Observatory tried to ease alien fears

By David Maurer

Published: October 26, 2008

With a horrified timbre in his voice, radio announcer Carl Phillips tried to describe what he was seeing to his listeners.

It was “like a gray snake, large as a bear.”

And it glistened, too, “like wet leather.”

Then he saw the thing’s face and immediately reported the horror as “indescribable.”

Listeners throughout the eastern part of the United States leaned in closer to their radio sets as Phillips provided them with word pictures of what the monsters from outer space looked like. Eyes widened as he described black eyes like a snake and saliva drooling from quivering “rimless” lips.

Infamous broadcast

It was a few minutes after 8 p.m. Oct. 30, 1938, and Orson Welles had started the infamous broadcast of an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” Long before the radio program on CBS’s Mercury Theatre concluded, a great many listeners believed Earth was being invaded by ruthless Martians.

In the aftermath of the jarring event, Princeton University professor Hadley Cantril conducted a study to discern how many people had thought the dramatization was the real thing. In his 1940 book, “Invasion from Mars,” he concluded that 6 million people heard the program.

Panicked listeners

The professor calculated that 1.7 million listeners thought it was actually happening and, of those, about 1.2 million panicked. Newspapers reported people weeping hysterically in the streets and driving cars like maniacs to escape the nonexistent invaders.

Many people living in Charlottesville and the surrounding area were taken in by the broadcast. The following evening nearly 100 people trooped into the University of Virginia’s Leander McCormick observatory to look through the telescope and reassure themselves that there was “no evidence” of combative Martians on the red planet.

Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of the airing of the program that scared the britches off so many people. It also happens to be opening night of the 21st Virginia Film Festival, which coincidentally has the theme “Aliens!” this year.

“Midway through the year, we made the uncanny discovery that opening night of the festival fell precisely on the 70th

anniversary of Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast,” said Richard Herskowitz, artistic director of the festival.

“So we approached the observatory about using their facility as a theater. We decided to play the radio broadcast in the dome room of the observatory on opening night.

“During the program people will be allowed to get up and look through the telescope and scan the skies to make sure we’re not being invaded. In many ways, it’s a commemoration of the fact that the observatory was open to the public for that very reason 70 years ago.”

Rebroadcast of the radio program will begin at 7 p.m. Thursday at the observatory. The facility will be open from 7 to 10 p.m. each night of the festival, which runs through Sunday, to host a series of experimental and independent films about space.

In the days that followed the 1938 broadcast, many people made light of the incident and poked fun at those who thought a full-scale invasion from outer space was occurring. For others, it was hardly a laughing matter.

On the 50th anniversary of the incident, John A. Houchens was interviewed for a story that ran in The Daily Progress. He was 13 when the program aired and was living on Avon Street in Charlottesville.

“There was no joke about it, it was a real scary thing,” said Houchens, who remembered feeling queasy as he sat in the living room with his mother and listened to the show. “I can get a little tense over it right now.

“The program was interrupted, and all this stuff about Martians landing started and we were just dumbfounded. I remember sitting there just numb, wondering how it was going to turn out.

“I looked to my mother for guidance, of course, and she was sitting there wringing her hands and getting more hysterical by the second. She said we had to get up to grandmother’s house, where we’d be safe. I was all for that, and I remember her pulling me along the six blocks by the arm.”

Fanny Hankins was living near UVa in 1938 and remembered police officers using bullhorns to tell everyone to remain calm. Problem was they weren’t saying if the broadcast was real or not.

One of the most disconcerting elements in the broadcast was Phillips’ breathless reporting of the Martians using a death ray as well as poison gas to kill countless people.

John W. Wilkins, a Charlottesville resident and veteran of World War I, was all too familiar with poisonous gas and he wasn’t laughing.

Wilkins grew even more somber when he received a telephone call from his hysterical daughter who was a student at William and Mary. She reported students jumping on anything moving on the roads to escape the poison gas and pleaded with her father to come rescue them.

“I had been listening to the program on the radio, and it was so real,” said Wilkins, who was 94 in 1988 when interviewed. “I told her I could hardly believe it, but I’d come.”

Wilkins rushed out of his house and took the doors off his 1935 Studebaker. He joined a lot of other people racing here and there along Virginia highways.

“I took the doors off so I could get as many of those kids in the car as possible,” Wilkins said. “I couldn’t get any sense out of that girl, the state she was in, but she had said there were about 20 others with her.

“I got there and a state trooper helped me load them. I packed them in like sardines and wrapped a rope around the car so they wouldn’t fall out and even lashed a few of them to the hood.

“When I got us back to Charlottesville, I found out it was just a hoax. The first thing I felt was relief, and then I felt real foolish.

“After I got over that, I put my car doors back on.”