September 17, 2012 • 29 mins
In 1938 Orson Welles produced a series of radio dramas, including one based on "War of the Worlds." The broadcast caused a mass panic, since many believed it was a real news program. In this episode, we discuss why so many mistook the show as real.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Debling a chokerate boarding and I'm fair at out
and nowadays, at least in terms of the Internet, we're
all pretty used to, maybe even desensitized to the idea
(00:22):
of the news hoax, those bits of information that are
passed off as real news. I mean we can probably
all think of some examples of them. I think, you know,
there's always those out there about celebrities who've died when
really they haven't. And we do one of our own
every year, don't we. We do. We have an annual
April fools Day article, which is kind of a staff favorite,
I would say, picking out what it's going to be,
(00:44):
somebody gets to write it, and then um, I sit
next to tech Stuff Jonathan Strickland and he's written a
few of them before, and usually April Fool's Day, you
can hear him trying to judge if the articles passed
off is real anywhere, and which which news sites are
running it as it as a real story. But it's
always kind of fun just to help this fake out article.
(01:04):
It's usually something pretty outlandish like animated tattoos or green
Air Force one or or something that is a little
bit plausible, but not so much if you if you
think about it for a while, especially if example Fools Day,
so someone might be in danger of falling for one
of those. But we're usually not in danger of falling
for these Internet hoaxes because they're not coming from so
(01:26):
called legitimate news sources. Most of the time. A lot
of times they're passed along through social media, or you
get an email that looks like it's made to look
like a news article that was forwarded to you or
something like that. But what if these are actually proliferated
through what we consider to be legitimate media, So you
read it on a on a newspaper website that you
(01:48):
respect and read frequently, or or see it on a
news channel exactly, or hear it on the radio, And
that's kind of what happened in the situation we're about
to discuss, though it might not have been intended. As
to the ninety eight War of the World's broadcast has
been called the greatest hoaks in the history of broadcasting.
And you could call it the greatest I guess because
so many people believed it The broadcast was an original
(02:11):
play based on H. G. Wells War of the World,
a science fiction novel about a Martian invasion of the Earth,
but enough people thought it was real that it caused
mass panic, and for that reason, the situation has been
a case study for sociologists and psychologists and for media critics,
who cite it as an example of the power of
the media. But what made it so realistic in the
(02:32):
first place, and why did so many people believe it,
Especially since the broadcast was labeled upfront as fiction. They
weren't trying to fool anybody, or at least it seems
that way. So we're going to go into all of that,
and we'll also want to take a look at the
brains behind the broadcast, in particular Orson Wells. He's probably
best known for his work on Citizen Kane, one of
(02:53):
the most influential films of all time, but many people
say that this radio broadcast is what made Hollywood take
note of him in the first place, how he really
got his start. So we're going to start with him.
George Orson Wells was born May sixth, nineteen fifteen, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
into an upper middle class family. He was the second
son of Richard Wells, a successful inventor, and Beatrice Wells,
(03:15):
who was an accomplished pianist. And Orson is said to
have been pretty precocious while he was growing up, and
something of a child prodigy too. He was reading and
writing Shakespeare at age three, and at age five he
had walk on roles at the Chicago Opera. Pretty impressive,
but things in his life started to shake up a
little bit when he was around six years old. That's
when his parents separated, and when he was nine years old,
(03:38):
his mother got hepatitis and died, and after that he
traveled the world with his father a couple of times.
He went to Africa and Europe and Asia, but in
nineteen thirty his father passed away too and that left him.
That left Orson Wells and orphan at age fifteen, so
he studied at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois,
(03:59):
where he was pretty mediocre student in general, even though
he showed great interest in studying drama, so he graduated
at sixteen. He wanted to go to work in theater,
but he couldn't really break in right away, so instead
he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago for a
while and even worked as a reporter briefly, which seems
(04:20):
to be everybody's job when they a lot of reporter
openings back then another aren't now. In nine thirty one, though,
he kind of went off on a different path. He
went to Ireland and that fall he found theater work
in Dublin with the Gate Theater. He remained there for
about a year and then did a tour of Spain
and Morocco before finally heading back to Chicago. And when
he got back there, he joined Catherine Cornell's company, Theater
(04:43):
Company in nineteen thirty three and stayed with her until
about nineteen thirty four. Then he finally made it to
New York, which is where he wanted to go, and
he made his Broadway debut in nineteen thirty four in
Romeo and Juliet. But while he was getting the supporting
roles on stage, Orson sought out radio work to make
ends meet. Yeah, and soon he really made a name
for himself doing these dramatic radio performances, and he narrated
(05:07):
a new series called The March of Time for two years,
and in ninety seven he became famous as the voice
of a mysterious crime fighter on the radio show The
Shadow and Evil. He knows what evil lurks in the
heart of men. Yeah, I mean or some Wells. He
has a great voice. But as a result of the Depression,
Wells had also become involved in the Federal Theater Project,
(05:29):
which was part of the New Deal's Works Progress administration,
and through that he started working with a guy named
John Houseman, and together they worked on a couple of
avant garde productions, including a production of Macbeth with an
all African American cast and um. Their partnership continued and
developed into a pretty interesting one. Yeah. Nineteen thirty seven,
(05:52):
Wells and Houseman formed the Mercury Theater with only a
hundred dollars in capital to start with. They had a
few stage hits, and then in the summer of eight
they made a deal with CBS to produce weekly radio
dramas with the Mercury Theater cast, and they called themselves
a Mercury Theater on the Air. The program was initially
called First Person Singular, but I don't think that's stuck.
