From a story on lithub.com by Katie Yee headlined “Remember the days when a literary radio broadcast could cause mass panic?”:

On this day, in 1938, Orson Welles broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. It aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System network as a special Halloween episode.

It begins like this: “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.” An alien invasion, descending upon the Earth?