Bittersweet Infamy - #111 - The War of the Worlds

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Halloween special! Taylor tells Josie about the 1938 Orson Welles radio play about a Martian invasion that allegedly caused a mass hysteria, and the 1949 Ecuadorean remake that went even further. Plus: flesh out your fall reading list with the world's largest collection of books bound in human skin!

Hey moms, looking for some lighthearted guidance on this crazy journey we call parenting? Join me, Sabrina Kohlberg. And me, Andi Mitchell, for Pop Culture Moms. Where each week we talk about what we're watching. And examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way. Come laugh, learn, and grow with us as we look for the best tips. And maybe a few what not to do's from our favorite fictional moms. From Good Morning America and ABC Audio,

pop culture moms, find it wherever you get your podcasts. The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in IN2IN.

The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Josie, it's spooky content season. More than being spooky season, it's spooky content season. That's a fact. We wouldn't put out non-spooky content in this season or if we did, we would have kind of disguised it as spooky content, because I don't think put out non-spooky content in this season, or if we did, we would have kind of disguised it as spooky content, because I don't think people want non-spooky content.

No, I'm just looking for the spooky stuff. Yeah. What kind of spooky content is your holy grail? Do you like supernatural? Do you like serial killer? Do you like psychological thriller? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think supernatural is good.

That's a good one for me. I recently rewatched Practical Magic. You gotta watch out for those vegetable trucks. Oh my gosh, they come out of nowhere. They'll catch it right by surprise. You'll have no idea they're coming. And then Sandra Bullock will just have to clean you up off the New Hampshire in America.

They make you do that yourselves and then they charge for it. Yeah. On a scale of one to two, cause this was sort of like a scale that we used when we were discussing possible choices for a bittersweet film club. On a scale of like one to five spooky ghosts,

how spooky do you want your spooky content to be? Oh, like a two? Dang. Okay. Fair enough. You want like Scooby-Doo. A Scooby-Doo low two. Scooby-Doo and not one of the graphic ones. Do you not like being scared? Is it like, does it feel too immediate? Like, when you're watching,

let's say we sit down and we watch some sort of 13 ghosts or whatever that you're really legitimately frightened by. Would it be a fear that the ghost is like, gonna actually get you or is it just like, the sensation of the thrill is like, overwhelming and unpleasant for you? It's not that I'll stay up and can't go to bed because it's scaring me.

It's like things that I would normally enjoy are shrouded in spookiness. Like I'll see Bee Man chewing on his little toy in the hallway and then all of a sudden it's just like, that's the creepiest shit I've ever seen. Bee man, focus. Like, what are you doing? Don't be scary.

But it's just because I'm in like a scary mindset. How many pounds would you say Batman weighs? 17 pounds, something like that. 15, 17. That's surprising to me that he's that heavy. That looks like a nine pound dog. Oh, he's scoogum. He's a scoogum dog.

He's all muscle. You're wearing your Batman shirt. You're wearing your Batman costume today for Halloween. Yeah, it's true. But yeah, there's something about it that like, it kind of like gives a wash over my reality. It turns all the tree branches into monsters a little bit. And it gets, and that just gets a little too much when it's like,

okay, well the movie is off and that's supposedly done, but it's still kind of with me. But you do spooky. I can do spooky. But there is a limit for me. I have realized that I don't actually, like once I did like a horror VR experience where I was in an asylum and someone like and the VR headset jabbed a needle into my arm, I didn't find that pleasant. I did not care for that experience one little bit. And then even certain horror video games, like I've never been big on the Resident Evil kind of zombie infected virus body mutation kind of that.

I think because in the video game, they're all very much coming at you. Whereas when I'm watching the movie, I'm like, okay, well, Sidney Prescott is fucked, but I'm fine. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's maybe a little bit of a layer, yeah, a layer of separation for sure. The scariest thing of all, Josie,

is that after this month we finish our last two episodes of the season as part of our trick or treat, infamy-a-spooky-a-spooky-a-story block. So we got a couple more Halloween episodes coming right up for you. And then after episode 112, we're taking a little break, taking a month long break. We're going to be gone for November, but we're going to be back for December 24th for our holiday

special and December 25th. We're going to be dropping the bittersweet mixtape over at coffee. Meanwhile, we are going to be doing spooky orphan movies for a film club for October. In particular, we're going to be doing Orphan 2009 and Orphan First Kill 2022. So if you want to join me, Mitchell, Josie, talk about some unusual kids, some unusual pikes. We'll talk about all this over at the at the Bitter Sweet Film Club. And we're doing the prequel to as a doubleheader. And you can enjoy the November chess game, baby. We're having a big chess game over the coffee page. And then December, we already told you about December.

So it's pretty good. And then we'll be back for season five. Five for January. Season five in January. Crazy times. So this way, we're really like allowing ourselves to build momentum and peak at a finale. That's good.

And then we got a little holiday special for you. Yeah. A little island, a little iceberg island, a little hop onto this ice floe to wait whilst we get season five ready for you. And I gotta tell you, Josie, I've already got my long list for season five subjects. Oh, wow. I'm excited. I'm excited to hear it.

I'm excited to hear it too, but like we gotta cross a few bridges before we get their first little matter of I'm infamous. Is there not? Spooky motherfucking bridges we gotta cross. Woo! It's true. Okay, Taylor, it's a rainy night, October, Vancouver, little chills in the air.

You are headed into Kerner Library at the University of British Columbia, our alma mater. You're there late at night, near closing because you have some research you've got to do for the nonfiction infamous podcast that you co-host. You know, a lot of research needs to get done. I'm always in the stacks. Always in the stacks. It's so true. I'm always cranking that handle, making the bookshelf go, and then it doesn't crush anyone.

And I'm like, damn it. And I try again. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's exactly where you are. You've made your way through the front and you've climbed down the stairs and down the stairs and down the stairs

into the deepest basement you can because you're looking for a very specific book. And you're in a part of the stacks where the lights are motion detector. So it's kind of dark and spooky until you walk down the hall. I don't remember that part of Kooners. Hmm. Maybe this is a level of the basement you've never been to. Oh, I found the super basement.

Yes. And you have to go down this long hallway. The lights turn on in front of you. But you notice when you turn around, they're going black again with no motion. You're the only one down here. And you get to the very end, and the lights turn on. But this last set of lights, they're kind of humming louder.

And they have a bit of a flicker, right? That fluorescent. As the best lights do. As the best humming, flouter, and they have a bit of a flicker, right? That fluorescent. As the best lights do. As the best ones, yes, yes. And you're looking for this very specific book for your infamous nonfiction podcast on 19th century medical practices. You're at this far corner of the stacks and you're following the call numbers and you're like, okay, this is the one. But like you mentioned, it's those movable bookshelves, right? That you have to turn this big crank to move. And of course you notice that the only thing that's protecting somebody from getting crushed

is the printer paper copy that the librarian has printed out that says like, watch out for somebody in there. And there's like a little caption of like a squished man. Yeah. You're like, okay, great. So you twist the handle. There's for somebody in there. And there's like a little caption of like a squished man. Yeah. You're like, OK, great. So you twist the handle. There's no one down there. You look down, double check, twist the handle, and these huge heavy bookshelves part for you.

And you walk down this stack of books. You walk down the bookshelves. And you run your finger along all these leather bound books. You're looking for a very specific one. You have the call number on your phone. These books are old and dusty and you know being 19th century medical practices, they're filled with pretty gnarly stuff. You move down and down and down the shelves until you get to what you think might be the shelf, right? You can get the call numbers and the lights flicker and then when they come back on you see it. You see the book that you're looking for. It's Robert Cooper's Speculation on the Mode and

Appearances of Impregnation in the human female, published 1789. So you place your finger on the spine and you pull and it comes down and the leather that binds it is this light brown color and it feels very fine. It's so fine that you have it in your hands but you specifically run your hands over it so your fingertips and your palms are kind of touching. And it's just like this incredibly noticeable, right? There is noteworthy in some way this leather that you're holding. You open a random page and there's these, you know, floored descriptions of medical practices and dilation.

Yeah, you can't quite follow this crazy, crazy idea. And certainly not this language. So you're like, I need to get myself some context. I'm just gonna go to the very beginning. So you flip to the very beginning, you open the front piece, and there's a handwritten note. And it says, this book was bound in the flesh of Mary L. L is followed by a line and a period.

Dang. So as you probably guessed, this is not in the basement stacks at Koerner Library. The very least hope that it was part of the like reference books that you're not allowed to like physically take out of the library. Right. Yes. Okay.

It would just be loose next to my body myself. You know what I mean? Like a snow ball. This book though does exist and it is housed in the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, another country, other side of the continent. But even still, the Museum of Physicians is what it's kind of shortened to. They have the most human skin bound books on record at five. I don't know if I expected more or less.

Yeah. Five is a lot, like in a vacuum, five is a lot of human skin books to have. Right, yeah, yeah. But when you're talking world records, I'm a little let down. I'll put a caveat on that because these are the ones that have been confirmed and tested, scientifically verified as being human skin. The confirmed

examples of books bound in human skin all kind of revolve around the era of the 1700s to about the like late 1800s, eken into the 1900s. Not that far back. No, not at all. But one thing that does seem to tie these cases together is that many of these books can be traced back to physicians. Many scholars believe that it was tied to the French Revolution, the advent of what we call clinical medicine.

So the French Revolution was this great upheaval of a monarchist way of ruling society, right? A functioning society, moving away from a one divine ruler to a more egalitarian approach, right? Oh, he's named Henry. Oh, yeah. Or Louis. Louis, actually, they're all Louis. Yeah. So in that great upheaval, a lot of the old methods of containing power, right,

were disrupted. Even the medical practice, the idea of how we take care of illness, how we take care of the human body, right, even that was being examined at this time. And so previous to this, it was an apprentice program, right? You work with a doctor and you understand what happens and then eventually you become a doctor. At this time too, doctors and surgeons were not in the same structure of medicine. Surgeons were actually much closer to barbers in terms of the lack of status, but also maybe the slapdash nature of how surgeons worked.

