The War of the Worlds is an episode that is directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells‘s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. The episode is famous for causing panic among its listening audience, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.