(06:12):
Kind like Mercury Theater in the Air. Better, definitely more dramatic,
but they were originally slated to run nine to ten weeks,
and the Mercury Theater broadcasts included adaptations of Dracula, a
Tale of two Cities around the world in eighty days,
so famous works. And the broadcasts were done in first
person narrative, and they incorporated things like stream of consciousness,
diaries and letters, and they also used sound effects and
(06:35):
music in an innovative way. Despite all that innovation, though,
the ratings weren't all that great at first, but the
show scheduled for October thirtieth ninety eight, the Halloween show,
War of the World was really about to change the
fate of this radio company entirely so. According to many sources,
including Richard Cavendish in History Today, Howard Kotch, who was
(06:58):
the primary on the script of this adaptation of War
of the World's privately thought that H. G. Wells book,
which was published back in was pretty dated and pretty
boring actually, and Orthan, Wells and Houseman and Cotch all
wanted to figure out how to spice it up a
little bit, make it compelling for the for the radio
format especially. Yeah, it's hard to think of a classic
(07:21):
work like War the World's needing any work but apparently
it did in this instance, and so Cotch worked on
a script for this and he banged it out in
six days. Now, we're going to stop for a second
here and tell you a little bit about the story
in case you don't know War of the Worlds, and
you can see then the differences between the script change
the original story. Right, So the original story took place
(07:43):
in England, but Kotch changed the setting to grow Over Mills,
which is a village in central New Jersey. And this
the idea behind this was to bring the spookiness of
the Martian invasion closer to home for the American listening audience.
He also presented H. G. Wells story as a series
of increasingly alarming news bulletins that start by reporting a
meteorite landing in New Jersey. Now, the news bulletins is
(08:06):
kind of like the key to the whole thing of
definitely why this hoax worked, and a lot of people
think that it was Orson's idea. We're not sure about that,
but just putting that out there. The meteorite turns out
to be this extraterrestrial capsule that opens up to reveal
terrifying creatures that burned by standards to death with heat rays. Yeah,
and then there's another twist that the capsule later reveals
(08:28):
a giant machine that starts reaking havoc in New Jersey
and New York. And as the news bulletins report more
and more Martian landings all over the country, the situation
quickly escalates into total war. Still though, when the script
was finished, I mean, it sounds like a pretty pretty
cool story, and we know the history of it now,
But when the script was done, everyone involved thought it
(08:51):
was still pretty silly and dull. Yeah. According to an
article by James Narramore in the journal Humanities, Orson almost
withdrew the project at the last minute in favor of
an adaptation of Laurena doone. But they went on a
scheduled at eight pm on October and by eight thirty
members of the Mercury Theater on the air were surprised
to find out that some people actually thought the story
(09:12):
was real. So let's look back now and try to
understand the panic that came from this radio drama. So,
looking back on some of the more extreme reactions to
the broadcast that we're going to talk about later, most
sources describe it as a quote panic or a math hysteria.
So what really happened here, Well, people basically started acting
(09:35):
really irrationally. They were trying to flee to their cars.
They were going to warn neighbors and people in churches
that the world was ending. So traffic was jammed and
communication systems were jammed because so many people were trying
to call the police and the radio stations to find
out what, what should we do? Where should we go?
And we have a few examples here of things that
(09:55):
the New York Times reported the next day, just to
kind of give you a play by play of things
that a really happened, or at least were reported to
have happened. For one thing, at least a score of
adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria. Yeah, And
in Newark, a single block at Head and Terriff and
Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their
homes with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to
(10:18):
flee from what they thought was a gas raid. And
some of them even began moving household furniture. I don't
know if they were trying to save it or blockade
their houses or just do something. And just to clarify,
people were worried about a gas raid because of the
giant machine Sarah mentioned before was supposed to be spring
poison gas in the story on the radio, so they
(10:39):
thought that they had to protect themselves. The switchboard of
the New York Times was overwhelmed by about eight hundred
and seventy five calls. A man who called from Dayton, Ohio, asked, quote,
what time will it be the end of the world.
With so many of these calls coming into the newspapers,
a lot of papers found it advisable to follow up
on them and see if there was any truth to
(11:01):
reports despite the fantastic content. So finally the Associated Press
decided to send out the following bulletin at eight forty
eight pm. And here here it goes note to editors
queries to newspapers from radio listeners throughout the United States
tonight regarding reported meteor fall which killed a number of
New Jersey it its are the result of a studio dramatization.
(11:25):
The a P and then the police stations also had
to issue statements so that the officers knew what was
going on. So here's an example of what the New
Jersey State Police put out they teletyped the following quote
note to all receivers w ABC broadcast as drama regarding
the section being attacked by residents of Mars period imaginary
(11:48):
affair period end quote. It's it's brief and to the point,
and I like the addition of the imaginary fair at
the end. But just to make sure, just to make sure, guys,
this is not for real. But it's sort of hard
to tell exactly how many people were part of this
so called mass panic. The New York Times made reference
(12:08):
to thousands of people, and a lot of sources make
a reference to the generic millions. And you'll see estimates
that about half of the six million people who heard
the broadcast believed it was true, and about half of
those people actually panicked. So that leaves us with approximately
one point two million people. But not everyone thinks the
(12:30):
numbers were really that high. That's true. Some experts believed
that these inflated numbers are the result of just a
lot of hype. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael
Sucklau wrote that quote, the panic was neither widespread nor
as serious as many have believed at the time or since.
I mean, nobody died, nobody was killed or committed suicide,
(12:50):
so there weren't those results from it. But he says
that our perception could be the result of a couple
of things. For one thing, it could be just the
media loving and really just making a big deal out
of the story. You know, it was a story that
a lot of people wanted to read and they put
it out there. Another possibility is that it was just
inaccurate reporting on the part of survey respondence. A lot
of people were surveyed after the fact to kind of
(13:12):
study the situation and find out what really happened. So
whatsuckle I was saying here is that people after the
fact may have claimed that they heard the broadcast when
they actually didn't. They might have just seen their neighbor
panicking and done the same yeah, or heard the story
and decided to pass it along. Um, maybe they just
wanted to feel part of it. Well, So, regardless of
how many people did panic, the fact remains that a
(13:36):
lot of people really did believe that the War of
the World's broadcast was real. But why did they believe that?
Why would people believe this story about a Martian invasion
just because they heard it on the radio. That question
is especially pertinent since the program started out with a
very clear introduction, this is how it this is how
it went orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on Air
(13:59):
presents the Are of the Worlds by H. G. Wells,
And to add to that, a couple of times in
the middle of the broadcast they say you're listening to
an original dramatization by Mercury Theater on the Air of
War of the Worlds by H. G. Well So it
seems like if you caught one of those parts it
would be pretty clear that it was it was fiction.
