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Mystery Lab / Rumours & reporting

The same broadcast sentence, a different context

Keep a sentence unchanged, reveal its surrounding information, then examine what an individual response can tell us.

Rumours & reporting · two guided observations

What will you compare?

On October 30, 1938, CBS radio in the United States aired The War of the Worlds, a play about an alien invasion. Parts were presented like news bulletins, and some listeners mistook them for real events. Records of individual responses do not, by themselves, tell us how widely fear spread across the country.

Here we explore that distinction with an original fictional sentence and cards summarizing real letters presented by the National Archives. First, reveal the surrounding information to see how it identifies the sentence as part of a play; then examine whether a report about one person or one place supports a nationwide claim. The fictional sentence does not reproduce dialogue from the 1938 broadcast.

1. Reveal the surrounding information and see how it changes the context of the same sentence. 2. Compare the evidence in an individual response with the evidence required for a nationwide claim.

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Continue with the story and its records

Explore how the difference you noticed connects with the surviving records of the historical story.

Read about the broadcast first
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Sources and scope

We consulted the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives, and the University of Michigan Library. The three National Archives articles come from one institution, not three separate institutional confirmations. Estimates differ across accounts, so large audience or panic figures are not treated as settled counts.

  1. 01
    Page from the Past: War of the Worlds Library of Congress · 2016 · Checked 2026-10-22
  2. 02
  3. 03
    Revisit The War of the Worlds University of Michigan Library · 2025 · Checked 2026-10-22
  4. 04
  5. 05
    This Week in Universal News: The War of the Worlds Broadcast, 1938 U.S. National Archives · 2014 · Checked 2026-10-22

This original article draws on public institutional accounts and their descriptions of historical material. It is not a translation checked against the complete original letters or a reconstruction of the broadcast. Surviving letters are not used to calculate percentages for the full audience. No original audio, broadcast dialogue, newspaper scans, or letter scans are included.