The War of the Worlds (radio drama) The War of the Worlds (radio drama) "The War of the Worlds" is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel "The War of the Worlds" (1898). It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938 over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode became famous for causing panic among its listening audience, but the scale of that panic is disputed, as the program had
Orson Welles after the success of the "Harry Lime" radio show. Harry Alan Towers offered Welles another series, "The Black Museum", which ran for 52 weeks with Welles as host and narrator. Director Herbert Wilcox offered Welles the part of the murdered victim in "Trent's Last Case", based on the novel by E. C. Bentley. In 1953, the BBC hired Welles to read an hour of selections from Walt Whitman's epic poem "Song of Myself". Towers hired Welles again, to play Professor Moriarty in the radio series, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Welles briefly returned to