WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

Here's a fun TV news report from 1978, with an interview with the owner of the Wilson farm in Grover's Mill (which was confused with the Wilmuth farm of the broadcast.)

"That night was just horrendous for this sleepy little community. We had traffic jams for miles; you just can't imagine. We have very small roads in this area, and suddenly the whole area was just inundated with traffic, with state policemen, with farmers with their pitchforks, with their rifles, with their shotguns, coming into this whole area." Henry Jeffers III, 1978

Sure sounds like pandemonium to me.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EMtCFc3py4

Sounds more like nostalgic exaggeration, from here... :wink:

- Craig

That's the sentiment of those who today deny that any panic whatsoever occurred. Shall we call them Panic Deniers?

There's a trend in history for a 'fact' to remain upheld for several decades (i.e. that the great and brave Captain Robert Falcon Scott was the paragon of British virtue) and then to be utterly torn down in subsequent decades (the later opinion that Scott was an incompetent and lethal idiot who was loathed by his men.) We seem to be in this second phase regarding War of the Worlds.

All we have is the testimony of those who were there, the members from the Mercury who answered the phones at CBS after the broadcast and talked to upset people, the town mayor and police chief (at least one of each?) who wrote to CBS and the FCC complaining that their emergency police phones were jammed for hours with people asking about the invasion, and the psychological survey conducted by Hadley Cantril at Princeton (which is today completely rejected by some since the scientific standards for writing a questionnaire, taking a sample of recipients, and doing the statistical analysis of the results were different in 1938 than they are today.)

Were the claims of a panic all hyperbole? I think not, but it will be to future historians to judge the matter with any clarity.

Terry -

Balance in all things; as the old saying goes, "Almost nothing is ever as good, or as bad, as it seems."

No "denial" here. Just the simple knowledge that:

- Insider Bill Herz said later (to myself, and German Radio's Christian Blees) that the Company was not particularly alarmed during the Broadcast. That they noted nothing unusual when they went out into the street afterwards. And that the only inclination they got that something was really up, was when reporters were waiting for them at the Mercury Theatre when they got there for a rehearsal.

- Insider John Houseman said later that the exaggerated "hysteria" was generated by the Newspapers as their chance to, in his words, "piss on radio." (Which they'd grown to hate, for stealing their place as Public Arbiters - and their ad dollars.

More here:

https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson ... teria.html

Were there some spooked listeners, and some irate phone calls? Yes. Did some Powers-That-Be try later to glom onto this, in Media and Goverment, for their own ends? Yes. But the jampacked highways, and multiple injuries, deaths and suicides, that were a part of the pop-culture legend for years? NO.

As far as waiting for the judgement of history? Well, we are over three-quarters of a century on, now.

Best,
- Craig

P.S. - Contemporaneous response from a smart listener:

https://youtu.be/nWR44p4gW4k?t=128