This change of how the medical practice would work is called the Paris School and it's a more scientific structure to medicine that involves a foundation for shared medical knowledge. So that's another part of the old apprenticeship model is that it was kind of just from like a mentor mentee situation. There wasn't a large Congress of doctors sharing information. Now, with this pair of school, there would be. There were three elements that became part of the pair of school. One was educational requirements.

You go to school for a very long time, you learn everything you need to learn. Second is a very close study of cadavers. Understanding the human body by looking inside it. This is before x-rays, before really even microscopes, like we were talking about, like, we don't even know what the human heart looks like, right?

Eww, I mean, on the one hand, very interesting to be like, I guess, a trailblazer in that field, especially, to be like, okay, we're not just kind of guessing, we're kind of figuring it out. Not my vice, Surgical Gore. Where are you on, like, surgery stuff? Because I really don't like thinking about

how the human meat machine functions. It bugs me out. But I know a lot of surgeons and wannabe surgeons and those types of people who are like, yeah, really just really interesting to me. I have visited a gross anatomy lab. Gross meaning like large, right? It was essentially a cadaver lab. I was invited by a poetry teacher and she does some, it's called like narrative

medicine. It has a lot of different names, but she works in hospitals with patients and doctors and using kind of creative writing as a therapy through. Art can help make us feel better. Yeah, but it's also there's a side of it that's very specific for physicians and using writing to like help with establishing a bedside manner, like empathizing and understanding a compassion with patients through a writing practice. So she had an inn at the medical school, and I got to go and see these cadavers. And it was a little gross, but it was also super informative.

I learned things just in like the 30 minutes I was there about the human body that I had never known before. It was really wild. Our eyelids have a very thin, small piece of cartilage in them. See, I don't want to know about the eyelid cartilage. I was better before I knew about the eyelid cartilage. I was a better person.

Okay. Okay. Where were we? Oh, there was a third element of the Pear School, which is hospital training with live patients. So this idea of education, studying cadavers, and then live patient work. What happens with this parascule approach to medicine is that the body becomes an object to be studied in this very academic and regimented way.

What develops is a disassociation, a separation between a doctor and a patient when all of a sudden, it's not Sally who has a bad cough, it's, oh, these lungs have been exposed to section, section, section, section. I mean, we've all either had experiences with doctors where the bedside manner is not great or we've heard of experiences people have had because they are traumatic experiences most often and it's not fun and it's not great.

And when this clinical medicine started, there wasn't a lot of thought to the morality of treating a patient. We got empathy six months ago. I say it all the time. Yeah. We just learned about it now. It's been a short six months. So you have this proliferation of learned, typically higher status individuals, because even the French Revolution couldn't make it in an egalitarian

practice that how people become doctors and mostly men. Midwives are kind of through the clinicalization of medicine. A lot of midwives would have been elbowed out of the picture. And so it's high status learned men who have very little appreciation for patients, understanding, compassion, empathy for them, and they're given free range to kind of do what they want. And that's where we get a lot of all, nearly all the instances of books bound in human skin

come from this particular era and can be tied to male physicians who are doing just that, taking the skin from... Taking liberties. Taking liberties, yes. Enter from stage left is Dr. John Stockton Ho. And it's 1868. We're in Philadelphia. The country is, you know, barely 100 years old. And the physicians in America are trying to make a name for themselves so that they can compete with their counterpoints across the pond. And John Ho is a physician at the Philadelphia General Hospital. And at this time of medical practice, hospitals are for poor people, and rich people have

private doctors who come to their homes. So a hospital is extremely underfunded, not very sanitary. Usually I think the Philadelphia General Hospital has like an insane asylum attached to it. It's like this mess of 19th century medical practices that are really gross and nasty, right? And Dr. Ho is interested in gynecology and he has invented a speculum adaptable for vaginal, uterine and anal use.

So. A speculum for all seasons, for all reasons. Well, he's doing the Lord's work, obviously. Jeez. I know. Dr. Ho is conducting autopsies, and he encounters the body of a 28-year-old Irish immigrant. She was a widowed woman who had been admitted

to the Philadelphia General Hospital with tuberculosis. She had a diagnosis of tuberculosis, which was rampant at the time, right? Yeah, life was short and cruel, huh? Especially if you are lower class in Philadelphia in the 1860s. Like it is not. Her story is kind of insane. She was in the hospital getting treated and her family came to visit her and they brought her bologna sandwiches. Like here, eat something good, put some meat on your bones, you know, little did they know. And we're talking about sanitation at this time, which is not great. Hygiene, not the best.

No one washed their hands. Well it was a hot summer, Taylor. It was hot in Philadelphia, no air conditioning. No. The bologna had trichinosis. When bad goes to worse. Which if you don't know is a type of roundworm. It's like a, yeah, it's gross. It's a parasite

that you do not want to get. I miss when you were talking about the corpses. Right. Yeah. Now it's very easily treatable, but at the time it was not. And the combination of her tuberculosis and her trichinosis meant that in six months she was gone. She did not go softly. It was a very painful way. Yeah, that sucks. I'm sorry. RIP. So as if that weren't bad enough, her body is being optopsy by Dr. Ho, who is fascinated by the trichinosis. And he writes a very gruesome description of it for the American Journal of Medical Sciences. And then he thinks that it is

okay in some way, shape or form to take a section of her thigh flesh and tan it himself. So cure the skin as if it were leather, right? Yes. I suppose intellectually I knew that had to happen, but I just don't like to hear about it. No, no. There's speculation in terms of the testing that he perhaps used urine to initially tan the leather. He tans the skin and then Dr. Ho carries around this skin for four decades. I mean, he has this skin turned into leather, it's preserved, and he doesn't just say, okay, and now this will bind to these books and ceremoniously. He just walks around with, he didn't even have the book in mind.

Nope. He just carried it around for 40 years. You used to could get away with fucking anything if you were like a powerful enough white guy. Anything. Insane. Insane. Sacre bleu. After 40 years, he took this human skin and he at that time had amassed a huge library.

He was a bibliophile. He had like over 5,000 books in his collection, something like that. Sounds like he might have been a few different kinds of file maybe. And he picked some of his favorite books and had them quarter bound. So the human skin is on the spine and like wraps around so that it covers like a quarter of the cover. Right. That's called quarter bound.

That's tasteful. Right. Yeah. Elegant presentation. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's 2014 and rumors, tall tales, spooky content galore, right? Oh baby, yeah.

The content mill is grinding. That creepy leather brown book, that's gotta be Human Flash. And like, well, that copy of the Ovid Metamorphosis, that's got to be bound in human flash. And like this creepy ass book, Human Flash. So there's all these books in rare collections around the world that are carrying kind of these stories of, well, this is bound in human flesh and this and that and this, right? But there is not definitive science behind it. There's not been testing until 2014 when a scientist by the name of Daniel Kirby develops a pretty low-cost testing route, which is, which creates all this opportunity for libraries to finally test. It's called

peptide mass fingerprinting, and it just takes a little bit of a sample from the leather, and it pretty much maps out the protein peptide, like the collagen in the skin. That's enough to tell us large animal kingdom vibes. So you can know if it's a goat or if it's a cowhide or all these more typical leather, but you can also tell if it's a goat or if it's a cow hide or like all these kind of more typical leather, but you can also tell if it's human. So books are slowly starting to be tested.

The Museum of Physicians in Philadelphia, they have some books that have heard and suspect to be bound in human flesh, including Dr. Ho's old book, and they send it in for this testing, and lo and behold, it's bound in human flesh, including Dr. Ho's old book. And they send it in for this testing. And lo and behold, it's bound in human flesh, along with four other books. A lot of these books that are bound in leather,

they kind of carry these rumors. But just by looking at it, you really can't tell. It's, you know, the tanning process can be so different between all these different leathers that... You've never seen a Wallaby covered book. It could be that. Exactly. Yeah. Until you definitively scientifically test it. So there are quite a few rumored books out there that are covered in human skin, but they have not been subject to testing as of yet.

You might be in a library and you might check out a book, probably not check out, it would probably be still in the rare book section, special collections kind of thing. But interestingly enough, I did learn that with leather books, you're not instructed and you should not actually wear, or I shouldn't even say just leather books, but old books like this, you shouldn't wear gloves to handle them.

The dryness of the gloves will cause actually more tearing. Interesting. Yeah, you're just instructed to wash your hands and wash them often and keep them, you know, dry. I thought that was interesting because I have one source I looked at quite a bit. Her first experience texturing a book bound in human skin, she did not know. She just picked it up. Then the librarian was like, oh, that's that book you wanted, bound in human flesh.

She's like, oh, oh. Yeah. So there are still these books out there. This woman who I just talked about who wrote this book called Dark Archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin. Her name is Megan Rosenblum. And not only did she write this book, she's, you know, a librarian who works with rare books. She also is a member of the Order of the Good Death and a co-founder of their death salon, a community that encourages conversation, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning.

And she has started a book project called the Anthropodermic Book Project. Anthropo meaning human and dermic meaning skin like dermatology. And it's devoted to research and encouraging the testing and making available testing of these books so that we have more information about them. And she's very interesting and the book is really interesting. There is, I kind of pick up a little bit of like morbid curiosity and fascination. To be fair, she does include another scholar in here and has conversations with him that she puts on the page.