(14:20):
But there are a few theories as to why people
thought that this was real. The first theory posits that
people just came into the program too late and didn't
hear that opening line. So, as we mentioned, ratings for
the Mercury Theater on the Air weren't that great at
the time. In their time slot, they had to compete
with the more popular Chase and Sandborn Hour on NBC.
So after that opening line of this broadcast, the broadcast
(14:43):
shifts to a weather report that transitions into a music
program uh performance of Raymond Roquello and his Orchestra, So
you're listening to the seemingly normal radio program for a
good couple of minutes before the first news interruption about
gas eruptions on Mars actually occur. Hers. So the theory
is that this news interruption was timed, perhaps purposely timed
(15:05):
perfectly to the commercial break of the Chase and Sandborn Hour.
So people would have been flipping around during the commercial
break as we often do easy Latin music listening, and
decided to stick around for a minute exactly um and
so when they were switching channels, when they switched to CBS,
they would have just heard this annything later than gentlemen,
(15:26):
from the Meridian Room in the Park claus Of Hotel
in New York, today, we bring you the music of
Raymond Ricuello and the doctors show the touch of the
finish Raymond Ricuello leadt with LA company, Ladies and gentlemen,
(15:56):
We interrupt our program of dance music to bring you
a special bulletoo, from the undercontinent of a radio on you.
At twenty minutes before a central time, Professor Farrell of
the Mount Gettings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions
of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.
The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving
(16:16):
towards the Earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pearson of the
Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and describes the phenomenon
as quote like a jet of blue flame shots m
a gun unquote. We now return you to the music
of Ramon Rocquelo playing for you in the Meridean room
of the Park Laza Hotel situated in downtown New York,
(16:45):
so you can see there where where it would have
sounded just like a normal interruption. It does sound like
a real interruption. And the fact that Mercury Theater on
the air was still unsponsored at that point really helped
because there weren't any commercials breaking in to remind people
that they were actually just watching a show. Also, there
are a few other effects that took place during the
show that really added to the reality of all of it.
(17:09):
The interviews with real sounding experts like Professor Pearson, a
noted astronomer, Lloyd Gray and natural history museum expert, and
also a man on the street. You know things that
real radio news programs were doing at the time. Yeah,
and the interviews they sounded really kind of authentic. I thought,
at least listening to this broadcast with the interviewer asking
(17:31):
people to speak up and things like that, interrupting each other,
it sounds very natural. It doesn't sound like something that
would have been rehearsed and performed. It's not totally perfect,
I guess, and the sound effects of background noise kind
of add to that authenticity. So here's an example of
an interview that would illustrate this point. Would you mind
(17:52):
Benny one side place back? Here's Mr Willmots, owner of
the bond here. You may have some interesting fact to it.
Let moment, would you please tell the radio audience as
much as you remember this rather unusual visitor that dropped
in your backyard as step posted. Please, ladies and gentlemen,
this is Mr Willman Well, I wass sisting in the
(18:13):
radio post in louder. Please find me a louder please
poses Yes, I was listening to the radio and kind
of drowsing. A professor fellow was talking about Mars. So
I was half dozen and half yes, yes, this woman,
and then what happened? Well, as I was saying I
was listening to the radio kind of halfway. Yes, this
willen and then you saw something? Not first off, I
(18:35):
heard something? And what did you hear? Hissing sound like this,
kind of like a fourth of July rocket? Yes, then
what I turned my head out the window and would
have sworn I was to sleep and dreaming. Yes, I've
seen a kind of greenish streak, and then zingo stopping
smack the ground knocked me clear out of my chair. Well,
(18:55):
why are you frightened, Mr Willman, Well, I'm quite sure
I reckon. I was kind of r Thank you, mister Wilma,
thank you very much. Best fladding ladies and gentlemen. You've
just heard Mr Wilmot's owner the farm where this thing
has fallen. That type of on the spot coverage was
also familiar to people, so the broadcast really took advantage
(19:15):
of that fact. Since the Hindenburg explosion in n seven,
people were used to the on the spot, guy on
the street kind of news coverage, and some even say
that orson Welles had the actors listened to those older
broadcasts so they knew exactly what they were trying to replicate,
kind of studied them and Finally, another theory as to
(19:37):
why people would have believed this hoax is that listeners
were just vulnerable at this time because of what was
going on in the world. And I mean, we have
kind of talked about and going especially through the New
York Times stuff, and it's kind of amusing to see
in some cases, at least the way people reacted or
the way the police department reacted. But some of the
issues that were going on, we're pretty serious. I mean,
(19:58):
for one thing, a lot of people point to anxiety
that may have been latent in the population at this
time after years of economic depression. Also, the Second World
War was looming in Europe, so that had people on edge.
And in fact, the show aired just after the Munich crisis,
which was a war scare, which may have caused some
people to think that the invasion wasn't actually extraterrestrial it
(20:19):
was just a human war, which actually is scary enough.
It is scary. And regardless of exactly why people believed
this radio drama, whether they thought it was an enemy
invasion or an alien invasion, they did believe it and
it led to some not so great publicity for CBS. Consequently,
and initially for Orson Welles too, so he had given
the final word and the broadcast basically saying that it
(20:42):
was all just a story and CBS's version of a
good Halloween joke essentially, but a lot of people were
angry when they realized it was fiction. That FCC issued
a statement calling the program quote regrettable. Lawsuits were drawn up,
even H. G. Wells threatened to sue for them its
use the quote misuse of his novel, and CBS had
(21:03):
to come out and publicly apologize and promised not to
create any quote simulated news broadcast that could cause harm.
So there was a lot of backtracking immediately after after
the show came out. There was an Orson Wells even
retreated from public view for a little while. But actually,
once the desk settled, it became very clear that this
broadcast really put him on the map at the young
(21:24):
age of twenty three. The Mercury Theater on the Air
continued for a while and even got the sponsorship of
the Campbell Soup Company, so they went from being a small,
unsponsored show to really having a new name family fund
kind of. Yeah. Well, they got moved to a better
time slot and they were renamed The Campbell Playhouse, so
they had a little backing behind them. Orson Wells also
got a contract with R. Chaos Studios and moved to
(21:46):
Hollywood to write, produce, direct, and act in Citizen Kane.
