In my upcoming Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus I look at subjects I consider to be distinctive manifestations of the new epoch prophesied in The Book of the Law. These are primarily the Nazis, the psychedelic sixties, and the UFO phenomenon.
As part of a preamble to an extensive consideration of UFOlogy I mention Orson Welles legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast. As it lends itself to a format where pictures and videos can enhance the text, I decided to post some of it as a blog entry.
Although the modern UFO era effectively began in June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine anomalous aerial phenomenon that a newspaper reporter referred to as Flying Saucers it is clear that there is a prehistory that is in fact a huge study in itself. One event clearly demonstrates that many people were already primed to respond to the idea of visitors from other worlds who might have hostile intent.
Perhaps the most famous radio broadcast in history was made by awesome Orson Welles and his co-writer Howard Koch, with their Mercury Theatre Company on October 30th 1938. They presented HG Wells classic account of invasion from Mars The War of the Worlds in a format that suggested it was really happening in the present moment with music being interrupted by newscasters telling a progressively more apocalyptic tale. Simulated live outside broadcasts depicted sounds of carnage and destruction.
Although the programme was clearly identified at its beginning as fiction and this was briefly repeated in the midst of the story it seems that many listeners, perhaps randomly tuning in from other stations, believed that it was genuine and some kind of mass panic ensued. Real American locations were featured.
Grovers Mill monument.
Grovers Mill in New Jersey was the initial landing site and a commemorative monument there now records the fact, a measure of the magnitude of the event in American folk memory. As New York itself came under attack the outside broadcast was apparently cut off as the reporter succumbed to poison gas.
The whole broadcast is easily available online. This short extract is a good indicator of the mood evoked.
How many people were affected and to what degree has been debated at length for decades. There is no doubt that in some cases the responses were extreme. Poison gas was smelt. Heat rays were felt. Gunfire was heard. Martian machines were seen. Flames of conflict were visible. Families left their homes to escape.
Things got understandably confused in the town of Concrete, Washington. A power failure at a local electricity station that began with flashes of light left the whole place in darkness. To those who had been listening to Welles up to that point it got difficult to figure out what was happening.
The next day the New York Times carried some impressive details. “In a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than twenty families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture. Throughout New York families left their homes, some to flee to near-by parks. Thousands of persons called the police, newspapers and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.”
Quite why the broadcast was able to stimulate such an intensity of response has in my opinion never been satisfactorily explained. The gathering storm in Europe certainly played upon the American psyche. Earlier on in the year the crisis over Czechoslovakia that was resolved in Nazi Germany’s favour with the wretched piece of paper brandished by Neville Chamberlain as “peace in our time” had seemingly boosted the sale of radios in America to an unprecedented extent. The tensions with Japan that would ultimately lead to war were already present. Okay, so people were a bit stressy about another war. An invasion from Mars is surely another level of the game.
There are rumours that the whole episode was part of a deliberate mass psychology experiment. It has also been suggested that when UFOs and close encounters started to become widely reported a decade later the authorities adopted a cover-up approach believing it had already been demonstrated what the public response to such news being validated might be. All of this remains difficult to prove. What is clear is the phenomenon of saucer mania did not emerge from a vacuum.
I couldn't resist including this as an afterword.
The 1953 movie of War of the Worlds has a lot going for it. It displays the psychology of that decade very effectively. This section contains the still powerful scene where the priest goes out into the valley of death to meet the Martians. Although I’m a great fan of the Speilberg Cruise version there is nothing comparable in it. The movie demonstrated the shifting values of the time in as much as the priest lags behind nuclear weapons in the scale of escalating response. The scene has a sense of the death of an old dispensation and is therefore redolent of the disturbing third chapter of The Book of the Law, especially considering that the agents of destruction are from the planet attributed to Horus. The climax of the movie backs away from this being set in a church and having the feeling of prayers being answered but the power of this sequence is a thing unto itself.