A rare books librarian out of Princeton named Paul Needleham. And he is very aware of books bound in human skin and is very against it. And to the point that he thinks the books should be cremated and buried and interred. Because these are human remains. Because they are human remains, yes. Does he condone book burning? No. But a book bound in human flesh... We can't tie ourselves into moral knots about the book...

Like, listen, you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, gotcha. Like, whatever. Let's, I got the guy's point. They're made of skin. Come on, let's not be obtuse. Yeah, interesting, interesting, because I was thinking it was, this is a moment that really stayed with me.

I was taking a Latin American anthropology course where we learned about two folks who had been found, their remains had been found at the top of a mountain somewhere in South America, where they had died of exposure as was common in their culture. And there was discussion of these mummy bundles and what was found in these mummy bundles of these people. And I remember being like,

gosh, at what point do you stop being like a person whose remains are being desecrated and start being like a mummy bundle that's full of fun surprises for archaeologists to discover? Like, what's the line on that? You know what I mean? And it really took me down the... That thought of like, when does one become a mummy bundle, quote unquote, has really like dictated a lot of my philosophy

on like treating human remains with dignified ways, is that like, even though regardless of the circumstances under which they died, I feel like you have some compulsion to treat all human remains with the same level of dignity. If you must desecrate them, desecrate them all. But don't pick and choose. Yeah. And I mean, Mary-Elle, dignity. If you must desecrate them, desecrate them all. But don't pick and choose. Yeah. And I mean, Mary L, whose full name is Mary Lynch, they could find her hospital records

and they know her full name to be Mary Lynch. That's a good Irish name. Yeah. She's, you know, just one example of this whole process, right? And... She just happened to be the one I found at Kernel Library. Exactly, yes. And she's emblematic of like taking advantage of women in the medical sciences, but there's a long history of taking advantage of black patients, taking advantage

of Native American patients, like any, and that's just specific to the American story. Like there's a lot of any, any type of minority or person who doesn't have as much power as somebody else, then they typically, or they, they could have been subject to this. They're vulnerable. They're vulnerable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a part of clinical medicine, modern medicine,

that according to Megan Rosenblum, we need to keep that history around so that we don't repeat it, right? And the same idea that we put Confederate stack shoes in a museum or that we study the Holocaust, right? So that we can understand how this happened and prevent it from happening again. But I don't know, I'm kind of,

I'm convinced by both her and by the idea of a proper burial for these books. Yeah. Because they're not books, the books are objects. They're the remains of people. The books are incidental. The books happen to be enshrouded by human remains, but it could as easily be a bell or a painting or a box, you know? Some of the, you know, human skin that was turned into leather, it wasn't used for just

books, it was turned into wallets, turned into, you know, any object that you could use for leather, they used it for this too. And I think it typically happened with books because it was tied to physicians and physicians had too. And I think it typically happened with books because it was tied to physicians and physicians had books, but I think they were also maybe rationalizing and justifying this as like, it's part of my education. The pursuit of knowledge.

Pursuit of, yes, yeah. Which- And something to do with my piss bucket. Yes, something with the chamber pot, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. ["The Moonlight"] When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell

our clients that we really care about you! Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs! Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? Are you itching for more bitter sweetness? Visit our Ko-fi page and become a monthly subscriber to get full access to bittersweet exclusives, including the Bittersweet Film Club.

In this episode of the Bittersweet Film Club, we watched 2017's I, Tanya. We are Tanya, collectively. We are Tanya. Oh, we! We are Tanya, the three of us. We call us Tanya. Tanya-mos aki hoy. We are Tanya-ing here together. We're Tanya. We are Tanya. The three of us. We are Tanyaing here together.

We're Tanya folks. Yeah. Tanya. On this episode of the Bitter Sweet Film Club. Become a monthly subscriber at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. That's ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. Next month for Trick or Treat Infamy, we'll be watching a double header orphan and orphan first kill. I've told you before every year for Halloween, I almost do the same story since like season one. Yeah. And I always end up changing course at the last minute.

Are we doing it this time? We're doing the last minute. Are we doing it this time? We're doing it this time. We're doing it this time. We're finally doing it this time. I've, I cleared my schedule. I said, no, we're doing that Halloween theme story that I've been putting off since the first season. Nice.

Been a while since we've used the time machine. Why don't we hop in the time machine? I wanna set the chronometer and take us back to Sunday, October 30th. Oh, oh. 1938. Cool. Just after 8 p.m. Eastern. And we are in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. You ever been to Grover's Mill? I've never been to New Jersey, much less Rover's mill. Are you missing out? Are you missing out? I don't know yet. So I want to take you in and join reporter Carl Phillips

as he wipes sweat from his brow, setting up his microphone, the modern Marvel, prepared to beam transmission from this unincorporated township in the Jersey farmlands back to big city Manhattan. Whoa. OK, OK. On another night, you might ask what a New York reporter was doing out here in the soft ground,

dodging cow patties, but when you see the smoke billowing from the crater, it's totally clear. Oh. And it's clear to listeners what's happening as Carl describes in his practice radio voice the characteristics of the meteor. The space object's low, unearthly hum broadcast live to America's living rooms via that trusty friend, the radio.

They hear his voice tremble as the creature beams its light ray into the person next to him, eviscerating the man with a horrible scream. Watch out for light rays, Josie. They don't fuck around. Yeah. 1938 light rays, too.. You know that shit ain't regulated. That's just like... No, no. They could put all kinds of lead in there. Who knows? Then Carl's audio feed cuts off and all is silence.

Hmm. Over the next hour, it is made clear that the Martians have captured New Jersey with the rest of the country and indeed the planet to follow. And if the world is ending, why not act like it? So that's what the humans did. They broke laws, they confessed their love, they drank alone to forget the end, all that until the next day in the sobering light of the morning

when the Monday editions read, radio play terrifies nation. Josie, you're smiling knowingly. I am smiling knowingly. It's the war of the world! But Josie, this couldn't really be true, could it? Could people really be so gullible as to believe this? Martians in New Jersey? Yeah. New Jersey? Yeah.

Yeah. Jersey sure is a rough neck of woods. Would people really do such drastic things if they thought these were their last moments? Was the so-called hysteria just hype? And if so, why has the mystique around the day before Halloween 1938 persisted for nearly 90 years? Suit up, soldier. Your planet needs you. It's time to go to war.

The War of the Worlds. I didn't know that it released on October 30th. That makes it even more convincing in some way, you know? How? That it would happen on Halloween would make it actually much less convincing to me. I know. And I thought that, but then I stood by what I said because... Sure, sure.

Well, it was what I was describing. I want to be on your side here. When you are ingesting spooky content, it can... You're suggestible. The shrapnel is in the air. The, you know what I mean? Like cute little bee man chomping on his cute little toy is all of a sudden a creepy corn child in the hallway on a tricycle, right?

And it's like, oh, fuck me, right? So. So. On a tricycle. What do you know about the War of the Worlds 1938 radio play? What I know is that it was written by that dude. You know?

That dude. What's his name? It's gonna come to me. Just give me. Oh shit. Oh, this is a fun I can't say his name until Josie remembers it. Oh Is it cuz you have a joke that's lined up with it? No, no, I'm just playing Rumpelstiltskin. Okay. Okay. Okay Orson Welles It's Orson Welles. Thank you. So for the record He wasn't like the scribe who wrote the thing, but he was the scenario and he directed and produced it and had like a huge hand in the creative and the writing.

So, like, if he wasn't the guy who literally sat there and typed up the script on the typewriter, he sure had a lot to do with it. So, basically, yes. Yeah. And I know that the intent behind it was to make it as real as possible. I don't think there was the intention for it to kind of go off the rails like it did. But there was the intention of like, let's make it sound as much like a news reporting event.

There we go. Because you said real and real can mean a lot of things. Yeah. When you say it, it's like a news broadcast, effectively. It takes the tropes and the familiar, we are now receiving a breaking news bulletin, and it plays those more or less entirely straight to the audience. But it is reporting on a fictional incident that's happening this Martian invasion of Earth. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And being a radio program, those things were easy enough to mimic without

it sounding fake. So, and I think the other element that distinguishes it is that they did not have the news cycle that we have now, and there was a lot more trust in what you heard on the radio. The radio being your one outlet to the outside world. If you say you lived in... Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Yeah, exactly.

So having it sound really convincing and having this unequivocal trust in media that you were exposed to kind of created this like perfect storm of people thinking that aliens were actually invading the world. We talked a little bit about this in sort of of all things our game show episode back in episode 90, I'd like to phone a friend. There we were talking about it in the context of the then relatively new media of television being in people's homes. But there was a trust there. You have to be lied to a couple of times by each new technology,

whether it's TV or the internet or social media specifically, or whatever it is. You need to receive a couple of lies from each technology before you're like, oh, yeah, this is just run by people who could be lying to me. And then I guess, what do you know of the hysteria? Like, what is your impression of this notion that people ran out of their homes

and set themselves on fire and such? Do you take this to be true? Do you take this to be false? Somewhere in between? I guess kind of somewhere in between. It usually is somewhere in between, isn't it? Yeah, given the somewhere in between option, I'll choose that. Yeah. You know what?

There's nothing wrong with a nice hedge, is there? And I do remember, I think there was another rendition of War of the Worlds that happened in somewhere in South, or like that was produced and made in South America, and it had the same effect. Like it did it all over again. So quick brief on the show. The episode in question, the infamous episode, just to lay it on the line as explicitly as possible, the 1938 Mercury Theater on the Air adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, as interpreted by Orson Welles. And though their names are H.G. and Orson Welles, they spell them differently, and there's no relation there.

It's just a coincidence. It's arguably the most famous radio play in history. And in saying arguably, I don't actually have an alternative in mind. Peggy Delaney? I've written here, I don't have an alternative in mind, semicolon, Peggy Delaney, question mark. I'm just reading your script, baby. Semicolon, Peggy Delaney, question mark. I'm just weaned this group, baby.