And of course he made a lot of other films too,
so he was really prolific in that respect. Hard Cotch
also went into film and had a very successful career.
He received an awesome here in nineteen forty four for
the Casablanca screenplay, and even H. G. Wells finally changed
(22:07):
his tune. The controversy spurred renewed interest in his novel.
I mean, it's one of those any publicity is good
publicity kind of cases, I think, and he came to
realize that. Yeah. So in retrospect it seems like a
genius move because of the publicity it did get for
all these people, and many saw it as such at
the time. I read one take on it that said,
(22:28):
if you weren't fooled by it, you probably thought this
whole thing was genius, especially if you saw your neighbor
running out right, and if you were, if you were
the neighbor running out, if you were fooled by it,
then you were probably one of the ones who were
outraged and thought it was really, really a bad thing
to do. And I think that's probably true of most hoaxes. Yeah,
if you're in on it, it's cool. If not, if
(22:49):
your feelings are hurt, your feelings may be hurt and
you may feel a little bit silly about it. But
I don't know. It's a it's an interesting question. Since
we weren't around then, do you think that you would
have fallen one for those hoax Sarah? Well, hopefully I
would have been a careful listener and I would maybe
pick up on some of the clues that it wasn't real. Um,
if you would have been there exactly at eight pm
(23:11):
to hear the intro, yeah, i'd have my clocks that
I'd be like one of the old fashioned pictures where
the family is sitting in front of the radio waiting
for the show to be on. Um. I don't know, though,
I'm not sure. I'm not sure what I would have done.
What about yourself, Yeah, I'm not sure either. I would
like to think that I wouldn't be fooled, but you'd
be out there with a towel over your head. Maybe,
(23:32):
Unless I wouldn't be out there but I'd definitely be
checking things out. I might make a phone call. I
can't be sure. It's interesting to wonder about, and I
am interested to know what our listeners think. Is there
is a good one. Um, how would you have reacted
if you heard the War of the World's Radio We
may have to put that one out there, but I
think before we can find that out before we sign
(23:55):
off today. Well, it's worth mentioning that there have been
some other more recent War of the World's Panics, and
including one in nineteen forty nine involving a broadcast that
took place on Radio Quito in Ecuador, but this one
was actually deadly. Thousands of people rioted in the streets.
Some people thought that monsters were actually invading the country,
and some people thought that it might actually be neighboring
(24:15):
Peru invading. So some similar things going on at the
time as far as what people thought. Um. After discovering
that it was all a hoax, though, mobs attacked and
torched the radio station, killing twenty people, and since then
there's been other similar hoaxes around the world, one in Buffalo,
New York in nineteen sixty eight, one in Providence, Rhode
(24:35):
Island in nineteen seventy four and one in northern Portugal
in nineteen eighty eight, so these things still happened. I
noticed though, there hasn't been one of these radio hoaxes
since the Internet became pretty common. And I wonder now
if it would just be put down pretty pretty quickly,
you know, if the flames would be put out before
it got to the point of people rioting. But I
(24:57):
don't know it could it could accelerate, So if you
think about it, it's true. I would encourage people to
listen to the broadcast. I listened to the whole thing,
and I think Sarah did too, and um I listened
to a couple of times actually, and I heard different
things both times. It was interesting to sit there and
imagine what it would be like to, uh have that
as your form of entertainment. Yeah, either either enjoying it
(25:19):
as fictional entertainment, knowing it with such, or trying to
imagine what the people who thought it was a real
news report were actually thinking. And you may recognize little
bits and pieces of it here. It's been sampled in
popular culture. For example, if you if there are any
fans of the band Pin Back out there, They sampled
parts of this for their song Boo on one of
(25:39):
their albums, so that's just like a plug for one
of my favorite bands there. If you know of any
other places in popular culture that this has been sampled,
please write to us at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com. I think that's all we have today though,
on the War of the World's broadcast, and now we're
going to move on to snor mail. So some of
(26:03):
you may have heard our recent podcast proposal from Jim
to Julie on our Victoria and Albert episode, and we
heard from both of them recently. They are now engaged,
So podcast proposal success. We were pretty excited at our
cubes when we got that email where we yeah, we
were jumping up and down and they sent us. We
(26:24):
put this on Facebook up a great save the date
that's superhero theme. So congratulations to Jim and Julie. But
are we really invited? You don't know, I know, we
don't know. If we don't know, if it's just sharing
the well, we sent the save the date to everybody
on our Facebook page now though, so I don't think
they probably don't want thousands of people at their weddings
(26:46):
on that note, we thought we would share this postcard
that we received from David from the Alhambra. Um Katie
and I did an episode on it back in the fall,
so here's what he wrote. Hi did Lena and Sarah.
After hearing a show, I was inspired to take the
thirty hour flight to visit the Alhambra from Australia. The
place really is too beautiful for words. I sat in
(27:09):
the shadow of the Alcazaba having a Spanish tortilla sandwich,
listening to your Rick Lunquista podcast just to make sure
I didn't miss the thing. I thought life could not
get better. Podcast in headphones, tortilla in hand, and gorgeous
gardens as far as you can see. Until it did.
My partner and I decided to get married then and
(27:29):
there a series of events your podcasts began audiose, So hekay,
we're just like the romantic podcast streak going it seems
we do. We We love those stories and we will
admit that it's girly and apologize to anyone who was
offended by our love of love. We just did a
podcast on Like Possible Invading Aliens, so we think it
(27:51):
balances out. It's the best of both worlds. The war
of the world's best of both world is excellent. So
congratulation David and your partner, and congratulations again to Jim
and Julie. You guys look very happy together. If you
want to email us, it doesn't have to be a
grand dromantic story or an alien story. Yeah, just just whatever.
(28:13):
Any suggestions you have on radio dramas, orson welles old Hollywood.
I know lots of you have all sorts of Hollywood suggestions,
go ahead and send them to us. That history podcast
at past stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at Miston History, and we're on Facebook, as I already mentioned.
And if you would like to learn a little bit
(28:34):
more about the possibility of life on Mars, which is
something sort of indirectly explored in the topic we talked
about tonight, we have an article by our own Sarah
Doality on our website called is there really water on Mars?
