On Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System, actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles aired an adaptation of H. G. Well's novel, The War of the Worlds (1898). They only announce that this was a radio production, and an act of fiction, before starting the program. For any listener who joined after the show started, it sounded like an actual radio broadcast. People panicked and pandemonium ensued. The cast had to sneak out of the CBS building out the back door in order to avoid the newspaper reporters, photographers, and police. 

Today, it's hard to imagine that a radio broadcast about an alien invasion would create this kind of panic. In this class, we will talk about the actors, the original novel and the radio adaptation, what lengths listeners went to to avoid the aliens, and how this one broadcast has become an iconic moment in entertainment history.