Light hour of the hour is the hour of the sky.

Light hour for the perfect, the given one of the dead and so

and fire.

Oh my The You're listening to a special presentation of the hour of the time.

I'm William Cooper.

At 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, on the evening of October 30th, 1938, the night before All Saints Day, now generally celebrated as Halloween, an estimated 6 million Americans listened to the famous Orson Welles broadcast, War of the Worlds, describing an invasion from Mars.

An estimated one million people responded with sustained credulity and fear.

Thousands responded with sheer panic. Some committed suicide.

And in the small village of Grover's Mill, New Jersey,

residents left their homes and shot holes in their city water tower, thinking that it was

a Martian tripod invasion machine. The broadcast, ladies and gentlemen, was a psychological warfare experiment conducted by the Princeton Radio Project.

The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project in the fall of 1937.

An office of radio research was set up with Paul F. Lazarsfeld as director and Frank Stanton and Hanley Crentrell as associate directors.

Cantrill used a special grant from the General Education Board to study the effects of the broadcast.

Cantrill published the study as a book titled The Invasion from Mars, a study in the

psychology of Panning.

It contains a complete script of the broadcast.

The book is one of a series of studies sponsored by the Federal Radio Education Committee.

War of the Worlds, ladies and gentlemen, was broadcast by Mercury Theater on the air

from a microphone in a New York studio of the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Council on Foreign Relations member Frank Stanton was a CBS executive.

Stanton would direct Radio free Europe in later years.

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