And you can look it up by entering that topic
into our the search bar on our homepage, which is
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Were sure
(29:00):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the
Future Join House to work staff as we explore the
most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Top
Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on
iTunes
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Debling a chokerate boarding and I'm fair at out
and nowadays, at least in terms of the Internet, we're
all pretty used to, maybe even desensitized to the idea
(00:22):
of the news hoax, those bits of information that are
passed off as real news. I mean we can probably
all think of some examples of them. I think, you know,
there's always those out there about celebrities who've died when
really they haven't. And we do one of our own
every year, don't we. We do. We have an annual
April fools Day article, which is kind of a staff favorite,
I would say, picking out what it's going to be,
(00:44):
somebody gets to write it, and then um, I sit
next to tech Stuff Jonathan Strickland and he's written a
few of them before, and usually April Fool's Day, you
can hear him trying to judge if the articles passed
off is real anywhere, and which which news sites are
running it as it as a real story. But it's
always kind of fun just to help this fake out article.
(01:04):
It's usually something pretty outlandish like animated tattoos or green
Air Force one or or something that is a little
bit plausible, but not so much if you if you
think about it for a while, especially if example Fools Day,
so someone might be in danger of falling for one
of those. But we're usually not in danger of falling
for these Internet hoaxes because they're not coming from so
(01:26):
called legitimate news sources. Most of the time. A lot
of times they're passed along through social media, or you
get an email that looks like it's made to look
like a news article that was forwarded to you or
something like that. But what if these are actually proliferated
through what we consider to be legitimate media, So you
read it on a on a newspaper website that you
(01:48):
respect and read frequently, or or see it on a
news channel exactly, or hear it on the radio, And
that's kind of what happened in the situation we're about
to discuss, though it might not have been intended. As
to the ninety eight War of the World's broadcast has
been called the greatest hoaks in the history of broadcasting.
And you could call it the greatest I guess because
so many people believed it The broadcast was an original
(02:11):
play based on H. G. Wells War of the World,
a science fiction novel about a Martian invasion of the Earth,
but enough people thought it was real that it caused
mass panic, and for that reason, the situation has been
a case study for sociologists and psychologists and for media critics,
who cite it as an example of the power of
the media. But what made it so realistic in the
(02:32):
first place, and why did so many people believe it,
Especially since the broadcast was labeled upfront as fiction. They
weren't trying to fool anybody, or at least it seems
that way. So we're going to go into all of that,
and we'll also want to take a look at the
brains behind the broadcast, in particular Orson Wells. He's probably
best known for his work on Citizen Kane, one of
(02:53):
the most influential films of all time, but many people
say that this radio broadcast is what made Hollywood take
note of him in the first place, how he really
got his start. So we're going to start with him.
George Orson Wells was born May sixth, nineteen fifteen, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,
into an upper middle class family. He was the second
son of Richard Wells, a successful inventor, and Beatrice Wells,
(03:15):
who was an accomplished pianist. And Orson is said to
have been pretty precocious while he was growing up, and
something of a child prodigy too. He was reading and
writing Shakespeare at age three, and at age five he
had walk on roles at the Chicago Opera. Pretty impressive,
but things in his life started to shake up a
little bit when he was around six years old. That's
when his parents separated, and when he was nine years old,
(03:38):
his mother got hepatitis and died, and after that he
traveled the world with his father a couple of times.
He went to Africa and Europe and Asia, but in
nineteen thirty his father passed away too and that left him.
That left Orson Wells and orphan at age fifteen, so
he studied at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois,
(03:59):
where he was pretty mediocre student in general, even though
he showed great interest in studying drama, so he graduated
at sixteen. He wanted to go to work in theater,
but he couldn't really break in right away, so instead
he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago for a
while and even worked as a reporter briefly, which seems
(04:20):
to be everybody's job when they a lot of reporter
openings back then another aren't now. In nine thirty one, though,
he kind of went off on a different path. He
went to Ireland and that fall he found theater work
in Dublin with the Gate Theater. He remained there for
about a year and then did a tour of Spain
and Morocco before finally heading back to Chicago. And when
he got back there, he joined Catherine Cornell's company, Theater
(04:43):
Company in nineteen thirty three and stayed with her until
about nineteen thirty four. Then he finally made it to
New York, which is where he wanted to go, and
he made his Broadway debut in nineteen thirty four in
Romeo and Juliet. But while he was getting the supporting
roles on stage, Orson sought out radio work to make
ends meet. Yeah, and soon he really made a name
for himself doing these dramatic radio performances, and he narrated
(05:07):
a new series called The March of Time for two years,
and in ninety seven he became famous as the voice
of a mysterious crime fighter on the radio show The
Shadow and Evil. He knows what evil lurks in the
heart of men. Yeah, I mean or some Wells. He
has a great voice. But as a result of the Depression,
Wells had also become involved in the Federal Theater Project,
(05:29):
which was part of the New Deal's Works Progress administration,
and through that he started working with a guy named
John Houseman, and together they worked on a couple of
avant garde productions, including a production of Macbeth with an
all African American cast and um. Their partnership continued and
developed into a pretty interesting one. Yeah. Nineteen thirty seven,
(05:52):
Wells and Houseman formed the Mercury Theater with only a
hundred dollars in capital to start with. They had a
few stage hits, and then in the summer of eight
they made a deal with CBS to produce weekly radio
dramas with the Mercury Theater cast, and they called themselves
a Mercury Theater on the Air. The program was initially
called First Person Singular, but I don't think that's stuck.
(06:12):
Kind like Mercury Theater in the Air. Better, definitely more dramatic,
but they were originally slated to run nine to ten weeks,
and the Mercury Theater broadcasts included adaptations of Dracula, a
Tale of two Cities around the world in eighty days,
so famous works. And the broadcasts were done in first
person narrative, and they incorporated things like stream of consciousness,
diaries and letters, and they also used sound effects and
(06:35):
music in an innovative way. Despite all that innovation, though,
the ratings weren't all that great at first, but the
show scheduled for October thirtieth ninety eight, the Halloween show,
War of the World was really about to change the
fate of this radio company entirely so. According to many sources,
including Richard Cavendish in History Today, Howard Kotch, who was
(06:58):
the primary on the script of this adaptation of War
of the World's privately thought that H. G. Wells book,
which was published back in was pretty dated and pretty
boring actually, and Orthan, Wells and Houseman and Cotch all
wanted to figure out how to spice it up a
little bit, make it compelling for the for the radio
format especially. Yeah, it's hard to think of a classic
(07:21):
work like War the World's needing any work but apparently
it did in this instance, and so Cotch worked on
a script for this and he banged it out in
six days. Now, we're going to stop for a second
here and tell you a little bit about the story
in case you don't know War of the Worlds, and
you can see then the differences between the script change
the original story. Right, So the original story took place
(07:43):
in England, but Kotch changed the setting to grow Over Mills,
which is a village in central New Jersey. And this
the idea behind this was to bring the spookiness of
the Martian invasion closer to home for the American listening audience.
