75: War Of The Worlds

Today is the 75th anniversary of Orson Wells' radio program "The War of the Worlds." I watched a show about the whole incident last night and it was pretty interesting and funny. The show tried (desperately) to say that people were living in fear at the time because of the 9th year of the Great Depression and the Nazis (the Munich Crisis) happened a few months earlier. I think it was just the same paranoid people that we have today (the doomsday preppers, etc.) No intelligent person can say they were duped by the show because the station (CBS) had the title and time in the newspaper before - like the TV Guide people used to use for TV. It wasn't some secret show that came out of nowhere. I like that Wells kept the show going even when CBS execs tried to get him to cut-in and announce it was a hoax -that Martians weren't really attacking New Jersey. In the end, the radio program showed how truly gullible people really are. Even after people learned it was just a show they tried to cover-up their stupidity by trying to get charges brought on Wells and CBS - nothing ever stuck. I am curious to see how people today would react to something like that. I wonder if I would be one of the intelligent ones or one of the freaked-out.