Great minds, great minds, great minds. So, tell you a little bit about Peggy Delaney since you're both of that mindset. Josie, you and I have a history together studying radio play, of all things, don't we? We do, we do. It was the very first class, it was before we were even in the creative writing department.

We were taking it as undergraduates. It was Brian Wade's stage and radio play class, and we did a lot of stage and radio stuff with Brian, and we adore him and miss him dearly. And it was interesting because I remember at the time thinking that, like, you're expected in at least in the creative writing program that Josie and I did our undergraduate at, you're expected to be slightly promiscuous in the genres that you do,

such that you get a feel for about four or five different genres. I think they mandate that you take four or something like that. Here's what I studied. I studied fiction pretty extensively. I did kids lit. I did radio. I did stage.

I did film at one point. I didn't think that the radio stuff that we did would be as relevant because there was this preconception of like radio at the time as dying. But podcasts hadn't quite taken off the way it has now, I think when we were in school, as this like very accessible medium, etc. And even in entering this podcast, I wasn't really thinking about it in terms of like radio play, etc. But I like a great deal of it in terms of like radio play, et cetera. But I like a great deal of the stuff we learned there is applicable, right? Especially for like the more sound effects heavy stuff we do.

The melties. The melt, yeah, the melties is kind of... That was a radio play. It's essentially just a radio play. That was semi improvised. We didn't script it the way that we would have scripted up something for that class. Like we were writing proper scripts for that class. And so, and sort of on that note, Peggy Delaney was this sassy lady detective reporter that we both really admired who, like, bullied this man

out of the closet. It was really, really great. I think she was on the... That show was on the CBC, wasn't it? I think so, probably. It was Canadian in some capacity. And then, so I'm excited, I guess, to kind of pick apart how a very famous immersive radio play works with you. I think that'll be fun. That's your history with radio play.

What's your history with Orson Welles? Can't remember his name. Well, evidently. Yeah. I don't know, I don't have much of a history. You didn't seem to enjoy him much when you watched F for Fake, did you? I seem to remember you finding him kind of windy.

A bit of a blowhard, yeah. Two schools of thought on this one, the nation was gripped in madness or the more modern notion that the hysteria has been overblown for a variety of reasons to the point of near fabrication. Talking tales of up to one million listeners beset by heart attacks, attempted or successful suicides, mob mentality, riots in the streets, everything but actual Martians, basically. We find ourselves on the timeline in a place where that makes sense, right?

October 1938, hell of a time in global history. Yes. We are ten years in the shadow of the economic collapse that destroyed employment, shuttered banks, and ushered in the Great Depression, so named because it is fucking depressing. We've got nothing to do but play with rags, suck on potato peels to avoid malnourishment,

and talk to one another, God forbid. A nightmare. Oh, yay, yay. Meanwhile, we're about a year away from Hitler innovating Poland, making good on many years of foreshadowing and ushering in a little war you might have heard of, the War of 1812.

No, Josie, it's World War II. ["JOSIE LAUGHS"] Get it together. Keep going. You now got me. I was, what? Oh, okay. This is obviously a rapidly developing situation of global concern. So to recap, the Depression means we need entertainment, and the war means we need information.

And right in the center of that Venn diagram lies radio. Radio. Radio. The preeminent communications technology of the day, even as cash strapped citizens are selling some machines and abstaining from buying others, in 1938, 80% of American homes have a radio. And even then, the American media has an ear

for a gripping news cycle. And like you say, they hadn't done CNN yet, right? Like the American media's master opus, the 24 hour news cycle, hadn't yet been invented. But if you look at the way that we were doing radio in 1938, I really do think you can see some of the seeds for it there. If you want to listen to the ravings of a populist blowhard with a shitty haircut, you don't have to get the Fox News cable package.

You can just listen along on the zenith as Hitler runs roughshod through Czechoslovakia in the buildup to the deadliest conflict in human history and like named as such. Right. Yeah. Dramaticized as such. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers his rhetoric direct to American eardrums every night via his fireside chats. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That's right. And frequent breaking news interruptions

make listening to the radio an exciting and emotional experience, like anything could happen. So there is still this sense of like, almost news is entertainment, and I don't mean that to in any way diminish what people were going through then, because like, you weren't listening to the radio in 1938 to the news, because it was a bundle of laughs.

But there was... It did occupy you, right? At a time when being occupied was at a premium and they found exciting ways to put these stories to you right in your home. Not just news media though, music of course, popular radio programming as are radio plays and other forms of scripted entertainment. One such program is an anthology series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a 13 week series commissioned in 1938 by CBS Radio

based on the successful New York City-based independent theater company of the same name, founded in 1937 by producer John Housman and 23-year-old auteur writer-director Orson Welles. Orson... Hello. Welcome to the podcast, Orson. The Mercury Theater Company's first production in all-black staging of Shakespeare's Macbeth invoking tropes around Haitian voodoo... That's rad. ...is a rousing success.

It's production of Julius Caesar mirroring the European fascism of the era, similarly well-regarded, and in fact, it later gets adapted for radio as part of the On Air series. Oh, tight, tight, tight. Trendy, forward-thinking versions of classics staged by this hip, young, up-and-coming writer-director,

Orson Welles. Yeah, and very modern, especially if it's being broadcast across the nation or to these, again, rural areas that don't get to see theater. They can now hear it. Well, it's interesting, because I gather that the way that Orson Welles' career started in earnest was as part of a federal program that FDR set up

during the Depression. One, to get jobs, and two, to bring theater to, like, all over America, like, a federal theater commission, basically. And he eventually parted ways from that to do the Mercury Theater, which is what led to the Mercury Theater on Air, the radio show. And I think that was just him and Houseman, who had both been doing this federal thing together, kind of just striking out and doing their own thing. But it did sort of start with this, like bringing theater to the people

kind of mindset for him. That's cool. Other literary classics, the radio version of the theater show adapted Around the World in 40 Days, Jane Eyre, Treasure Island, the list goes on. Most memorably, the decision is made to stage a Halloween production of the popular and influential 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

You ever read this one? No, I have not. It's supposed to be good. One of those ones that's been adapted a million times, a million different ways, it's a Martian invasion of Earth from the perspective of an unnamed narrator in England. It's a satire of imperialism that's considerably bigger and more complicated in its story and structure than the 1938 radio play. And as a result, I won't dive too deep into the particulars of the Wells story or any of the other kind of different treatments.

Why was H.G. Wells so taken with Mars? Could be because in the late 19th century, Italian astronomer Giovanni Shaparelli spotted on the nearby planet faint geometric lines, which he dubbed canale. And to an English speaker, canale suggests... Canals? Canals. Okay. and to an English speaker, canal suggests... Canal? Canals.

Canals, okay. Canal suggests irrigation or transport or at some rate intelligent life with the capacity for engineering. Also very canal heavy time, you know, canals on the brain, the 19th century. This is when people start to get into Mars pop culturally. It sustains itself into the new century, three days before the broadcast of War of the Worlds. In 1938, the Christian Science Observer publishes a quote from Swedish astronomer, Nute Lindmark,

hypothesizing the existence of life on Mars. Oh, yeah. We're thinking Mars. It's in the zeitgeist. It's in the zeitgeist, yeah, exactly. An understatement to call the War of the Worlds influential, it is like the fountain from which all of our Martian stuff springs.

Gotcha. Any cultural depiction of like a Martian, a man from Mars, Mars versus Earth, et cetera, is in some way derivative of the War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, so very, very well known. Which for this to trick people on the radio, it sort of becomes necessary that Orson Welles transforms it, right? Because it is very well known, which for this to trick people on the radio, it sort of becomes necessary that Orson Welles transforms it, right?

Because it is a well-known story. Like, little kids know this story. Yeah. There are comic books inspired by this that kids are reading in the 30s, you know. Oh, that's, yeah, that's interesting that that would be kind of a clue for folks to, it's October 30th and you know this story.

Well, the thing is, it's interesting. It's interesting. I don't think the intention is legitimately to trick the audience. And we'll get there. So the Thursday before the show, the performers rehearsed the first draft of the play written by a guy named Howard Koch, I think based on notes by Wells. And I clarify that because the script's about to take a hit here

for being, quote, abysmally dull. Oh. It's recorded on a wax disc and delivered to Orson Wells at the St. Regis Hotel for him to listen to. Wells, of course, still the director of the Mercury Theater's non-radio offerings. And at this moment, he's desperately attempting to revitalize a production of George Buckner's

Danton's Death that's absolutely shitting the bed in rehearsal due to lack of energy. It's dying Danton's Death. It's absolutely shitting the bed in rehearsal due to lack of energy. It's dying Danton's Death, dude. Truly it is. As a result, he basically ignores this War of the Worlds thing until the 11th hour only to find a production that's plagued with the same dullness he's been trying

to shake off this Buckner play. Oh no. That's gotta suck, huh? You're like, oh my God, I'm so, finally I can get away. Put on War of the Worlds and you hear that, you're like, this is worse. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's rough. That is really rough.

When Orson hears the dry radio play, he knows it needs a hit of juice and basting, if you like. So the production flies into the sort of inspired last minute creative chaos that would become a signature of the temperamental wells. Like any good-o-tour wells by this point, already a reputation for fussiness, precision. Mm-hmm.

Even tyranny in the name of artistic perfection. There are stories of him taking painstaking effort to get exactly the right sound effect for a wooden stake piercing a heart for the Mercury's radio production of Bram Stoker's Dracula. OK, when the Mercury Theater stage Julius Caesar, Welles demanded a real bagger. And when he as Brutus, because Orson Welles is always in his own shit, we should say. He always stars in his own stuff. Yes, yeah, yeah.

