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| The cold, dry, rocky plains of Mars |
A little belief can go a long, long way even if what you believe isn't even true. Case in point: We know now that Mars is a cold, dead, dry world that may have warmer, wetter and capable of supporting some sort of life in the long distant past. But we only know it because for centuries we were trying to prove the exact opposite.
Not that long ago many people -- and even scientists -- believed that not only was Mars capable of
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| H.G. Wells |
Herbert George “H.G.“ Wells was one of them. Greatly influenced by opinions of American astronomer Percival Lowell, he wrote the now classic science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds in 1898. Trained as a scientist himself, Wells was a big believer in technology. In fact, a futurist, he thought that all of mankind’s problems could and ultimately would be solved through it. However, it was also clear to him that an over dependence on machines would sooner or later leave people more or less physically helpless. A big fan of Huxley and Darwin whose notion of evolution was still a point of extreme controversy during the Victorian age, Wells depiction of the Martians he created for War of the Worlds was as
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| Wells' Martians |
much a speculation on the possible evolution of human beings as it was a speculation of what advanced forms of extra-terrestrials might be like. Wells’ Martians were big brains with hands. The hands sported overly extended fingers closely resembling tentacles. They didn’t need legs because they rode in all sorts of different machines. This might sound absurd. But all you have to see today is some fat-ass rich guy riding on a Segway instead of walking to start wondering if maybe H.G. had a point.
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| Martian tripods |
Taking into account that Wells was writing during the low tech horse and buggy era at the end of the 19th
century, he came up with some pretty cool Martian technology. His best was the Martian fighting machine. This was a walking tripod with a metal hood on top that carried a Martian driver. Each space cylinder that landed carried enough materials to build three of them, and all of the tripods carried standard equipment such as heat rays, tubes for dispensing a heavy-duty poison gas called “black smoke,” and dangling arms that resembled their tentacle-like fingers for grabbing stuff. Some of the tripods were also equipped with large baskets big enough to carry the poor Earthlings the Martians would catch, and then later use for food.
The tripods were like Flash Gordon’s spaceship or Commando Cody‘s rocket suit. They were beautiful impossibilities that couldn’t possibly work, but were so cool you had to love them. Funny thing is that no two artists seemed to be able to agree on what a tripod actually looked like. Of course H.G. described them. But those descriptions were certainly open to interpretation. Some were ultra cool. Some looked
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| Is this a water tower, or a MARTIAN? |
like boilers standing on legs. When my son was a little kid, he thought that all the water towers in town were actually Martian tripods. So I’d sing “Ooo Laa!” which was the sound the tripods made and the poor little tike would freak out.
To this day I can’t look at a water tower without seeing a Martian standing there.
The War of the Worlds has never been out of print since it was first published in 1898. That’s a long run for a novel. Part of the reason is because of the cool stuff, including the monsters, the tripods, the heat rays and so forth. But another part is because its so scary. I mean, really. Strange, scary-looking monsters land in an odd spaceship and start frying anyone who comes near to them before climbing out of the pit in some juggernaut machine that can’t be stopped. Attempts to fight back prove futile and ultimately all you can do is run for your life. Two other novels I can think of that have also never been out of print, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, work on the exact same levels. Nobody likes the unknown. Nobody likes being helpless. Nobody likes being out of control. Unless, that is, it’s in a story and then people love it.
One reason The War of the Worlds worked so well is because it seemed plausible at the time and played
on certain fears. Playing off of the works of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percy Lowell’s descriptions of the mysterious canals and outrageous conclusions popularized the notion of Mars as an older world with sentient beings running around on it. Further, Darwin’s theories of evolution seemed to support the idea of an older species evolving into a superior one. Add to these trendy notions a certain superstitious and unreasoning but wide-spread popular fear that New Year’s Eve 1899 would herald the apocalypse (and you thought that Y2K was an original idea!). Since Great Britain was at the height of it’s ruthless imperialist military power, it seemed the only thing that could bring her to her knees was an invasion by even more ruthless imperialists with better technology and superior weapons. And to the superior-minded, stiff-necked Brits of the Victorian age, that would be the apocalypse.
