On Halloween night, WCHL presented a special “Chapel Hill” version of ‘The War of the Worlds.’

Listen to the WCHL version of ‘The War of the Worlds’ Below:

 

A 23-year-old narrator named Orson Welles delivered a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938.

It is the most famous (and infamous) radio broadcast of all time.

Hear that original broadcast of The War of the Worlds here.

It aired on the Columbia Broadcasting System on Welles’ weekly show, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.  Orson Welles began the broadcast by paraphrasing the book in order to update it to contemporary times:

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence men went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs … In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crossley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.”

Of course, the broadcast did open with an announcer clearly recognizing the program as an adaptation of the novel.

What happened as a result of The War of the Worlds broadcast is disputed.  For years, stories claimed that the broadcast sent millions in the United States into mass hysteria.  In 2013, Slate published a lengthy rebuttal to those claims.