He's Brutus in this and he stabs Joseph Holland as Caesar with this real dagger and it wounds the guy, right? Oh, my God. What a jackass. That was back when, like, if you were, like, the Alfred Hitchcock or the Orson Welles or you were this, like, kind of, you could literally just, like, whip live birds at Tippi Hedren's face and no one would do a thing about it.

And that's not hypothetical. The Alfred Hitchcock whip live birds at Tippi Hedren's face and no one did anything about it. But yeah, again, it's that ethos of like, anything is good enough for the art, right? Like it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if people get hurt if we make good art. And that's sort of, I don't know, maybe something to keep in mind as we talk about the various adaptations of this play.

Yeah, the ends justify the means, perhaps. The decision is made to use real local place names and institutions in order to offer a sense of verisimilitude and make the proceedings seem more urgent to listeners. The choice to set the invasion in Grover's Mill in New Jersey comes when scriptwriter Howard Koch drops a pencil point on the town on a gas station map and decides he likes the sound of the name. At Hausman's suggestion, Koch also removed some specific mentions of the passage of time,

so that it seems like the broadcast proceeds in real time, heightening the terror, if not also the implausibility. These merchants make very good time in their 40-minute long annexation of the entire earth. Get their steps in. The updated version of the script passes muster with CBS Network sensors, who request the change of certain non-fictional institutional names

in order to avoid legal action, but otherwise give the project their approval. So, whatever comes of this in terms of responsibility, the networks have signed off on it. Yeah. The episode starts with a little title bumper explaining that this is the Mercury Theater on Air production of The War of the Worlds, directed by Orson Welles.

Okay. So, we have an announcement that, hey, guys, this is an adaptation of The War of the Worlds. It's not like it doesn't start midway through a fake interview and then just never tell you what it is. It tells you right at the top what it is. So why in the mass hysteria theory do listeners not take this warning under advisement? Because of the phenomenon of dial twisters, people changing stations to chase the most

interesting programming as people still do. Yeah, I was going to point out like that's something that radio does in terms of, you know, you're listening to a long form interview, and then all of a sudden, the interviewer kind of interrupts and says, you're listening to, you know, bittersweet infamy with Taylor Basso and Josie Mitchell. Yeah, a piece of it. And we're interviewing. Yeah.

You know, a drop of like, this is what we're talking about. This is what you're listening to. This is what to expect. And now we're back, you know, and it's just like, it's under 30 seconds. And because you don't have a visual that you could put on the screen to like not interrupt, but the audience can still tell you do have to interrupt auditorily. So if you don't have that, yeah, these dial twisters certainly, or you just come late to the show, right?

You have to finish the dishes and then, okay, okay, now we'll gather around the living room and listen, and you turn on and you don't get to hear that. Wasn't another thing, too, that in the script they used a lot of, like, breaking news interjections? Yes, almost entirely. The first half at least of this thing is breaking news, breaking news, breaking, breaking, breaking news. And sort of interestingly, when we talk about dial twisters, the thing that they might have been twisting the dial from, this program was up against a very popular ventriloquist act. And the show presents a series of musical interludes purportedly from a nearby hotel ballroom, but really carried out by a 27-piece orchestra who joined the 10 actors in Studio One on the 20th floor of the CBS building

in New York City. And these musical interludes are frequently interrupted by breaking news bulletins that become increasingly frequent and frantic, detailing first reports of a meteor-like object hitting a farm in Grovesville, New Jersey. This gradually segues into pseudo-live coverage in which the fictional reporter Carl Phillips, and consequently the listeners, bear a horrified witness as Martian invaders emerge from the meteor in the crater using their light rays to vaporize the on-site journalists, police presence, state militia, and finally, our boy Carl Phillips himself. Mm, RIP.

RIP, shortly thereafter, it's announced that the charred body of Carl Phillips has been discovered among the dead, and the Trenton state militia has declared martial law. They want Carl to know that he's not coming back in the sequel. I guess so, yeah, yeah. And, uh, I want to play a clip for you. Goodie goodie. It's the clip of Carl getting vaporized.

Oh, thanks. Great. Ladies and gentlemen, here I am back of a stone wall that joins Mr. Wilma's garden. From here, I get a sweep of the whole scene. I'll give you every detail as long as I can talk and as long as I can see. More state police have arrived. They're drawing up a cordon in front of the pit. About 30 of them. No need to push the crowd back now. They're willing to keep their distance.

The captain's conferring with someone. Can't quite see who. Ah yes, I believe it's Professor Pearson. Yes it is. Now they've parted and the professor moves around one side studying the object while the captain and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I can see it now. It's a white hexagon tied to a pole. A flag of truce.

Those preachers know what that means, what anything means. Wait a minute. Something's happening. A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror that leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on. Oh, they're turning into flames.

The whole sea is falling by the woods. The fires are gasp-itting everywhere. It's coming this way now. It, about 20 yards to my right. Well, had you ever heard that before? No. It's very easy to find. There's many versions of it on YouTube. That's yeah, I'm kind of surprised myself that I haven't heard the whole thing.

So what do you make of that? What do you think you would make of that if you heard that as, like, a nine-year-old girl listening to the radio with the fam jam? You know what I mean? Would that hit you? Would that spook you? I think so. Yeah. It would make me turn and be like, is this... Is this real? Like, I think I would. I would really question... Especially if you'd missed the first thing that indicated that it was a show.

Because then all you've been listening to is like, if you tune in late to this hypothetically, you think you're just like listening to an evening of dance music that's being like interrupted by increasingly graphic shit. And let's not forget too, when we are, we are in a time when most people listening to this will be war veterans themselves or certainly have one in the family. And they'll know, like, it's not out of the realm

that you know someone who was there one day and then, ah, dead the next, right? Whether or not it was a light ray. So, of course, this would ring true in that way. Yeah. Oh, think how training that must have been for so many people with post-traumatic distress. Or pre-traumatic, because Hitler's there. Yeah, yeah, true, true. And all they're listening to is his fucking goofy ass going like...

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, on the fucking radio. And then they're like, why don't we take a nice night and listen to like that nice young New York man who does the radio show? Yeah, yeah. Let's listen to the theater, daddy. Yeah. The story goes that when Phillips gets vaporized, the radio show. Yeah, yeah. Let's listen to the theater, daddy. Yeah. Oh. The story goes that when Phillips gets vaporized, this is when CBS gets on the horn with Studio One to tell Wells that they're getting a lot of switchboard traffic. Yeah.

From disturbed radio listeners and that he absolutely must make a station ID break announcement that this is a fictional production of War of the Worlds by Orson Welles for Mercury Theater on the Air. And so, typically, station breaks at this time for this show would come halfway into the production. I think this is just typical across shows. Thirty minutes in, you get a radio break. And Orson, our boy Orson, he didn't do this. They blew past that 30-minute break.

Yeah, okay. So the lack of a break at the 30-minute point of the show seems to indicate that whatever is happening on CBS is not a show. Otherwise, they rolled the station break. Right? Yeah. Do we know the rationale that Orson Welles has there? That he's like, I want to suspend reality.

Make it feel real. Make it feel real, okay. You wouldn't run a station break during a Martian invasion, that's crazy. Says Welles. Six minutes after we'd gone on the air, the switchboards and radio stations right across the country were lighting up

like Christmas trees. Houses were emptying. Churches were filling up from Nashville to Minneapolis. There was wailing in the street and the rending of garments. We get mixed stories about what happens next. Some speak of Wells emerging from his phone call with CBS haunches panicked as pale as a ghost. Others noted that he held the suspense a full 10 minutes further

before running the station break. Another actor who takes an inspired approach to the materialist, Kenny Delmar as the secretary of the interior, who appears after that intermission. Although, if you didn't notice his job title, you might mistake him for someone a bit higher up than the secretary of the interior seat. Wells happened to know that Delmar had a banger FDR impersonation in the chamber. Oh. And so, with a wink and a nudge, he asked Delmar to take a more...

presidential approach to the character, in order to be more convincing in his authority to the average listener. Oh. Hmm, hmm. As in you sound like FDR, people will think it's real if you just talk like FDR. Yeah. It doesn't matter who we say you are, if you go in there with like an FDR voice

coming out of the radio, people will think that they're our merchants. From there, the chaos on the radio show spreads rapidly from town to town, claiming the radio personnel, the military, and the entire government until one lone survivor played by Orson Welles is left to monologue to himself for the rest of time. Of course it's fucking Orson Welles.

Oh, left to a fate that I'm sure he hates, listening to himself talk for eternity. Bummer. At long last, Welles ends the broadcast with the following announcement. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen. Out of character to assure you that the War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be, the Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo.

Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the Columbia broadcasting system. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody and remember the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, gluing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch

And if your doorbell rings and nobody's there that was no Martian. It's Halloween Dun dun dun dun and credits woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo So that was his sort of honestly like kind of pretty elegant, not bad on the fly, like gotcha, stop yelling at me. After the episode Studio One is inundated with police officers who corner Wells and Houseman inquiring about their role and all the chaos that seems to have unfolded. The men are convinced they're going to jail, and they hurry to a back office to sweat it out while network employees feverishly collect and destroy the scripts and recordings of the broadcast. Oh my goodness.

Yeah, no, no, no. Well, they didn't get them all because obviously it's survived to the present day, so that's good. Yeah. But I understand why they might feel inclined to do so. So what do you think of the ethics of what Wells did here? He wrote a middle line. He did say at the beginning that it was a show. Really, all he did was he did something really adventurous with form that nobody was expecting.

But alternately, you could argue by doing things like deliberately delaying the ID break past the half hour. Is he like yelling, fire in a crowded theater here? Because we know that people are like, there's legitimate weird war shit. A nuke is about to get dropped in a few years, right? Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. That's not that different from a fucking light ray. It just happens to be not a Martian controlling it, right? And the Martian is an allegory for the other anyway.

