Dead Air: The Night Orson Wells Terrified America

On October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles, held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of people ran out into the night, grabbed shotguns, drove off in cars, ran screaming down the streets, hid in basements, attics, anywhere they could find to get away from Martians intent on exterminating the human race.

While Welles held up his hands to his fellow actors, musicians, and sound technicians, he turned six seconds of “dead air” or radio silence into absolute horror and changed the way the world would view media forever, making himself one of the most famous men in America in the process. Jittery from war news and weary from the concussive effects of a nine-year Great Depression, local author William Hazelgrove presents a summary of his newest narrative nonfiction book, the night Martians invaded America and how Orson Welles set himself up to go to Hollywood and make his opus, Citizen Kane.