--- title: "War of the Worlds aired on CBS radio 88 years ago, but a same-night survey found only 2% of homes tuned in" url: https://badiyaa.com/war-of-the-worlds-1938-panic-2-percent-survey/ published: 2026-10-30T13:17:00+00:00 modified: 2026-10-30T13:17:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # War of the Worlds aired on CBS radio 88 years ago, but a same-night survey found only 2% of homes tuned in Of nearly 2,000 letters sent to Orson Welles and US regulators after the October 30, 1938, broadcast, only about 27% came from frightened listeners. About 100 out of 5,000. That is how many homes in a ratings company’s same-night phone survey were tuned to Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” when it aired on CBS radio at 8 p.m. Eastern on October 30, 1938, 88 years ago. The C. E. Hooper company rang 5,000 households that evening. Only 2% said they were listening to the Martian play, and not one said they thought they were hearing a news broadcast. Yet by the next morning, newspapers were describing a country in terror. ## What actually went out over the air The hour was episode 17 of *The Mercury Theatre on the Air*, an unsponsored CBS drama series run by a 23-year-old Welles. Writer Howard Koch moved H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel from England to New Jersey and set the first landing at Grovers Mill, a village in West Windsor Township. The first half imitated a night of dance music cut into by bulletins: explosions on Mars, a cylinder in a farm field, a heat ray, poison smoke over Manhattan. The first station break did not come until roughly half an hour in. CBS still said the show was fiction four times during the hour, at the start, either side of the break and at the close, then repeated the notice three more times later that night. ## How big was the panic? Historians who have gone back to the evidence keep shrinking the number. American University media historian W. Joseph Campbell concluded in 2003 that the hysteria “did not occur on anything approaching a nationwide dimension.” The richest evidence is the mail. Nearly 2,000 letters reached Welles and the Federal Communications Commission afterward; they are now held by the University of Michigan and the [National Archives](https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/10/27/this-week-in-universal-news-the-war-of-the-worlds-broadcast-1938/). Historian A. Brad Schwartz found about 27% came from frightened listeners or people who saw fear around them, about 540 letters on that share. He concluded the show briefly fooled part of its audience, but few people actually fled their homes. Other details point the same way: - Princeton professor Hadley Cantril put the total audience at about six million in his 1940 study. - A Radio Project study found fewer than a third of frightened listeners thought the invaders were aliens; most assumed a German attack or a natural disaster. - Some New Jersey police and press offices took up to 40% more calls than normal, which Campbell reads as people checking facts, not running. - Some CBS stations, including Boston’s WEEI, did not carry the show at all. Media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow put it bluntly on the broadcast’s 75th anniversary in 2013: “Almost nobody was fooled”. ## Why the legend got so big Timing mattered. The Munich crisis had kept Americans glued to radio news bulletins for weeks, and the late Sunday hour left newsrooms thinly staffed, so many papers ran stitched-together wire anecdotes. Newspapers had also lost advertising money to radio during the Depression, and historians argue the panic story gave them a stick to beat the newer medium with. The [Library of Congress](https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/10/lcm-page-from-the-past-war-of-the-worlds/) notes that sensational headlines, like the San Francisco paper’s front page of October 31, built the lasting belief in a widespread panic. A newsreel of the period, preserved at the National Archives, claimed “thousands of radio listeners” were frightened “into mass hysteria.” The National Archives’ own film staff now call that panic “more likely media hype.” The coverage itself was the real flood: at least 12,500 newspaper articles in three weeks. Adolf Hitler cited the broadcast in a Munich speech on November 8, 1938. ## What Welles said At a press conference on October 31, 1938, a sleep-starved Welles told reporters he had expected “nothing unusual.” Asked whether he should have softened the script, he replied: “No, you don’t play murder in soft words.” In a February 22, 1983, letter to his old mentor Roger Hill, he wrote that whatever panic there was faded fast, “But, the newspapers for days continued to feign fury.” ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)) - [Library of Congress: Page from the Past: War of the Worlds](https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2016/10/lcm-page-from-the-past-war-of-the-worlds/) - [National Archives: The War of the Worlds Broadcast, 1938](https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/10/27/this-week-in-universal-news-the-war-of-the-worlds-broadcast-1938/) *Image: Paul Ligeti, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*