File:WOTW-NYT-headline.jpg

Author: The New York Times Source: Archives of The New York Times

This is an image of the center portion of the front page of the October 31, 1938, edition of The New York Times. The headline that is illustrated here is "Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact" with a subhead "Many Flee Homes to Escape 'Gas Raid From Mars'--Phone Calls Swamp Police at Broadcast of Wells Fantasy". The article is about the hysteria reported after Orson Welles'broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. It makes reference to "thousands" of people taken by hysteria, traffic jams and swamped phone systems from areas as sundry as New York, NY, Dayton, OH, Princeton, NJ, and even as far as San Francisco, CA, and New Orleans, LA.

Also of note is the headline to the right, which reads "OUSTED JEWS FIND REFUGE IN POLAND AFTER BORDER STAY" which may serve to illustrate just how much the burgeoning second world war was on the minds of the listeners, who would have remembered the Czechoslovakian crisis and the Munich Accord, signed one month earlier.

The image here is intended to illustrate the extent to which the War of the Worlds panic was reported. It is occasionally alleged that the panic was a hoax, or that the panic was limited to a few small, isolated incidents. Contemporary news accounts indicate that the panic was real, and took in "thousands," not just a few.

Technical information: 560x257 JPEG greyscale image, 13KiB

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