THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Daily Vitamin. I hope you had en excellent weekend!

This Wednesday is a holiday, All Saints Day, so there will only be four Daily Vitamins this week. And Thursday is Halloween, so this is Halloween week. ;-) To celebrate, I have decided to do a couple of "cultural" Daily Vitamins. 

Today I want to speak about a very strange incident that happened on this day 75 years ago in the United States; it was October 30th, 1938. It was before TV, and radio was the main entertainment in the homes of the United States. There was a radio show called "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" from the CBS Radio Network. On that day in 1938, Orson Welles presented the live drama "The War of the Worlds" based on H. G. Wells's novel, The War of the Worlds (which was published in 1898).

Many people connected to the programme late and did not realize that what they were listening to was a radio drama, not a real news broadcast. So it caused some listeners to believe that an invasion by aliens from Mars was actually taking place. Among some people it caused lots of panic, and police even showed up at the radio station as the broadcast finished. The radio station was inundated with calls and Orson Welles eventually had to apologise for the confusion.

If you want to hear all or part of the radio broadcast from 1938 (with the possibility of adding subtitles) you can listen with this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWD9Q6klzco

If you would like to read more about this fascinating story, there is a very detailed entry in Wikipedia (in English) at the following link: ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_%281938_radio_drama%29

If you listen to the radio show, or read about it on Wikipedia, let us know what you think by posting a comment on one of our social media sites (Facebook or Twitter/X) and we will give you feedback on your comment as soon as possible.

Enjoy the rest of your day!