My mother heard this and her reaction was "Will I be able to get to work tomorrow?"

Widespread is an overstatement. The panic was a small number of people as it is with every panic. It's the same kind of numbers we all saw with people during covid wearing masks wile walking or driving alone. Somewhere in that 0.25% range which is high enough to be concerning, but low enough that most of them would look around and see that no one else is panicking.

@CuriositiesObscura

3 ай бұрын

Thanks for sharing your insights! Always good to learn something new every day!

Except...it didn't happen. The "panic" was a story concocted afterward for publicity.

@dermotlillis6180

3 ай бұрын

Very true, it was also exaggerated by the paper media to damage the radio media because radio was becoming much more accessible to homes allowing people to get their news from them rather than the papers

Sorry folks, nice try but it's mainly BS. As has been proven many times, at most a tiny handful of people took the broadcast for real. Most people who heard the broadcast knew it was an adaptation of a work of fiction and accepted it as such. The fact that newspapers blared out stories of mass panic shows that sensationalism sells. As for Orson Welles, he was happy to play along with the fiction - a great boost for both his career and the radio show he produced. BTW, having the fictitious story presented as a newscast was not new. 13 years before Orson Welles's broadcast, in 1926 the witty Ronald Knox did a fake broadcast on the British BBC saying that anachists were rioting in London and they had destroyed the clocktower Big Ben. This "broadcast" was in a comedy show... but a tiny number of listeners thought it was real. Just as a very tiny few took Welles's broadcast seriously.