War Of The Worlds – Could It Happen For Real?

Davidreneke.com

It was the day before Halloween in the United States, October 30, 1938. Henry Brylawski was on his way to pick up his girlfriend at her apartment in Washington, D.C.

As he turned on his car radio, the 25-year-old law student heard some startling news. A huge meteorite had smashed into a New Jersey farm. New York was under attack by Martians. He knew it was a hoax but others were not so sure. When he reached the apartment, Brylawski found his girlfriend “quaking in her boots,” as he puts it. “She thought the news was real,” he said.

What radio listeners heard that night was an adaptation, by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre group, of a science fiction novel written 40 years earlier: The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. However, the radio play, narrated by Orson Welles, had been written and performed to sound like a real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars.

Thousands of people, believing the Earth was under attack by Martians, flooded newspaper offices and radio and police stations with calls, asking how to flee their city or how they should protect themselves from “gas raids.” Scores of adults reportedly required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.

“We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s. 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. 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.”

So began a science fiction classic written over a hundred years ago by H.G. Wells that would enthrall generations of readers, spawn countless numbers of books and magazine articles, and shape the imagination of thousands of future writers for decades to come.

A new film adaptation of his work, ‘War Of The Worlds’, starring Tom Cruise hit cinema screens across Australia last year. A remake of the original 50s classic from George Pal which had Gene Barry playing the part of scientist Dr. Forrester, this one focuses a little more on the personality of the characters than it does on the widespread theme of invasion, including of course, the traditional destruction of human society. With a budget of US$200 million, modern special effects and sound dramatization, it works very well.

“The War of the Worlds” entered our imagination via the pen of H.G. Wells in1897 and has taken a permanent hold on our psyche, reinforced over the years by Orson Welles famous 1938 Martian invasion radio broadcast, Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical (with Richard Burton), Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and now in 2005 with a major rebirthing via Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster treatment.

Interestingly, Wells wasn’t the first to offer up this idea to Australian readers in literary form. The theme of invasion from another planet was first entertained in an obscure novel, “The Germ Growers – An Australian Story of Adventure and Mystery” – published way back in 1892.

The central fictional characters, two young Englishmen, eventually come into contact with an alien presence in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, bearing witness to the activities of the alien’s flying craft, – “invisible aerial cars” – and their sinister alien leader. The author was an Australian priest, Robert Potter, a canon of St. Paul’s Anglican Church in North Melbourne,

Victoria.

Reading the novel one can perhaps readily understand why it didn’t capture the public imagination in England or Australia, languishing instead as a hidden oddity – perhaps the world’s first science fiction novel focusing on an alien invasion – fully 5 years before H.G. Well’s classic of the genre.

The ‘canals’ on Mars

We now know that Wells was wrong in his assumption that Mars was an inhabited world. Its not, it’s a barren, dead planet devoid of anything we can recognize as life; and it’s probably been that way for millennia! It was an Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who, in 1877, gazed at Mars through a telescope and thought he saw ‘canals’ – straight lines crisscrossing the surface. He made dozens of drawings wondering who, or what, could have made them.

An earlier observer of Mars, M. Javelle of Nice, claimed to have seen a strange light on Mars, which further stimulated Schiaparelli’s speculation about life there. Schiaparelli called the strange markings he saw canali, or ‘channels’.

Years later an American astronomer named Percival Lowell would carry on where Schiaparelli left off, only this time Lowell added a cryptic new slant to the observations. He saw the ‘canals’ too and imagined them to be real constructions, not lines of vegetation, radial cracks or benign surface features.

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