War of the worlds on the streets of England? Could you imaging an invasion of aliens on our planet nowadays? Could you believe in the possibility of such an event? Nevertheless, one of the best known cases of mass hysteria occurred in 1938 when one reporter in a broadcast in the United States announced that aliens had landed on Earth. The author pretended that he was reporting an actual live event.
This mystical and terrifying story was based on H.G.Well’s science-fiction novel «War of the worlds». The well known Hollywood director and actor of the 1930s Orson Wells was symbolically chosen for the creation of this classical piece of radio theatre, due to his surname being the same as the now famous author of this fantastic story. Orson Wells created «The Mercury Summer Theatre» which dramatized many programs for CBS an American broadcasting company. All performances were enacted as if they were occurring in «real time», many radio listeners believed that they were being invaded by aliens. This caused a real panic among most of the population…
Another time a similar story occurred in Ecuador where an angry crowd took to the streets destroyed the studio of the radio station…
Herbert Wells certainly never imagined that anything like this would ever happen, while writing this great novel which was inspired by his brother. The famous writer penned the work in the city of Woking, near London, where he lived in the middle of the 1890s. According to this story created by Wells, Martians landed for the first time in Woking. This invented race of alien conquerors wanted to exterminate the Earth’s population. The narration of the story is told from the point of view of the residents who witnessed this foreign invasion. Their description of the Martian spaceship was that of a monstrous tripod, taller than houses, striding over the young pine trees and smashing them aside in its progress, “it was a walking engine made of glittering metal, crossing the heather with articulated ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder” (Chapter 10).
This is one of the earliest and most well known descriptions of aliens invading the Earth. Fortunately, the Martians did not succeed in their plan and they perished from normal terrestrial bacteria. It is amusing to recall this story especially when you see an alien tripod from «War of the worlds» (Albert Nozaki’s design) in the center of Woking which was erected in memory of H. G. Wells. It’s a very unusual monument for this writer who was characterized by his contemporaries with the words «his name brought light in many dark back streets of life».
Martians were not the only things H.G.Wells wrote about. He immortalized the Invisible man. Also delving into the fantasy of anti-gravitation and the Time machine, all these concepts were entered into for the first time by Wells.
Our reality is four-dimensional space in time; declared H.G.Wells 10 years before Einstein’s theories.
Well, the «War of the worlds» tripod – is the best monument to one of the greatest imaginative writers of the 1800’s. Let’s hope this is a lesson to all inhabitants of Earth: That all legends about a doomsday shouldn’t cause mass hysteria and panic, especially as we approach the end of 2012…
