09.21
War Of The Worlds
We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s, and yet as mortal as his own.
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.
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.
In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up.
On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.
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.
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.
We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S.
You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business.
So goodbye everybody, and remember please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight.
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.
Director J. Burkhart is an independent, innovative, psychic medium paranormal researcher with more than 30 years field experience involving anomalous, cryptozoological, diabolical possessions, hauntings, indigenous shamanic, and ufological exploration.
