A month in the past, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reviews of further sightings in various locations within the area have been lodged on a daily foundation, and anxieties concerning the origin and purpose of those unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We have now no evidence at the moment that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public protectedty menace or have a foreign nexus,” declared the FBI and the Department of Houseland Security in a joint statement. However the very lack of further information on the matter has stoked the public imagination; one New Jersey congressman spoke of the drones having come from an Iranian “mothership” off the coast.
If this real-life information story sounds familiar, consider the truth that Morris County lies solely about an hour up the highway from Grovers Mill, the well-known web site of the fictional Martian invasion dramatized in Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Predespatcheded like a genuine emergency broadsolid, it “fooled many who tuned in late and believed the occasions had been actually happening,” writes Space.com’s Elizabeth Fernandez.
The unsettled nature of American life within the late 9teen-thirties certainly performed an element, given that, “wedged between two World Wars, the nation was within the midst of the Nice Depression and mass unemployment.” Some listeners assumed that the Martians had been in reality Nazis, or that “the crash landing was tied to some other environmalestal catastrophe.”
Within the 86 years since The Conflict of the Worlds aired, the story of the nationhuge panic it triggered has are available in for revision: not that many people had been listening within the first place, many fewer took it as actuality, and even then, drastic responses had been uncommon. However as Welles himself recounts in the video above, he heard for many years thereafter from listeners recounting their very own panic on the suddenly believready prospect of Mars assaulting Earth.“In reality, we weren’t as innocent as we meant to be after we did the Martian broadsolid,” he admits. “We had been fed up with the best way wherein eachfactor that came visiting this new, magazineic field — the radio — was being swallowed,” and thus inclined to make “an assault on the credibility of that machine.” What a aid that we right here within the Twenty first century are, after all, far too sophisticated to just accept eachfactor new technology conveys to us.
Related content:
Edward Gorey Illustrates H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)
Hear Orson Welles’ Radio Performances of 10 Shakespeare Plays (1936–1944)
Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds
Carl Jung’s Fascinating 1957 Letter on UFOs
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
