LONG BEACH WAR OF THE WORLDS 1938 WINDOWS

Ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable, I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it so awfully. Now it's large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. Now it's another one, another and another. Good heavens! Something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! Wait a minute! Someone's crawling out of the hollow top.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. So goodbye, everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS.

LONG BEACH WAR OF THE WORLDS 1938 WINDOWS

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 best next thing.

This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be.

On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crossley service estimated that 32 million people were listening in on radios. In the 39th year of the 20th century came the great disillusionment. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the Earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own.

Long beach war of the worlds 1938