Martian (The War of the Worlds) antagonists are the "squid-walkers", a cybernetic race of tripods controlled by a single entity inside their mothership. Inside the mothership, humans are kept alive and their blood is filtered, homogenised, and fed to the aliens. They are killed by infected blood injected into the mothership's core, telepathically shutting down the Tripods. In the film "H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds", the Martians are large, bulkish creatures, keeping the two large eyes and tentacles described in the book; but do not seem to possess the beak-like mouth. They meet the same fate as the originals, having caught Earthly diseases. Their
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) to hoax broadcasts that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic. Bartholomew sees this as yet more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry. In a study published in book form as "The Invasion from Mars" (1940), Princeton professor Hadley Cantril calculated that some six million people heard "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. He estimated that 1.7 million listeners believed the broadcast was an actual news bulletin and, of those, 1.2 million people were frightened or disturbed. Media historians Jefferson Pooley