He also presented H. G. Wells story as a series
of increasingly alarming news bulletins that start by reporting a
meteorite landing in New Jersey. Now, the news bulletins is
(08:06):
kind of like the key to the whole thing of
definitely why this hoax worked, and a lot of people
think that it was Orson's idea. We're not sure about that,
but just putting that out there. The meteorite turns out
to be this extraterrestrial capsule that opens up to reveal
terrifying creatures that burned by standards to death with heat rays. Yeah,
and then there's another twist that the capsule later reveals
(08:28):
a giant machine that starts reaking havoc in New Jersey
and New York. And as the news bulletins report more
and more Martian landings all over the country, the situation
quickly escalates into total war. Still though, when the script
was finished, I mean, it sounds like a pretty pretty
cool story, and we know the history of it now,
But when the script was done, everyone involved thought it
(08:51):
was still pretty silly and dull. Yeah. According to an
article by James Narramore in the journal Humanities, Orson almost
withdrew the project at the last minute in favor of
an adaptation of Laurena doone. But they went on a
scheduled at eight pm on October and by eight thirty
members of the Mercury Theater on the air were surprised
to find out that some people actually thought the story
(09:12):
was real. So let's look back now and try to
understand the panic that came from this radio drama. So,
looking back on some of the more extreme reactions to
the broadcast that we're going to talk about later, most
sources describe it as a quote panic or a math hysteria.
So what really happened here, Well, people basically started acting
(09:35):
really irrationally. They were trying to flee to their cars.
They were going to warn neighbors and people in churches
that the world was ending. So traffic was jammed and
communication systems were jammed because so many people were trying
to call the police and the radio stations to find
out what, what should we do? Where should we go?
And we have a few examples here of things that
(09:55):
the New York Times reported the next day, just to
kind of give you a play by play of things
that a really happened, or at least were reported to
have happened. For one thing, at least a score of
adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria. Yeah, And
in Newark, a single block at Head and Terriff and
Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their
homes with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to
(10:18):
flee from what they thought was a gas raid. And
some of them even began moving household furniture. I don't
know if they were trying to save it or blockade
their houses or just do something. And just to clarify,
people were worried about a gas raid because of the
giant machine Sarah mentioned before was supposed to be spring
poison gas in the story on the radio, so they
(10:39):
thought that they had to protect themselves. The switchboard of
the New York Times was overwhelmed by about eight hundred
and seventy five calls. A man who called from Dayton, Ohio, asked, quote,
what time will it be the end of the world.
With so many of these calls coming into the newspapers,
a lot of papers found it advisable to follow up
on them and see if there was any truth to
(11:01):
reports despite the fantastic content. So finally the Associated Press
decided to send out the following bulletin at eight forty
eight pm. And here here it goes note to editors
queries to newspapers from radio listeners throughout the United States
tonight regarding reported meteor fall which killed a number of
New Jersey it its are the result of a studio dramatization.
(11:25):
The a P and then the police stations also had
to issue statements so that the officers knew what was
going on. So here's an example of what the New
Jersey State Police put out they teletyped the following quote
note to all receivers w ABC broadcast as drama regarding
the section being attacked by residents of Mars period imaginary
(11:48):
affair period end quote. It's it's brief and to the point,
and I like the addition of the imaginary fair at
the end. But just to make sure, just to make sure, guys,
this is not for real. But it's sort of hard
to tell exactly how many people were part of this
so called mass panic. The New York Times made reference
(12:08):
to thousands of people, and a lot of sources make
a reference to the generic millions. And you'll see estimates
that about half of the six million people who heard
the broadcast believed it was true, and about half of
those people actually panicked. So that leaves us with approximately
one point two million people. But not everyone thinks the
(12:30):
numbers were really that high. That's true. Some experts believed
that these inflated numbers are the result of just a
lot of hype. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael
Sucklau wrote that quote, the panic was neither widespread nor
as serious as many have believed at the time or since.
I mean, nobody died, nobody was killed or committed suicide,
(12:50):
so there weren't those results from it. But he says
that our perception could be the result of a couple
of things. For one thing, it could be just the
media loving and really just making a big deal out
of the story. You know, it was a story that
a lot of people wanted to read and they put
it out there. Another possibility is that it was just
inaccurate reporting on the part of survey respondence. A lot
of people were surveyed after the fact to kind of
(13:12):
study the situation and find out what really happened. So
whatsuckle I was saying here is that people after the
fact may have claimed that they heard the broadcast when
they actually didn't. They might have just seen their neighbor
panicking and done the same yeah, or heard the story
and decided to pass it along. Um, maybe they just
wanted to feel part of it. Well, So, regardless of
how many people did panic, the fact remains that a
(13:36):
lot of people really did believe that the War of
the World's broadcast was real. But why did they believe that?
Why would people believe this story about a Martian invasion
just because they heard it on the radio. That question
is especially pertinent since the program started out with a
very clear introduction, this is how it this is how
it went orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on Air
(13:59):
presents the Are of the Worlds by H. G. Wells,
And to add to that, a couple of times in
the middle of the broadcast they say you're listening to
an original dramatization by Mercury Theater on the Air of
War of the Worlds by H. G. Well So it
seems like if you caught one of those parts it
would be pretty clear that it was it was fiction.
(14:20):
But there are a few theories as to why people
thought that this was real. The first theory posits that
people just came into the program too late and didn't
hear that opening line. So, as we mentioned, ratings for
the Mercury Theater on the Air weren't that great at
the time. In their time slot, they had to compete
with the more popular Chase and Sandborn Hour on NBC.
