The evening of October 30, 1938 will be forever remembered as the night that terrified America. On that long-ago Halloween Eve, the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind of the wireless, Orson Welles, and his Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The War of the Worlds.

Welles, with all the arrogance and impetuosity of a youthful genius, had panned the script as “corny.” To avoiding putting his audience to sleep, he demanded spine-chilling sound effects and increasingly impassioned performances from his actors. He was aiming for realism; he got more than he bargained for.

Because of a lull in the program on a competing channel, impatient listeners began twisting their radio dials in search of something more interesting. They found it. At about 8:12 p.m., a small but significant portion of the nation’s radio audience tuned in to the Mercury Theatre just in time to hear a chilling “news announcement” that a flying saucer from Mars had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Hideous death-dealing aliens had emerged to destroy the human race.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of mass hysteria ever recorded. Some listeners dropped to their knees in prayer; some reached for their shotguns. Others grabbed their families and fled. Massive traffic jams choked the motorways. Churches were crammed with distraught worshippers convinced that the world was coming to an end. At least one woman gave birth prematurely, and others were injured in the inevitable accidents that occurred.

Listeners with relatives living anywhere near the placid village of Grover’s Mill tried desperately to telephone them, only to find that all circuits were jammed. One man finally managed to get through to a cousin of his who lived in the town of Freehold, N.J. “Are the Martians there?” he gasped. “No,” came the cool reply, “but the Tuttles are, and we’re about to sit down to dinner.”

Even before the broadcast was over, news of the widening panic reached the control room at CBS. The prospect that he might be held legally accountable for the havoc wrought by his innocent radio play shook even Welles’ colossal self-assurance. Attempting damage control, he made a bantering curtain speech:

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’ Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you have learned tonight: That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian – it’s Halloween.”

For some still-jittery listeners, Welles’ attempt to laugh off the whole affair as a Halloween prank merely added insult to injury. There were those who would hold the broadcast against him for years.

Though I had not yet been born, I can verify that last statement from personal experience. When I was in college, I became fascinated by Welles and his work. As my admiration grew, I innocently confessed my new-found enthusiasm in a conversation with my mother.

To my astonishment, my mother winced at the very mention of Welles’ name. Thus did I learn that she had been one of the thousands who, all unawares, had tuned in late to the Mercury Theatre that fateful night. Even thirty years had not dulled the edge of the terror she had felt then. For her, Orson Welles would always remain the terrible man who had scared her half to death.

Happy Halloween.