Yeah. I think there is some irresponsibility, But I do also think that, you know, there was a whole network that was signed off on the script that could have very easily hit the pause button or, you know, like, come in and- Send it to the fucking dummy! Go to the dummy feed! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Because when I think about it as a piece of art, it's like, yeah, suspend reality.

Let's go. I liked studying it as a piece of art. It's a cool piece of art to kind of pick apart and figure out like, okay, how did this get people so riled up? What are the specific structural choices that were made, you know? Right, yeah.

And I think that is very cool. But I don't know, it's a crowded theater up what are the specific structural choices that were made, you know? Right, yeah. And I think that is very cool. But I don't know, it's a crowded theater and you yelled fire, you know? That's a little tricky. I imagine, okay, here's a scenario. You go to the theater and the play is, you know, it's the premiere of the play. You don't know how it will end. You maybe know what it's about,

but you don't know how it will end. And it ends with a fire that takes place in the audience or whatever it is, right? And- Your argument here is someone could get hurt by both. Yes. Even if it's a rendering of a fire in the theatre, if somebody believes it so much to be a fire, then it could cause a panic. And then their reaction is what is dangerous.

Is there anything in the idea that this is like an adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, a book that by then has been very popular and interpreted for about 40 years. Obviously, they were using entirely different techniques, but like no one was losing their mind when Dracula was on, do you know what I mean? Does that hold any sway in it, that like the idea that like people should quote unquote be reasonable enough to know that Martians didn't just come to New Jersey. This is pre man on the moon. This is where we know different things about the cosmos than we do now. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the thing though is panic is not reasonable. You know, it's kind of I'm sure there are plenty of people who are like, it's a radio show. It's not the hour

for this. It's no, no, this wouldn't. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, like, you look out your window and your neighbor's out there, like, you know, burning the furniture, because they're freaking out. And then it's like, well, that's terrifying. And I haven't heard the station ID. And I mean, that's the thing, right? The theater is crowded.

The theater is filled with people who are on edge. What about as a writer, how would you feel if something that you had, like... If you were Orson here, basically. I feel pretty damn good. Yeah. You'd be like, why can't these babies... Oh, the Martians are getting ready.

You'd be like, come on. I've got to talk to the cops over this. This is dumb. That's what you'd be thinking. Yeah. No, there, but yeah, I would be kind of proud that it was mistaken for sex truth, you know? Yeah. And I like, honestly, the instinct to do the things that he did that made this so evocative, that were sort of, like, looked at somewhat askance at the time.

E.g., like, why are you making the, like, first half of this a bunch of, like, cutaways from, like, ballroom music being played? That's the best part of it. The second it turns into Orison Welles being like, the aliens took everything from... Fucking shut up, who cares? Go back to the part where the guy's getting zapped by the light ray, because I thought I was gonna be fucking listening to some girl like play the harp or something.

Like, that's a good hook, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's very true. So, when it comes to the hysteria itself, the idea that people went out and did all of these crazy things, they thought the world was ending, there are many contrasting claims. The newspapers of the time published a total of 12,500 articles, casting a bemused eye toward the alleged dupes and a scornful eye toward Wells, Houseman, and the tricksters at CBS Studios. We hear that news desks and police stations were swamped with calls during the production

in Bergenfield, New Jersey, north of Grovers Mill. It's alleged that 20 families showed up at the police station with all of their possessions. In Indiana, a woman rushed to her church pulpit to inform parishioners that the world was ending and they could all go home. I think that's kind of funny. She goes, she's like, we don't need this shit anymore. We can wrap this up.

You can leave this sanctuary... Yeah, yeah. ...and go die at home. See ya. In concrete Washington, a power outage coinciding with the program supposedly sent citizens fleeing into the mountains. Oh, shit. We hear of hardy college boys fainting dead away of looting in the streets, of traffic accidents and medical incidents,

and even suicides caused by the mercury production. Iowa Senator Clyde Herring, based on these reports, calls for legislation to create a board of radio censorship. Because you knew that was going to happen. Ahh. The FCC calls for an investigation into CBS. Alphabet on Alphabet Violence. Yeah. Um... says Dorothy Thompson in her syndicated news column on the record, Hitler managed to scare all Europe to its knees a month ago,

but at least he had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. Mr. Wells scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all. In the end, Orson Welles gives a highly choreographed press conference as either a mea culpa or a victory lap, depending on your point of view. He said, quote,

We are deeply shocked and deeply regretful about the results of last night's broadcast. It came as rather a great surprise to us that the H.G. Wells classic, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories should have had such an immediate and profound effect on radio listeners.

So he's sort of subtly shifting the blame. Yeah, yeah. We thought that you all knew this story already and wouldn't go crazy when you heard it again a slightly different way. And when asked, should you have turned down the language of the drama, Mr. Wells replied, no, you don't play murder in soft words. Which I agree with. You don't play murder in soft words.

I mean, there are ways to do it for effect when you need to. But like when you're dealing with like the massacre of humanity, I'm with Orson on this one. I don't really see the point in soft shoe in that one, right? Come on. Yeah. So that's sort of the gloss around this supposed hysteria. So now here's the case against this hysteria having ever happened.

Okay. So first point, ratings. Mercury Theater on the Air was a low budget show without a sponsor that had only been on CBS for a matter of weeks. They had a small but loyal audience, but not one in the millions as accounts would seem to indicate. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

The night the program aired, a telephone survey of 5,000 households indicated that only 2% were listening to Mercury Theatre on the air, and nobody answered that they were listening to a breaking news broadcast about Mars. Oh. So the vast majority of people were otherwise occupied. It seems like indie theatre director Orson Welles,

prodigy though he was, was not yet up to the level of ventriloquist dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to beat the dummy on the radio. A CBS survey conducted after the fact confirmed that relatively few people had heard the program, and those who did interpreted it as a prank, say Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Sokolow for The Washington Post.

In a nation of about 130 million people, a generous reading would conclude that fewer than 50 Americans were panicked enough by the broadcast to flee outside. So not to say that people weren't upset or calling their mother-in-law about it or anything like that, but in terms of like, running naked into the sidewalk, fingering yourself and screaming for the Lord, not so much.

running naked into the sidewalk fingering yourself and screaming for the Lord? Not so much. Oh, Jesus. That's what she says. Yeah, yeah, okay. Number two, anti-radio sentiment is particularly from the newspaper industry. By the late 30s, radio is roughing up

the print news industry by stealing advertising revenues. If you're a newspaper printer, why not present radio as a source of sensationalized and untrustworthy news? Mm-hmm. Ooh, it's big newspaper. Fake news. Fake news. I mean, it was fake news. That was the whole thing. In this instance, it was legitimately fake news, yes.

A New York Times editorial criticized radio officials for telling, quote, blood-curdling fiction offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given. Trade, journal, editor and publisher said, the nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove that it is competent

to perform the news job. Oh, okay. Interesting, interesting, interesting. So, like, you can't trust the radio, it's too new a technology, it's not reliable like newspapers kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Or we don't have like the media literacy for radio yet. It's interesting because you see versions of this

every time there's a new... Like. These ring true to discussions I've had around various technologies with various people, right? Number three, tropes around the gullible public on October 30th, 1938, when The Swore the World's aired, were about a week out from state-level elections that will dictate the remainder of FDR's second term and the future of his efforts to tackle the issues that animate the depression, poverty,

mass unemployment, et cetera, et cetera. The punchline that this reactive radio audience was composed of the idiots about to vote on our collective future was an easy bone to pick for people on any side of the political spectrum. Yeah, true enough, yeah. And specifically reports of the apocryphal members of the idiot public often played into existing stereotypes around, say,

gullible black listeners or hysterical women. Oh, that's really... Classic, right? You forgot when we were for a moment. Yeah, classic and disheartening. The legacy of this whole thing was solidified in 1940 when a study by Princeton academic Hadley Cantrell estimated based on a report by the American Institute

of Public Opinion that one million people were frightened by War of the Worlds. However, he admits that this figure is over 100% higher than any known measure of this audience. But also, like, what does it mean to be frightened? Does it mean that you're like, ooh, I got goosebumps, Okay." -"Exactly." You're listening to a Halloween special.

You'd like to be a little bit excited, thrilled perhaps. Yes, yes. Get the blood pumping. Also of note, the Princeton Office of Radio Research asked around New York and New York City was not able to verify any cases of people being treated in hospital, for instance, related to the show. So, heart attacks, suicides. I think seeing this Princeton study seen as not being

all the best in its scholarship in terms of how it inflates the situation, but because it comes from Princeton or has the name tag of Princeton attached to the academic who did it, it is seen as legitimizing this hysteria angle. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. The FCC investigation concludes December 5th, 1938, with no punitive action against CBS. Senator Herring's proposed radio watchdog never materializes.

CBS basically makes a gentleman's agreement not to do this again. And I don't think they do. Also should note, a frightened listener sued CBS for $50,000 CBS basically makes a gentleman's agreement not to do this again, and I don't think they do. Also should note, a frightened listener sued CBS for $50,000 over nervous shock. Her lawsuit was dismissed. If the hysteria was overblown, the tangible consequences were also basically nil. Okay. Okay.

That's interesting. Yeah. The War of the Worlds incident strapped a rocket to Orson Welles' career. He became extremely in demand, an international star, sought after by Hollywood. He signed a contract with RKO Studios to write, direct, produce, and star in one film a year, the first 1941's Citizen Kane. They are.