Another reason The War of the Worlds was so effective is because of the attention to detail that H.G. put into the work. He figured that since the Martian’s were on Earth on a mission of conquest, of course they’d land in England since it was -- at the time -- the most powerful nation on the planet. Their ultimate target would therefore be London. So he landed them outside London in a country town called
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| The British army bites the dust |
When the book came out, first in serialized form and then as a hardcover novel, it was a hit with both
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| The Woking Station Martian |
audiences and critics. But did anyone believe it? Science fiction was a brand-new genre. They don’t call Wells its father because it was already around when he set pen to paper. So you can bet there was a good amount of people who were confused by it all. Most of The War of the Worlds sounds factual. And it all happened in real towns that were exactly like his descriptions -- before the Martians incinerated them, of course. So much of it happened in the town of Woking, that an artist named Michael Condron made a 23-foot tall sculpture of a Martian fighting machine and placed it in Crown Passage near the Woking Railway Station where it stands today. Is this a case of art imitating life? Did anyone really believe the events of The War of the Worlds were an actual possibility?
The answer to that came 40 years later, and it came with a vengeance.
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| Orson Welles |
On Sunday night, October 30, 1938, a 23-year old actor/director named Orson Welles took to the microphone to begin the latest episode of his weekly radio show, The Mercury Theater on the Air. Welles was already a popular radio personality having gained notoriety from roles such as The Shadow, which he played opposite Agnus Moorhead. But The Mercury Theater wasn’t just another radio show. It was Wells’ brainchild, a weekly
hour-long drama series showcasing classic novels such as Alexandre
Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Considered too “high brow” by some critics, the show was not the highest rated on the air. Nonetheless, due mostly to Welles popularity and influence, The Mercury Theater had gained a prime time Sunday night eight o’clock slot on the CBS radio network.
Mercury Theater presented straight-forward radio dramas that tried to remain as faithful to the novels they were based on as time allowed. But the October 30th show was different. For Halloween, Orson wanted to do something totally different. So he produced The Mercury Theater’s adaptation of H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds. And the way he did it was a total deviation from anything that had been done on the radio before.
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| New York City 1938 |
The Mercury Theater’s War of the Worlds wasn’t set in Victorian England, but, rather, in present-day, 1938 New York. And instead of a sand pit near Woking, the cylinder falls on a farm near the fictitious town of Grover’s Mill in New Jersey. But these weren’t the significant changes. Those were provided by the brilliant script written by Howard Koch and re-written and revised by Welles himself that changed the story from a first-person narrative into a series of radio news bulletins that at first break into and then take over a fictitious “program of dance music,” as the announcer says, “featuring Ramon Raquello and his orchestra broadcasting live from the Meridian Room at the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown New York City.”
Following the opening credits, Orson Welles began the show with lines more of less taken from the H.G. Wells novel. “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own,” Wells Began. “…Yet across an immense ethereal gulf , minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios…”
Up came the music of Ramon Raquello playing a tune called La Cumparsita. But not long after the orchestra began to play, an announcer broke in with the first news bulletin supposedly from the Intercontinental Radio News Service telling of the observation by astronomers of violent gas eruptions regularly occurring on the surface of Mars.
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| Edgar Bergan |
Meanwhile, over on NBC, the majority of the Sunday night radio audience was listening to the opening monologue by ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and his dummy sidekick Charlie McCarthy, stars of the Chase and Sanborn Hour. This was the hottest show with the biggest ratings and the greatest audience on the radio at the time which meant there weren’t many people listening to the Mercury Theater’s opening. Instead, they were laughing along with Bergan and McCarthy.
What they didn’t know was that ultimately the joke would be on them.
The Chase and Sanborn Hour was a typical variety show. It opened with a comedy monologue from the show host and then segued into a skit or a song by it’s guest star. On October 30, the featured singer was operatic singer Nelson Eddy performing Song of the Vagabonds. Eddy’s baritone, operatic style wasn’t exactly a crowd pleaser so listeners began tuning away once he began to sing. And when they tuned in to CBS, they got what sounded like a whole series of authentic-sounding newscasts reporting on the unbelievable story that Earth was being invaded by an army from Mars.