So after that opening line of this broadcast, the broadcast
(14:43):
shifts to a weather report that transitions into a music
program uh performance of Raymond Roquello and his Orchestra, So
you're listening to the seemingly normal radio program for a
good couple of minutes before the first news interruption about
gas eruptions on Mars actually occur. Hers. So the theory
is that this news interruption was timed, perhaps purposely timed
(15:05):
perfectly to the commercial break of the Chase and Sandborn Hour.
So people would have been flipping around during the commercial
break as we often do easy Latin music listening, and
decided to stick around for a minute exactly um and
so when they were switching channels, when they switched to CBS,
they would have just heard this annything later than gentlemen,
(15:26):
from the Meridian Room in the Park claus Of Hotel
in New York, today, we bring you the music of
Raymond Ricuello and the doctors show the touch of the
finish Raymond Ricuello leadt with LA company, Ladies and gentlemen,
(15:56):
We interrupt our program of dance music to bring you
a special bulletoo, from the undercontinent of a radio on you.
At twenty minutes before a central time, Professor Farrell of
the Mount Gettings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions
of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars.
The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving
(16:16):
towards the Earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pearson of the
Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and describes the phenomenon
as quote like a jet of blue flame shots m
a gun unquote. We now return you to the music
of Ramon Rocquelo playing for you in the Meridean room
of the Park Laza Hotel situated in downtown New York,
(16:45):
so you can see there where where it would have
sounded just like a normal interruption. It does sound like
a real interruption. And the fact that Mercury Theater on
the air was still unsponsored at that point really helped
because there weren't any commercials breaking in to remind people
that they were actually just watching a show. Also, there
are a few other effects that took place during the
show that really added to the reality of all of it.
(17:09):
The interviews with real sounding experts like Professor Pearson, a
noted astronomer, Lloyd Gray and natural history museum expert, and
also a man on the street. You know things that
real radio news programs were doing at the time. Yeah,
and the interviews they sounded really kind of authentic. I thought,
at least listening to this broadcast with the interviewer asking
(17:31):
people to speak up and things like that, interrupting each other,
it sounds very natural. It doesn't sound like something that
would have been rehearsed and performed. It's not totally perfect,
I guess, and the sound effects of background noise kind
of add to that authenticity. So here's an example of
an interview that would illustrate this point. Would you mind
(17:52):
Benny one side place back? Here's Mr Willmots, owner of
the bond here. You may have some interesting fact to it.
Let moment, would you please tell the radio audience as
much as you remember this rather unusual visitor that dropped
in your backyard as step posted. Please, ladies and gentlemen,
this is Mr Willman Well, I wass sisting in the
(18:13):
radio post in louder. Please find me a louder please
poses Yes, I was listening to the radio and kind
of drowsing. A professor fellow was talking about Mars. So
I was half dozen and half yes, yes, this woman,
and then what happened? Well, as I was saying I
was listening to the radio kind of halfway. Yes, this
willen and then you saw something? Not first off, I
(18:35):
heard something? And what did you hear? Hissing sound like this,
kind of like a fourth of July rocket? Yes, then
what I turned my head out the window and would
have sworn I was to sleep and dreaming. Yes, I've
seen a kind of greenish streak, and then zingo stopping
smack the ground knocked me clear out of my chair. Well,
(18:55):
why are you frightened, Mr Willman, Well, I'm quite sure
I reckon. I was kind of r Thank you, mister Wilma,
thank you very much. Best fladding ladies and gentlemen. You've
just heard Mr Wilmot's owner the farm where this thing
has fallen. That type of on the spot coverage was
also familiar to people, so the broadcast really took advantage
(19:15):
of that fact. Since the Hindenburg explosion in n seven,
people were used to the on the spot, guy on
the street kind of news coverage, and some even say
that orson Welles had the actors listened to those older
broadcasts so they knew exactly what they were trying to replicate,
kind of studied them and Finally, another theory as to
(19:37):
why people would have believed this hoax is that listeners
were just vulnerable at this time because of what was
going on in the world. And I mean, we have
kind of talked about and going especially through the New
York Times stuff, and it's kind of amusing to see
in some cases, at least the way people reacted or
the way the police department reacted. But some of the
issues that were going on, we're pretty serious. I mean,
(19:58):
for one thing, a lot of people point to anxiety
that may have been latent in the population at this
time after years of economic depression. Also, the Second World
War was looming in Europe, so that had people on edge.
And in fact, the show aired just after the Munich crisis,
which was a war scare, which may have caused some
people to think that the invasion wasn't actually extraterrestrial it
(20:19):
was just a human war, which actually is scary enough.
It is scary. And regardless of exactly why people believed
this radio drama, whether they thought it was an enemy
invasion or an alien invasion, they did believe it and
it led to some not so great publicity for CBS. Consequently,
and initially for Orson Welles too, so he had given
the final word and the broadcast basically saying that it
(20:42):
was all just a story and CBS's version of a
good Halloween joke essentially, but a lot of people were
angry when they realized it was fiction. That FCC issued
a statement calling the program quote regrettable. Lawsuits were drawn up,
even H. G. Wells threatened to sue for them its
use the quote misuse of his novel, and CBS had
(21:03):
to come out and publicly apologize and promised not to
create any quote simulated news broadcast that could cause harm.
So there was a lot of backtracking immediately after after
the show came out. There was an Orson Wells even
retreated from public view for a little while. But actually,
once the desk settled, it became very clear that this
broadcast really put him on the map at the young
(21:24):
age of twenty three. The Mercury Theater on the Air
continued for a while and even got the sponsorship of
the Campbell Soup Company, so they went from being a small,
unsponsored show to really having a new name family fund
kind of. Yeah. Well, they got moved to a better
time slot and they were renamed The Campbell Playhouse, so
they had a little backing behind them. Orson Wells also
got a contract with R. Chaos Studios and moved to
(21:46):
Hollywood to write, produce, direct, and act in Citizen Kane.
And of course he made a lot of other films too,
so he was really prolific in that respect. Hard Cotch
also went into film and had a very successful career.