They're probably held to be the greatest film of all time. Over the course of his career, Wells would go on to make The War of the Worlds broadcast a critical part of his mythology, with a healthy dose of exaggeration as he recounted. The evening, the world seemingly came to its end. These are some notes from Wellsnet, which is like an Orson Welles fan site as you might imagine.

They've taken dictation on, it sounds like notes of him speaking about this, and I've taken some quotes and like, I've trimmed them here and there for brevity, but I've left them pretty shaggy. Yeah. I'll just read them to you. During the years that have gone by since then, I've heard a number of stories about things that happened. Some of them may seem hard to believe, but they're all verified in a very scholarly book

by Princeton University. There we go, yeah. One of the stories I like best has to do with the Navy. It's wrong to say that I like it best, honestly. It does prey on my conscience. The United States Navy was in New York Harbor at the time and the sailors, the boys were all on shore leave and they were all recalled that night for active duty.

I felt often very sorry for them having to give up their nice holidays in order to defend America against the Martians. And I've often wondered what it was that the Navy haven't found to tell the sailors the next morning. Oh my God, oh my God. Would you like that Orson Welles anecdote or would you like to trade it in for the second one

that I have in this mystery box? Let's hear the second one. Trade it, trade it, okay, how about this. John Barrymore, the very famous American actor, and I know this to be true, was listening to the broadcast and although he was a friend of mine, ceased to identify me with the show and believed implicitly that America had fallen

to the Martians and hearing this on his radio, rushed out to his backyard where he kept 10 great Danes in a kennel and released the dogs, giving them their freedom, crying to them as they ran in all directions on the compass. The world has fallen, fend for yourselves. Pfft. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha This dear friend of mine forgot that he was listening to my voice on the radio because

I'm that good. He went mad. He released all of his Great Danes. All 15 of them. Jesus. That's so funny. So yeah, a very, our raconteur friend Orson kind of builds this into his mythos and I think just kind of tells a lot of lies about it over the course of his life.

But again, that's sort of the premise of F for Fake, right? That documentary. Yeah, and it's the whole premise of the, you know, war of the worlds too. So fake it till you make it. And then when you've made it, keep faking. And then make a movie called fake. Yeah. Exactly. It's perfect. In 1957 Studio One, a CBS television anthology series, dramatized the panic as the night America trembled. This is like...

We're watching 50s people listen to this on the radio, and, you know, Bobby and Joni on Lover's Lane, and they hear it come over, like, I'm never going to see my father again, you know. Yeah, mm, fun. Uh, in 1968, around the time man lands on the moon for the first time, so maybe that's why we're dredging up this other really invaders thing, I don't know.

WKBW in Buffalo started its tradition of readapting the Wells adaptation to bring it up to date. So this was actually kind of fun. You can listen to different versions of this on YouTube. And they would update it sort of over the years. They use their actual in-house, like, personnel. They would give them notes, but whoever was the actual DJ at the time

would be the one DJing for this. And instead of cutting to, like, the Starlight Ballroom in Atlantic City, New Jersey, or wherever, they would play a Cher song or a Rod Stewart song. And then they, like, cut into the Rod Stewart song to be like, sorry to interrupt, this is really weird. That's very cool. So they kind of update it for the 70s.

And there's a lot of really bizarre commercials for knitwear, the sponsor is like a knitwear brand. And the commercials are psychotic. They're like, Pete is dragging his fingers over these knit slacks because he has a fetish. They're really bizarre. They're like fucked up like groovy late 60s, 70s ads where everyone's dropping ass at. Oh, I love it. Oh, time capsule. Thank you.

There are also international interpretations, as you alluded, including in Portugal, where producer Matos Maia was dragged into a back room by the secret police and threatened as a result of the broadcast. Really pissed off the dictator at the time somehow. Brazil, where the military showed up pissed off the dictator at the time somehow. Brazil, where the military showed up at the radio station and the staff had to quickly doctor a version of the show that had disclaimers in it and act like they'd always been there. Oh, that's that's scary. That's spooky.

And and Chile, where, according to a 1944 Newsweek article, a Valparaiso electrician named Jose Vilaroel was so distressed that he died of a heart attack while listening. Notes to Skepticality.com, Vilaroel seems then to have earned the dubious honour of becoming the first person on Earth to be killed in an alien invasion. Aww. RIP. But wait Josie, something very interesting has happened here.

If someone has died from listening to a version of the Wells play, albeit just an adaptation, or if it ran afoul of Portugal's dictatorship, etc., you would think that those facts would have crept into the mythology somewhere along the way, since we're all bickering about the effects of this play and whether it was or was not legit in being a hysteria creator. Could it be the case that in all of our haggling around whether people had an extreme reaction to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, or whether it was all a big con pushed forward by self-interested newspapers

and an auteur artist fond of self-felatio, we've missed a definitive answer by limiting our search to just this one night in the United States in 1938. Could it be that the world is vast and we as humans are self-interested and that, as we've acknowledged before on the show, Spanish language news from South America, for example, is pretty patchy in terms of

making it up to the USA or Canada in any complete form? Could it be, Josie, that despite my tonal indications that I'm winding down this story, this episode of Trick-or-Treat Infamy isn't done collecting candy for the night, and that like Orson Welles, we're pushing that station break back because the war, Josie, the war of the worlds has only just begun. Let me take you to another world, another time.

Let me tell you what happened when the Martians came to Quito, Ecuador on February 12, 1949. And let me tell you, Orson Welles, he got shit on this. So I think this might be the one that you were talking about. This is what I was remembering, yeah. So how do you know about this? I heard a podcast about it.

It was a long time ago. Okay, so here's where I heard this. I'll tell you where I heard this, because I wasn't familiar with the story of the Ecuadorian adaptation and the subsequent fallout until Criminal, which is a great podcast that I rep all the time. Really, really enjoy it. An incredibly sensitive,

thoughtful, interview-heavy depiction of crime from all of its lenses through a very human and empathetic perspective, always. In November 2022, in their 200th episode, we interrupt this program. It's the second part of a Halloween two-parter. They cover this Ecuadorian version that had, like, really big consequences. And, like, to stop skirting around it,

like, a really legitimate hysteria and basically a riot that breaks out because of this. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Maybe I did hear this. This episode, which features extensive reporting from Lisette Arevalo, is largely drawn from another Arevalo pen podcast, the January 12th, 2020 episode of Radio Ambulante entitled Los Extraterrestres. So these episodes, the radioambulante one and the War of the Worlds one from the criminal story,

I should say, those are my main sources for this part of the story. Probably, if she's done this on a couple of podcasts, it's possibly something that you might have heard her speak about it on another podcast, because she talks about it in the context of, like, her grandfather having lived through this. OK, OK.

In 1949, Quito, Ecuador is relatively quiet and small as world capitals go. It's relevant to note our timeline, 1949, again, the wake of World War II with its global nuclear warfare. And while Ecuador was neutral in that war, they had a war with Peru in 1941 around territory claims. That would still very much be in the shared memory. One of the most popular radio stations in Quito is Radio Quito, whose artistic director, Leonardo Pais,

has been called the king of radio theater. A Radio Quito staff member named Eduardo Alcaraz gives Paez the script of the 1944 Chile version. So this is the one that sent our man off of a heart attack, RIP. Yeah, yeah, okay. He tells Leonardo Pais, the king of radio theater, that I want your take on the golden chalice of radio theater basically.

Right, yeah. In a pre-internet and social media time, many Ecuadorians simply wouldn't have heard about the NYC original or even the 1944 Chile version making them a fresh audience. Like Howard Koch before him, Páez adjusted the script so that the references were local to Ecuador. And he also notably omits any indication

that what the listener is hearing isn't really happening. Why would you do that? While Wells's 1938 adaptation had that nice little intro bumper naming the show not so in the Piaz adaptation. Yeah. So that's, phew, that's risky. Yeah. So that's, that's risky. That's, that's irresponsible.

See to me, that's irresponsible. Yeah, especially having the example from however long ago, the 12 years, whatever before. Or even the one in Chile, which is like the script that you're working off of. You know, someone potentially died of fright, or at least he had a jammer while listening. It's hard to say what makes the heart stop ticking, but it did look good.

Yeah, no, no. In the lead up to the show, Radio Quito plants cryptic ads about mysterious happenings on February 12th and promotes a special appearance by the popular musical duo Benitez y Valencia, ensuring that quiteños will be tuned in at home or else they'll listen outside with their neighbors as a group, as is popular at the time. You ring the radio out.

Yeah. Everybody listens, you chat about what you're listening to. Right? Right, yeah. There's music, you dance. Why not? Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The evening music program, of course, is interrupted with an urgent newswire

about a Martian invasion, as these things tend to be. Only there's no indication of any kind that this is a dramatization, because Leonardo has gone in raw. Real local journalists have lent their voices to the roles. An actor posing as the mayor of Quito asks the women and children to flee to the outskirts and the men to stay behind and prepare for combat.

Ooh, shit. Yeah, they're just like eggs eggs, lor, ding, this shit. So this is what we in the biz call the call to action. If Josie or I ever tell you to like, oh, subscribe, leave us a review, that's the call to action. This is a pretty intense call to action. This is like, you need to get ready to abandon your families

and defend your planet. People start to freak out. Like, really freak out. Then the Martians on the radio show take over the military base. That makes it worse. As the show goes on, the audience, who has a reminder, are listening socially

for an evening of music while surrounded by their families, neighbors, and other community members, are all just feeding each other's panic, which escalates and escalates. When the theater's crowded, that's easier to... easier to spread that panic. Leonardo Paez himself plays the reporter who gets got by the light ray. He talks about a gigantic metallic arm that shoots yellow liquid

that makes houses disappear. And then in parentheses, I've written, the house vanishing piss! Exclamation mark. Hahahaha! We know it. Everyone knows it. What a trope. It's the house vanishing piss. Quoting Lisette Arevalo,

after that he said in a very alarming voice that Martians were heading to Quito and that people should run for their lives. And then his transmission stops, as it would have if it had been interrupted by Martians. And the radio host said that Leonardo had been disintegr been interrupted by Martians. Oh, God. And the radio host said that Leonardo had been disintegrated by the Martians right on the spot.

