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
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) the adaptation, with a copy of his script being made into a paperback book enjoying large printings and an album of the broadcast selling over 500,000 copies, part of the income also going to him as copyright owner." The book, "The Panic Broadcast", was first published in 1970. The best-selling album was a sound recording of the broadcast titled "Orson Welles' War of the Worlds", "released by arrangement with Manheim Fox Enterprises, Inc." The source discs for the recording are unknown. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that it was a poor-quality recording taken off the air at the time of broadcast