He received an awesome here in nineteen forty four for
the Casablanca screenplay, and even H. G. Wells finally changed
(22:07):
his tune. The controversy spurred renewed interest in his novel.
I mean, it's one of those any publicity is good
publicity kind of cases, I think, and he came to
realize that. Yeah. So in retrospect it seems like a
genius move because of the publicity it did get for
all these people, and many saw it as such at
the time. I read one take on it that said,
(22:28):
if you weren't fooled by it, you probably thought this
whole thing was genius, especially if you saw your neighbor
running out right, and if you were, if you were
the neighbor running out, if you were fooled by it,
then you were probably one of the ones who were
outraged and thought it was really, really a bad thing
to do. And I think that's probably true of most hoaxes. Yeah,
if you're in on it, it's cool. If not, if
(22:49):
your feelings are hurt, your feelings may be hurt and
you may feel a little bit silly about it. But
I don't know. It's a it's an interesting question. Since
we weren't around then, do you think that you would
have fallen one for those hoax Sarah? Well, hopefully I
would have been a careful listener and I would maybe
pick up on some of the clues that it wasn't real. Um,
if you would have been there exactly at eight pm
(23:11):
to hear the intro, yeah, i'd have my clocks that
I'd be like one of the old fashioned pictures where
the family is sitting in front of the radio waiting
for the show to be on. Um. I don't know, though,
I'm not sure. I'm not sure what I would have done.
What about yourself, Yeah, I'm not sure either. I would
like to think that I wouldn't be fooled, but you'd
be out there with a towel over your head. Maybe,
(23:32):
Unless I wouldn't be out there but I'd definitely be
checking things out. I might make a phone call. I
can't be sure. It's interesting to wonder about, and I
am interested to know what our listeners think. Is there
is a good one. Um, how would you have reacted
if you heard the War of the World's Radio We
may have to put that one out there, but I
think before we can find that out before we sign
(23:55):
off today. Well, it's worth mentioning that there have been
some other more recent War of the World's Panics, and
including one in nineteen forty nine involving a broadcast that
took place on Radio Quito in Ecuador, but this one
was actually deadly. Thousands of people rioted in the streets.
Some people thought that monsters were actually invading the country,
and some people thought that it might actually be neighboring
(24:15):
Peru invading. So some similar things going on at the
time as far as what people thought. Um. After discovering
that it was all a hoax, though, mobs attacked and
torched the radio station, killing twenty people, and since then
there's been other similar hoaxes around the world, one in Buffalo,
New York in nineteen sixty eight, one in Providence, Rhode
(24:35):
Island in nineteen seventy four and one in northern Portugal
in nineteen eighty eight, so these things still happened. I
noticed though, there hasn't been one of these radio hoaxes
since the Internet became pretty common. And I wonder now
if it would just be put down pretty pretty quickly,
you know, if the flames would be put out before
it got to the point of people rioting. But I
(24:57):
don't know it could it could accelerate, So if you
think about it, it's true. I would encourage people to
listen to the broadcast. I listened to the whole thing,
and I think Sarah did too, and um I listened
to a couple of times actually, and I heard different
things both times. It was interesting to sit there and
imagine what it would be like to, uh have that
as your form of entertainment. Yeah, either either enjoying it
(25:19):
as fictional entertainment, knowing it with such, or trying to
imagine what the people who thought it was a real
news report were actually thinking. And you may recognize little
bits and pieces of it here. It's been sampled in
popular culture. For example, if you if there are any
fans of the band Pin Back out there, They sampled
parts of this for their song Boo on one of
(25:39):
their albums, so that's just like a plug for one
of my favorite bands there. If you know of any
other places in popular culture that this has been sampled,
please write to us at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com. I think that's all we have today though,
on the War of the World's broadcast, and now we're
going to move on to snor mail. So some of
(26:03):
you may have heard our recent podcast proposal from Jim
to Julie on our Victoria and Albert episode, and we
heard from both of them recently. They are now engaged,
So podcast proposal success. We were pretty excited at our
cubes when we got that email where we yeah, we
were jumping up and down and they sent us. We
(26:24):
put this on Facebook up a great save the date
that's superhero theme. So congratulations to Jim and Julie. But
are we really invited? You don't know, I know, we
don't know. If we don't know, if it's just sharing
the well, we sent the save the date to everybody
on our Facebook page now though, so I don't think
they probably don't want thousands of people at their weddings
(26:46):
on that note, we thought we would share this postcard
that we received from David from the Alhambra. Um Katie
and I did an episode on it back in the fall,
so here's what he wrote. Hi did Lena and Sarah.
After hearing a show, I was inspired to take the
thirty hour flight to visit the Alhambra from Australia. The
place really is too beautiful for words. I sat in
(27:09):
the shadow of the Alcazaba having a Spanish tortilla sandwich,
listening to your Rick Lunquista podcast just to make sure
I didn't miss the thing. I thought life could not
get better. Podcast in headphones, tortilla in hand, and gorgeous
gardens as far as you can see. Until it did.
My partner and I decided to get married then and
(27:29):
there a series of events your podcasts began audiose, So hekay,
we're just like the romantic podcast streak going it seems
we do. We We love those stories and we will
admit that it's girly and apologize to anyone who was
offended by our love of love. We just did a
podcast on Like Possible Invading Aliens, so we think it
(27:51):
balances out. It's the best of both worlds. The war
of the world's best of both world is excellent. So
congratulation David and your partner, and congratulations again to Jim
and Julie. You guys look very happy together. If you
want to email us, it doesn't have to be a
grand dromantic story or an alien story. Yeah, just just whatever.
(28:13):
Any suggestions you have on radio dramas, orson welles old Hollywood.
I know lots of you have all sorts of Hollywood suggestions,
go ahead and send them to us. That history podcast
at past stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at Miston History, and we're on Facebook, as I already mentioned.
And if you would like to learn a little bit
(28:34):
more about the possibility of life on Mars, which is
something sort of indirectly explored in the topic we talked
about tonight, we have an article by our own Sarah
Doality on our website called is there really water on Mars?
And you can look it up by entering that topic
into our the search bar on our homepage, which is
at www dot how stuff works dot com. Were sure
(29:00):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the
Future Join House to work staff as we explore the
most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Top
Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on
iTunes
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.