Now, live on your radio, we bring you the latest from the alien invasion. But first, these messages.

It’s been a really busy month for me. I’ve got posts I want to write, but between work and my new physical therapy program (which is doing wonders for my mobility), I’ve fallen behind on nearly everything. I’ll hopefully be caught up next week and start doing more blogging.

However, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. It’s not only a wonderful production (seriously, listen to it if you have the chance; I have it on old-fashioned cassettes, so I should get a digital version myself sometime soon), but it’s even more notable for the panic it caused.

If you don’t know the story, there were a large number of people who actually thought it was real. The first part of the program is presented as a night of classical music, which keeps getting interrupted for newsflash broadcasts, until the breaking news of an alien invasion takes over the entire broadcast. It was presented in exactly the same way that breaking news used to be broadcast, and some people who tuned in after the very start didn’t realize that they weren’t actual news broadcasts.  If it only happened one day later, we could have named it the greatest Halloween scare of all time.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Remember, not only was it a time before Twitter updates (and how often are the initial Twitter reports correct?), but this was an era before widespread TV use or even the casual use of telephones. We got our news from the papers and radio. That was it. Even more, tensions were already high due to the fact that, well, it was 1938. In fact, there was a funny little guy with a weird haircut and part of a mustache that decided to comment on the hysteria. That’s right, Adolf Hitler heard about it and was quite smug, saying it proved that democracy was decadent and made people stupid.

So check it out if you have the chance. It’s guaranteed to be better than that Tom Cruise movie with the same name, and that’s without looking at it as a genuine piece of history.

Oh . . . and happy Halloween, bones and ghouls.