Oh. So that was the moment that people panicked even more. Maria Luisa, for example, she was very young when this happens, but she remembers that people started taking out mattresses from their homes, luggage baskets and anything that they could carry to escape the city, to escape the invasion. Other people were knocking on the doors of the church out of terror. They were trying to confess their sins before they die. Men were coming down from the streets. Men who

were liberal and said that they didn't believe in God were suddenly kneeling on the streets and asking God for forgiveness." There's no atheist in the foxhole, or at least that's the folkloric version, because you must remember, right? Like, this too could have some sauce in the foxhole. Or at least that's the folkloric version, because you must remember, right? Like, this too could have some sauce in the telling and probably does. This is being passed down by the viejos from the 40s, the same way that the other thing is being passed down from the 30s, right?

Yeah, yeah, true enough, yeah. Notes Phoebe Judge, the host of Criminal, who my adore. There was one story that there were so many people asking for confession that a priest just told them to confess their sins together at the same time so that he could absolve them all at once. Whoa. So just yell them in my direction, I'm not gonna stop and address individual sins,

we're not gonna be doing any rosary shit, we're past the point of that, no Our Fathers, no Hail Marys, you got lucky. Leonardo Paez would later give accounts that there were people wanting to jump out windows so that they would die before the Martians came. People confessing that they cheated on their partners. People burning money or giving it away

to strangers in the street. People gathering around to just drink whiskey and wait for the Martians to come. Whoa. So it finally becomes known to the folks at Radioquito who are still playing this drama out. They hear what's happening outside the studio so they cut into the radio program to announce to everyone

that it was just a drama and to remain calm. And as you might imagine, this group of people who have recently been slamming brown alcohol and panic fornicating while they stare down at Destiny of getting charred alive at best and drenched in the house piss at worst, they did not calm down. The opposite, that.

Oh. They did not like to hear from these fake news journalists, these untrustworthy, fake, fraudulent, lying journalists, right? Yeah. That they had been had. And that's when we start to collect the torches and the sticks and head over to Radio Quito for a natter.

Oh, shiz. The phrase Lisette Arevalo's grandfather used is Ríos de gente, rivers of people walking through the heat, these streets of Quito, directly to the radio station, which shares a building with Quito's biggest newspaper, El Comercio. Quoting Lisette, when they arrived, they broke in the building,

they went into the lobby in the lower floor and started just smashing everything and burning everything down. End quote. People are throwing rocks and screaming down with radio. People start pouring cans of gasoline all over the building. Guillermo Villalba, one of the hosts who participated in the broadcast, remembers the anguish and despair as the smoke rose from the lobby to the second floor, which housed the radio station. Oh, God. The play personnel need to escape the building

to avoid being burned alive or smoke inhalation or collapse from the rubble, but they can't walk through the front door into this mob. The hosts begin to desperately ask for help on the mic into the live radio. Oh, gosh. They beg the police and firefighters to rescue them. Nobody believes them. They think it's part of the show. Of course. Why wouldn't you?

Yeah. Isn't that a heartbreaker? Isn't that just like, aww? That is. That's really, that's rough. That's so rough. And conversely, the pillar of smoke rising from the center of the city seems to give credence to the idea of a Martian invasions. So, invasions, that keeps that potential halfway too, right? Yeah, yeah. The play creators are trapped in an inferno of their own accidental design. Oh my God.

When firefighters finally arrive, the mob threatens them until they leave and then the mob knocks over fire hydrants so they can't be used. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The crowd agrees to let some people out of the building, but they want Leonardo Paez, the guy in charge, to pay for what he did.

Leonardo, to his credit, has already escaped by this point, by clambering onto the roof of the school next door and escaping along the tops of houses. Wow. Wow. Others attempt their own escapes, quoting the New York Times, as the flames cut off escape, occupants formed a human chain from balconies and windows. Some were dashed to the ground when the chain broke, others leapt.

Ecuador's Ministry of Defense sends in troops with tear gas and tanks for crowd control. Four officers are beaten so badly that they're hospitalized with concussions. Finally, the firefighters are able to put out the burning Radio Quito building, which is completely destroyed along with everything inside, including the archives and printing presses

of El Comercio. Oh, shit. As well as the script for and recording of The War of the Worlds. So, we don't know what this sounded like. We are able to recreate it based on kind of secondhand and various, like, educated attempts and recollections and things like

that. But we don't know what this sounded like. We just have to go on on witness accounts. Oh my gosh. It burned. It all fucking burned. Everything burned, burned, burned, burned. It's estimated that 20 people died that night, including two musicians, Leonardo Pais' girlfriend

and her nephew. Oh no. including two musicians, Leonardo Paez's girlfriend... Oh. -...and her nephew. And I couldn't get names or more details on these, so, like, again, I'm sorry if this number of 20 vague people who don't have names is wobbly, but this is just what I've got to report back, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. In the days to come, Quito police arrest members of the mob as well as employees of the radio station,

but they never get their hands on Leonardo Paez. He goes into hiding in the outskirts of Quito until under the advice of his lawyer, he appears in front of a judge. He's accused of arson and provoking a collective reaction that caused the destruction of the radio station, quoting Lisette Arevalo. Paez and his lawyer prove that the directors of Radio Quito

were aware of Radioquito were aware of what they were going to do and that they signed a contract for this. So again, like as in New York, it was signed off on by the higher-ups. So Páez argued that he was only following orders from his superiors. He was acquitted of all charges and was released.

Oh, wow. Radioquito and El Comercio are both able to resume operations after the War of the Worlds incident. Paez had trouble finding journalistic work with news organizations worried that their readers won't trust him writing under his own name. Eventually, he self-exiles to Emerita, Venezuela, where he lives out his days until dying in 1991.

In the remainder of his life, he penned many pop music songs, and notably a fictionalized novel version of what happened in Quito that infamous February day in 1949 called Los Que Siembren el Viento, Those That Seed the Wind. Ooh. Which brings us back to the question. The War of the Worlds panic. Did it really happen? Not as popularly recorded, but after hearing the accounts

of foreign versions, and especially the Ecuadorian one, it's hard to say no. Yeah. Even if it wasn't exactly on the terms that Orson Welles laid out. If I had to focus on a theme to close us out, for real this time, there's something about this narrative that intrigues me as an indictment of humanity's fear in looking outward and self-absorption in looking inward. In looking outward, we dread that which is different and live in fear of being harmed by the other. In looking inward, we accept that an alien invasion is happening 10 minutes away from wherever we live because in our individual experience, we're the center of the universe. Why wouldn't the aliens come to Quito? Yeah.

It's cause for reflection and self-reflection. So with that said, as you go out trick-or-treating this Halloween, keep your eyes peeled, watch out for Martians, steer clear of Grover's Mill, and if you're thinking about pulling any tricks in Quito, Ecuador, make sure you read the room first. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure, bittersweet infamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us

on Instagram at Bitter Sweet Infamy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this week's Mimphemous include the book Dark Archives by Megan Rosenblum. That's Dark Archives, a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin. She was interviewed on WNYC Studios podcast, All of It. Their episode entitled Dark Archives,

which was published October 30th, 2020. And lastly, I looked at the Wikipedia web page for Mary Lynch. My sources for this episode of Bittersweet Infamy and Trick or Treat Infamy really include PBS American Experience, War of the Worlds. I listened to the original 1938 CBS War of the Worlds, and we included clips from that show here in.

I also listened to the 1968 WKBW Buffalo reinterpretation. You can find those both on YouTube and a lot of fun to listen to. I watched season 10, episode one of Studio One, The Night America Trembled. I listened to episode 200 of Criminal, We Interrupt This Program, air date November 4th, 2022. Also listen to

January 14th, 2020 program of Radio Ambulante Los Extraterrestres. I watched the YouTube video AAT&T Operators Recall War of the Worlds Broadcast, posted on YouTube by AAT&T Archives I read, The infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast was a magnificent fluke in the Smithsonian magazine by A. Brad Schwartz, May 6, 2015. The fake news of Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds at 80 by Peter Tungette for Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for Humanities. Fall 2018, volume 39, number 4. On Wellesnet, I access the aftermath of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds Halloween Press Conference 1938 as well as Orson Welles' sketchbook episode 5.

I read Orson Welles' War of the Worlds panic myth the infamous radio broadcast did not cause a nationwide hysteria by Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Sokolow for Slate October 28, 2013. And War of the Worlds, those pesky aliens, for old time radio by John Gosling. And I read the Wikipedia articles for Mercury Theater, Mercury Theater on the Air, and the Ecuadorian-Peruvian War. And of course, the War of the Worlds 1938 radio drama.

If you wanna support the podcast, you can join us over at coffee.com, that's k-f-n-f-i.com, slash bittersweetinfamy. Come remember the Bittersweet Film Club for monthly episodes. Join us along with Ramone, Jonathan, Lizzie D., Erica Jerr, Soph, Dylan, and Satchel. Bitter Sweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Alexi Johnson, Alex McCarthy.

Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins and the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Stay sweet sweet friends. The Mercury Theater's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying boo Starting now we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates By tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS You will be relieved. I hope to learn that we didn't mean it and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing,

globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween. Okay, it's official. We are very much in the final sprint to Election Day. And face it, between debates, polling releases, even court appearances, it can feel exhausting, even impossible, to keep up with. I'm Brad Milky. I'm the host of Start Here, the daily podcast from ABC News.

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