My father was 21 years old at the time. He said that he did not hear the broadcast either but remembers hearing about it the day after. He said that it wasn't like there were people running through the streets or anything close to that where he lived.
At the same time, I question the authors closing:
But the myth also persists because it so perfectly captures our unease with the media’s power over our lives. “The ‘panic broadcast’ may be as much a function of fantasy as fact,” writes Northwestern’s Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media, suggesting that the panic myth is a function of simple displacement: It’s not the Martians invading Earth that we fear, he argues; it’s ABC, CBS, and NBC invading and colonizing our consciousness that truly frightens us. To Sconce, the panic plays a “symbolic function” for American culture—we retell the story because we need a cautionary tale about the power of media. And that need has hardly abated: Just as radio was the new medium of the 1930s, opening up exciting new channels of communication, today the Internet provides us with both the promise of a dynamic communicative future and dystopian fears of a new form of mind control; lost privacy; and attacks from scary, mysterious forces. This is the fear that animates our fantasy of panicked hordes—both then and now.
I'm going to suggest that a lot of the dumb, false, hysterical crap that gets passed around on Facebook is a similar form of manipulation to a population that is willing to believe anything. One look at Snopes.com and Factcheck.org will show you how much of it there is. And I'm quite sure that there are more people being sucked in for this junk than ever got panicked in 1938. Just count reposts as some indication.
Topic: The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic (Read 1399 times)
