Spooked!

Spooked!  How a Radio Broadcast and The War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America

by Gail Jarrow

Fake news.  We’ve all heard the term.  “News” that has been made up to deceive or scare the reader or listener.   Well on October 30, 1938, people across the nation were fooled into believing that the world was being invaded by Martians.  Silly? Maybe, but think about it:   if television and the internet didn’t exist and you got most of your entertainment and news by radio, imagine how you’d feel if the program you were listening to was interrupted by breaking news?  The broadcaster says strange cylinder have landed near Grovers Mill, New Jersey.  Suddenly these beings appear and start to kill everything in their path.  Earth is doomed – you can hear masses of people being murdered.  Would you panic?  Would you flee? And how would you feel once you found out it was just a radio play, based on a book by H.G. Wells?  And you’ve been fooled.  Badly. 

I've known about Orson Welles' radio broadcast, but I confess that I had some misconceptions about it.  I had always been told that masses of people panicked and fed the area around Grovers Mills, but Jarrow argues that while many people may have been fooled and scared by the broadcast, there wasn't a mass panic and traffic jams all over the place.  I thought Jarrow did a great job of laying the background for the broadcast and talking about the repercussions.  This was a fun piece of nonfiction, and I look forward to recommending it to my students.