This Thursday is marked 70 years (1938) of famous “radioteatro” the War of Worlds of Orson Welles in the transmitter CBS that managed to restore the hysteria in the American society: about sixty minutes in which the destruction and arrival of extraterrestrial to Grover's Mill (New Jersey) of cities, incinerated with deadly rays recreated, in their way towards the Great Apple.

It happened to history like “the night in that the Martians arrived”, behind schedule of previous Sunday to the night of Halloween whom the terror of coast to coast caused, flooded of calls the police stations of Police and it even brought about some attempt of suicide.

The radio, at that time, was the queen of the waves. Million people at night tuned the CBS to nine in New York, but who did not listen to the initial message, in that it was clarified that what came next was the adaptation of the H.G work. Wells, lived an authentic nightmare.

Everything began like a false news programme until an interruption in the program, with the intervention of professor Pearson (Welles), of the University of Princeton, seeded the panic with the announcement of “gas explosions in the Mars planet”.

Later the supposed death arrived from 1,500 people because of the shock of a meteorite against the Earth, in fact, the metallic cylinder in which traveled the Martians.

Welles, a young person of 23 years, obtained the absolute chaos. One had been born from the most important and influential film directors of century XX.

It and their companions of the Mercury Theater was sorry shortly after that its fantasy had caused “something of apprehension”, but to that turned it landmark into celebrity catapulted, to Hollywood and gave it rise to its prime opera, “Citizen Kane” (1941), mentioned often like the best film of history.

In order to create that pressing atmosphere, Welles counted on the aid of the Howard scriptwriter Koch, to whom said to him: “It dramatizes this (the novel of Wells) in the form of bulletin of the news, as if it was happening right now”. Koch was not a anyone. He wrote “Casablanca” four years later.

Joseph McBride, author of several books on Welles, maintained that the notoriety that reached the broadcasting of that fictitious attack intensified the interest of Hollywood towards the young producer, who already had left his track in the theaters of Broadway (New York).

Studies RKO, one of the classic companies of golden Hollywood, signed the first contract to Welles and they gave absolute to the artistic control, that it shaped in “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942), although the differences him arrived with the material that the director rolled for the documentary one on South America “It's All True”.

The race in the USA de Welles continued of irregular form by differences with the studies (their films never were magnet for the ticket office), but created jewels like the adaptations of William Shakespeare “Macbeth” (1948) and “Othello” (1952), and classic like “Touch of Evil” (1958).

A race that can be said began tomorrow will do 70 years. “They remember in the next days the terrible lesson that have learned tonight: (…) if its timbre sounds and there is nobody there, he was not any Martian, this is Halloween”. Thus the genius took leave.