Lou’s View – Jan. 23, 2014
The Day The Aliens Landed
By Lou Bernard
Aliens! Aliens are attacking! Run for your life!
Not really. But I’ve always wanted to say that.
In spite of all my scientific investigation, I have yet to turn up a provable UFO. Teen Paranormal, the teen group for investigating the unexplained, has recently learned how to investigate UFO sightings, but they haven’t actually seen one yet. But there was an interesting incident in the fall of 1938.
You’ve probably, at some point in your life, heard about the War of the Worlds radio broadcast on October 30, 1938. Orson Welles staged a radio show of the H.G. Wells novel “War of the Worlds,” which involved an attack from Mars. To what extent this caused actual panic has been debated, though it’s thought that people mistook the fictional program for a real broadcast, and went berserk over it. In more modern times, Miley Cyrus has been working on creating the same effect.
However, it was an interesting night here in Clinton County. Clinton County didn’t react quite as vehemently as some other parts of the county, though there was some activity. The newspaper reported it the next day. The headline said,”Invasion From Mars, Radio Broadcast, Frightens Thousands: Local People Alarmed by Vivid Drama of Air Attack.”
They theorized that there wasn’t too much panic because the majority of the county were fans of Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist who was performing on the opposite channel. A ventriloquist. On the radio. I mean, I could do that. Think about it. The majority of the county was so starved for entertainment that they tuned in to a ventriloquist….On the radio. I’ll just give you a moment to digest that.
Okay, moving along. The article began,”A realistic radio broadcast disturbed many residents of this vicinity, but failed to produce the panic and hysteria that prevailed in some of the other regions.”
Nobody called the police, or the newspapers at the time. A few people seem to have panicked quietly at home, but for the most part, people stayed calm. There was a part of the program that staged a speech from the Secretary of the Interior, who advised New Jersey citizens to evacuate before the aliens got them, and people didn’t react with much excitement. (Admittedly, I’d be okay with aliens taking out New Jersey.)
There was a little excitement, though, throughout the night. A woman in Mill Hall was said to have fainted when she heard the non-existent news about the alien invasion. Presumably, she woke up to find out that she hadn’t been vaporized yet.
In Lock Haven, a woman on Pine Street was out on her porch, chatting about the broadcast with her neighbors. Both of them stayed fairly calm about it at first, assuming that invading Martians would have no immediate designs on Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. But when the woman saw a falling star, she screamed—The paper reported that she was “scared nearly to death,” because fright was still terminal in those days.
The next morning when people got up, they found out the planet was still pretty much here, and were embarrassed about it. The article said,”There was many a sheepish grin in town this morning among those who heard the broadcast, but the same group swore up and down that they had never heard anything that was more realistic or credible.”
And at the same time, there was a lot of debate about whether or not it was responsible to have the media run a show like that, which frightened people. And the media immediately got more responsible, and continued doing the right thing to this day. Just kidding; actually we invented reality TV and Larry King.
But eventually everyone calmed down, and announced that they were going on with the Halloween parade that night. The Halloween parade didn’t get attacked by aliens, either. To my disappointment.
