And this really did scare people. They really did take to the streets and panic.

There was, you know, public panic going on. And then the crowd finds out that it's fiction and they get angry and actually turn into an angry mob and burn down the local newspaper building that had the radio station inside of it, killing six people.

Yeah, six people died, 15 people were injured, like they knew that the staff was in that building and they set the building on fire to try to kill them. And a bunch of people escaped out the back, but a lot of people didn't escape. And the two people who were responsible for the broadcast, including Ecuador's most beloved and trusted presenter, were indicted for it.

Like there, Morley Safer, basically. Yeah, exactly.

And they were they were indicted for their role in this, like people died because of it. And this actually does seem to have happened in Ecuador. Amazing.

Yeah. So there you go. The idea that America fell into chaos and panic after the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 is largely a myth. Go forth and spread the gospel, everybody, unless you're in Ecuador and then you're like, no, it's actually happened here. And since I said that actually happened here, I think Chuck is time for this moment.

So this is from Tom in the U.K. Did you see this email? I don't think so.

It's great. It's one long sentence and I'm going to try and read it and how I think Tom speaks as a candidate, as Tom from the UK, because just the way he wrote it, I think Tom probably talks a little bit like this.

This isn't Tom from the U.K. who was our tour manager when we did our UK tour. Is it now? Well, shout out to that, Tom. Yeah.

This is an engineer and this is what he had to say. All right. Sup? Josh and Tom, engineer from the UK, Stoke on Trent, big fan of the show, Ben Benjamin for about two years and got through all of them all are you lot. Even Jerry have got me through a lot these last couple of years. And I put a few people on to your podcast, wanted to email you lot for a while and finally managed to get round to emailing a lot of things to people about stuff that really doesn't matter.

Emailed a TV show about one of their actors, a particle physicist, about using a light year of lead as a frame of reference. The company super noodles for the excellent job they've done with their super noodle pot. But I'm not much for the peas. And I just wanted to say I know you like the Japanese mayo, but you really need to try the Polish mayo spot on. All the best, Tom. Boy, oh, boy.

Tom, that was great. And Chuck, that was a fantastic Stoke-On-Trent accent. The the the most accurate I've ever heard. And the first time that was a great email. You're right, Chuck. I love that email so much. I had so much fun. You were right to choose that one.

So thanks, Tom. Thanks for writing in. Thank you for including us and your list of people you harass via email and keep listening, OK? And keep writing in me. We'll make this a regular thing. Chuck, I would love that. Yeah. So Tom, write in again. And if you want to write in two, we want to hear from you. You can send us an email to staff podcast that I heart radio dot com.

Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart radio, because the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Caitlin Durante, and I'm Jamie Loftus, and we're the hosts of the Bacto cast on I Heart Radio. Each episode we invite comedians, writers and film critics to bring their favorite movie and analyze it and sometimes tear it to shreds using an intersectional feminist lens and the battle test as a jumping off point for discussion.

It's the funny comprehensive movie analysis podcast of your dreams.

Recent episodes include Space Jim Harriet the Spy and Set It Off. New episodes of the Bechtol cast come out every Thursday. Listen on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.