Orson Welles causes a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds”…a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.
On the night before Halloween, 1938, young Orson Welles and the older John Houseman (who later played Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase movie and TV series) broadcast the drama. The Mercury Theater.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. . . .Well, I . . . hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern Arabian Nights. Well, I just got here. I haven’t had a chance to look around yet. I guess that’s it. Yes, I guess that’s the . . . thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have 
struck on its way down. What I can see of the . . . object itself doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. . . .”
In the days following the adaptation, there was widespread outrage in the media. The program’s news-bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.[3] The episode secured Welles’s fame as a dramatist.
