'I had no idea I'd become a national event': Orson Welles on the mass hysteria of The War of the...

On 30 October 85 years ago, the population of the US was – according to Orson Welles – overwhelmed by mass panic, terrified by the all-too-real broadcast of his alien-invasion drama The War of the Worlds. The director recounts his version of events in an interview from the BBC archive.



It's an incident that has been much referenced in popular culture – the broadcast, 85 years ago today, of Orson Welles's radio drama about a Martian invasion of Earth was so realistic, it is said, that it triggered widespread panic in the US. Indeed, the story of mass hysteria has become so ingrained in media folklore that for decades it wasn’t really challenged.

But in recent years historians, such as Professor W Joseph Campbell of the American University in Washington DC, have argued that the supposed panic was always exaggerated, and that the majority of listeners understood that the programme was a work of fictio