SEQUEL TO RADIO HOAX

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21183, 2 November 1938, Page 7

SEQUEL TO RADIO HOAX

AMERICA SWEPT BY HYSTERIA Proof of the Influence of Radio Scientific Inquiry Proposed □nlted Press Association —By Electric Telegraph—Copyright (Received November 1, 8.5 p,m.) NEW YORK, October 31. The extent of the hysteria arising from the broadcast of H. G. Wells’s play “The War of the Worlds”, was so great that the radio hoax has become a matter of extreme national importance. Never in the history of the United States has such a wave of terror and panic swept the continent. A Federal Communications Commission has begun an Inquiry not only into the incident itself, but also into the question of wireless as the single greatest potential force for the disruption of national life in the event of a real emergency. Observers commented that the panic couid have happened only in America and contrasted it with London’s calmness during the recent real threat of war. Reactions of People A Pittsburgh businessman returned home during the broadcast and snatched a bottle of poison from his hysterical wife’s hands. She struggled to drink the poison screaming: “I would rather die this way than in war.” Police struggled to quiet thousands of people screaming and praying in an agony of fear. Many were wearing wet cloths round their faces to counter the Martians’ gas. Two people died of heart failure. Fifteen cases of shock were admitted to the Newark Hospital alone. Lights failed in a mountain town called Concrete just as the announcer, was choked by poison gas after making, what he said might be his last broadcast ever made. All the inhabitants of Concrete took to the hills. Hysteria Spreads Like Flames Mass hysteria spread over the nation like a flame. One police station handled 4,000 telephone calls within an hour and another 3,000. Many rang to volunteer their services. “My God,” shouted one man, “We’ve got to stop this awful thing.” Scores of New York doctors and nurses volunteered their services and hundreds of motorists, picking up reports by radio in their cars, dashed inland, disregarding the signal lights of the police. Many declared they had seen Martian monsters and described the explosions from the death ray guns, shrivelling troops sent against them to cinders. At Harvard College, North Carolina, five students fainted and others fought for phones to appeal to parents to come and rescue them. A weeping woman called at Princeton University for her son crying: “Hell has broken out; it’s hot even where I am.” Alert Professors Princeton Professors of geology laden with equipment hurried to secure specimens of the n eteor reported to have fallen at Duch.ieck. A woman divorce plaintiff at Reno collapsed, fearing that her husband in New York would be killed, while the man started east to aid the wife he was divorcing. Unexpected Reactions Mr Orson Wells who produced the play was a little dazed. He commented “and we were doubtful about broadcasting the play, thinking perhaps that people would be bored listening to a story so improbable.” Throughout the day new items were coming in adding more utterly fantastic details to an already seemingly too fantastic story of individuals’ reaction through moments of great stress. An elderly lady at Salt Lake City being reassured by telephone that the Martian attack was only a ••ireless entertainment observed with satisfaction “Well, if it did not do anything else, it certainly made plenty of people pray.” Prompted to Pray A man at Princeton, New Jersey, receiving a telephone call in the midst of the panic, slammed down the receiver screaming Impatiently “The world’s coming to an end, and 1 have a lot to do.” A woman at Jersey City telephoned to the police to ask whether she would be safe from attack.if she closed the windows. A group of bridge players at Union Town, Pennsylvania, went down on their knees and prayed. Members of the editorial staff of a Memphis newspaper rushed to the office and prepared to issue a special edition, after they had received reports that cities were being bombed and Memphis would be next. Steadiness in Many Quarters Interestingly enough, not all the people who believed the broadcast reacted hysterically. Thousands calmly volunteered to the police including soldiers, sailors, civilians, doctors ..nd nurses, all wanting ‘o know just one thing: “Where can we be of help?” University Psychology Professors today have been improving an opportunity by diagnosing the exact reason for the panic. They agree that it was due to improper listening. It is perhaps not so bad a case as they make out, since had the panic-stricken listeners only remained at the radios to the end of the broadcast, they would have been completely reassured that the Martians coming from the planet where there are no microbes, were all killed by germs of the common cold.

New York residents, who after their Sunday dinners, had settled down to a quiet evening at home, listening to the radio, were mildly surprised when a programme of dance music was inter-

rupted by a news bulletin that an Observatory Professor had just no'.ed a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars. Surprise became, in turn, amazement, consternation and panic, when bulletins followed relating to the landing of a meteor in. a nearby New Jersey town, killing 15,000 persons. Then the discovery that it was not a meteor, but a metal cylinder containing strange creatures from Mars, armed with death rays to fight the Inhabitants of the earth. The police, unable to reach the radio by ’slephone, sent a squad car there, and discovered it was Just a dramatisation of H. G. Wells’s fantasy “The War of the Worlds.” The excited licteners had failed to iear or had misunderstood the preliminary explanation.