It’s estimated that as many as a million radio listeners thought it was true. In fact, they bought into it
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| Anybody see a Martian? |
hook, line and sinker. Panic and mass hysteria broke out, especially on the east coast. Police departments across the country were inundated with frenzied callers, some who swore they could smell the Martian’s “black smoke” and demanded gas masks; others who claimed they could see the bright flashes of the Martian’s heat rays going off on the horizon and wanted to know what to do about it. People in New Jersey were seen running from their homes with wet towels wrapped around their faces to protect them from the black smoke. Phones were ringing off the hooks at radio stations and newspaper offices, and tons of people jumped in their cars in an attempt to escape from the advancing Martians, totally jamming the roads. There were even rumors of the suicides of several people who could not face the fate that would be dealt by the Martian invaders. These, however, were never verified or proved.
And all this frenzy wasn’t contained to the east coast. Some of the worse hysteria happened in a town called Concrete, Washington on the west coast. So the story goes, at the same time as the Martians were reported charging through the countryside in their tripod fighting machines having just beaten the U.S. army in a fight at Grover‘s Mill, a transformer blew up on a power pole plunging the whole town of Concrete into darkness. Of course everyone thought it was the Martians. Some of the worst hysteria of all happened there.
My mother was seven years old on the night of the broadcast. The whole family lived in Los Angeles in 1938. While the rest of the family was listening to the radio, Mom said she was taking a bath to be ready for school the next day. Suddenly my grandmother burst into the bathroom in a frenzy. We had relatives in Buffalo, New York, and Grandma, so mom says, was panic stricken, screaming and whimpering about how the Martians may have gotten them. Mom said she could hear her sisters crying in another room, and the voice of one her brothers trying to comfort them. Cowering into the hot sudsy water of her bath, Mom said that poor old grandma scared the holy crap out of her that night.
Mom wasn’t alone. Orson Welles’ Martian invasion scared the crap out of a lot of people.
It’s hard today to believe that so many people could be gullible enough to fall for something like that. But there were several distinct reasons why it worked. Radio was an extremely popular form of entertainment and information at the end of the 1930s, but it was also a relatively new media. No one had ever aired phony newscasts before, so there
was no reason for the radio audience to think that they weren’t listing to something genuine. Add to that the fact that world tensions were running very high in the late 30s over the fear of another world war. So the idea of an invasion wasn’t far fetched. You might assume that the idea of Martians was far fetched, but even that wasn’t true. Most people believed in Percival Lowell’s canals, even if they had no idea who he was. The canals of Mars were almost part of the collective consciousness. Even if scientists and astronomers following Lowell pretty much disproved his theories, people still believed in the canals the same way they believed in other improvable places like heaven or hell. And if there were canals it only follows that there would be Martians to build them.
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| The Mercury Theater on the Air |
But you can’t take anything away from Orson Welles, either. The day after the so-called “night that panicked America,” Welles was charged with calming a country angry at having been scammed. In a 1970s interview he said, “The next day there wasn’t a CBS executive to be found.” So when an angry press descended on the New York City CBS Network headquarters, Welles had to face them. “Personally,” he said in the same interview, “I thought it was funny as hell!”
In the official interview filmed by newsreel cameras on Halloween day, 1938, Orson Welles looks humble and relatively shocked that such a thing could have happened. But that was just him doing what he did best…acting. It’s doubtful he was shocked since there is almost overwhelming evidence that he planned it. Orson knew that his Mercury Theater was a ratings underdog. Hell, the show couldn’t even find a sponsor. He also knew the listeners patterns. He knew that Edgar Bergan fans would tune in for the monologue. He also knew that a lot of them wouldn’t stay for a singer like Nelson Eddy, whose big baritone voice sounded like hammered tin due to the technological level of the average speaker in even a high-end radio set of the late 30s.
So he also had to know that only a few people would hear the lead-in to the show. Since there was no sponsor, he didn’t have to pause for commercials. It was only required that he break for station identification once. And that wasn’t done until 40 minutes into the broadcast. He knew that if the script worked and he hooked his audience, it would be the best ratings grabbing trick or treat gimmick the world had ever seen. And Orson Welles would laugh all the way to the bank.
But there was something else, too, that Orson may or may not have counted on. As it turned out, people wanted to believe in Armageddon as much as they feared it. And, apparently, they felt the same thing way about Martians.
And as we know, a little belief goes a long, long way.
Next Time: Martians, Monsters, Astronauts and Heroes
One Hint...THE WORST IS YET TO COME!
See you...Same Mars time, Same Mars Blog
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