As to "Other than the Normans......," what about the Romans a couple of thousand years ago?

I heard the "War of the Worlds" broadcast. My family normally listened to Welles's show on Sunday evenings because he did some pretty interesting stuff. I was seven years old at the time.

I was into the Buck Rogers comic strip, and he (Buck) was dealing with Martian "tigermen" at the time. To me, Welles's show was just a different take on a familiar story, and I lapped it up. But it was Orson Welles just doing his thing. No big deal.

But when the morning papers arrived on Monday, they featured headlines and front page stories about Welles's show causing widespread panic in a number of places around the country. But nowhere near as widespread as later stories would have you believe. The fish was big, all right, but not a whale by any means. It was mostly the press that made a big deal of it.

The show consisted of intervals of music, interrupted by "special news bulletins" and apparently there were a lot of people who didn't realize this was a dramatic spin-off of H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" and took it for real. They got sucked in!

There was, indeed, a notable amount of panic in various places around the country, but nowhere near the nationwide panic that the legend would have you believe.

Don Firth