Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' invoked real panic

In 1938, 1.7 million people were fooled into believing a Martian invasion was underway because of a radio play

Orson Welles' realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth, called "The War of the Worlds," caused quite a stir with audiences. The broadcast resulted in panic, with some people in the area where the story took place attempting to flee. It also helped Welles secure a contract with a Hollywood studio, leading to the creation of "Citizen Kane."

Time magazine ran a cover story titled 'The End of the World as We Know it?' in January 1999

In January 1999, Time published a dramatic Y2K cover with apocalyptic imagery and dire headlines. The portrayal likely exacerbated public fear and magnified the crisis in the popular imagination, turning a technical issue into a cultural panic.

Reports of a recording of Whitman's voice are said to be a hoax

A recording of Whitman reading a portion of his poem "America" has been mass-produced and broadcast, but the Library of Congress and other scholars say the recording is a hoax.

Watch a 1957 news report on the Sputnik launch

This 1957 news report captures the shock and uncertainty that followed the launch of Sputnik, showing how the first artificial satellite immediately altered global politics, military planning, and public perceptions of technological power.

Although not known for horror, a young Tennessee Williams wrote a gothic radio play

The "Streetcar Named Desire" author wrote "The Strangers," a short script, while a student at the University of Iowa in the 1930s. Andrew Gulli, managing editor for the literary magazine that published the unearthed piece, said that it blends classic '30s radio horror with themes Williams would revisit in later, more famous work.

A four-part podcast traces how the Manhattan Project reshaped the world

This podcast series explores the origins of the Manhattan Project, its secret cities, and the scientists behind it—showing how the effort contributed to the end of World War II, launched the Atomic Age, and later led Oppenheimer to become a critic of nuclear weapons.

Calvin Coolidge brought the State of the Union to the radio age

On Dec. 6, 1923, President Coolidge delivered his Annual Message from the US House chamber as millions listened by radio—crowds gathered outside with amplifiers—making it the first nationally broadcast address and the only in-person State of the Union of his presidency.

Limited transparency soon after Chernobyl made it a source of conspiracy theories

Some rumors about the event became perceived as more reliable than the Soviet mass media, which had omitted key information during the early days of uncertainty. The resulting theories included CIA involvement in the disaster, three-headed birds, aliens, and a weaponized earthquake.

Radio quiz shows took off in the '40s

The concept took hold during the Great Depression, with 50 shows on the air by 1940, because they allowed families to imagine a financial windfall was just a few questions away. Although the genre had a slight downturn during World War II, it experienced a resurgence by the end of the decade, with 200 shows on the air.

In 1957, the BBC conducted one of the first televised April fool pranks

The reputable broadcaster reported a story about a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from a "spaghetti tree." Some viewers didn't appreciate the joke and felt angry about being misled.

'Twenty-One' producers presented fabricated narratives as reality

Producers of “Twenty-One,” which featured two contestants competing from separate isolation booths, knew the quiz show format could use storytelling in the same way that any fictional program could. They found a perfect narrative in the matchup between Charles Van Doren, an all-American Columbia University instructor, and Herb Stempel, an arrogant Queens native. Stempel intentionally lost the game, pretending not to know the answer to a question about his favorite movie, “Marty.”

Hit show 'The Last of Us' was based on the real-life Cordyceps fungus

Though it depicted a fictional world with a collapsed society due to a fungal pandemic, this television series (based on an earlier video game) helped raise awareness about fungal threats. It even prompted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to publicly comment on it—clarifying the show’s plausibility. The mind-controlling fungal species in the show is based on a real-life Cordyceps species, a fungus that modifies its host’s behavior before killing it.

Explore the social and cultural history of the Mexican-American War

Historian Peter Guardino joins host Don Wildman to explore how the war shaped ordinary lives on both sides of the border. Drawing from The Dead March, the episode reveals how culture, class, and ideology shaped the conflict and its consequences.

Jazz's popularity inspired a moral panic

When jazz exploded in the 1920s, some believed the music's sudden popularity was the sign of a rotten nation, with one 1920 address at the University of Wisconsin proclaiming, "We are in deadly fear of the Jazz Devil, the demon which is consuming the country." Often, the connections were racialized, with columnists and preachers suggesting that jazz's Black artists were attempting to degrade white America.

Before it was a popular book, 'A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' began as a radio series

The science-fiction comedy began as a radio play on BBC Radio 4, broadcast between 1978 and 1980. The first novel appeared in 1979; two years later, it was adapted for television.

The ‘Universal Monsters’ series solidified horror as a film genre

Before 1931, most scary movies were billed as “mystery” or “suspense” with grounded explanations for anything "supernatural." That changed with “Dracula,” which presented the character as a real vampire who drank victims' blood. Universal continued adapting similar titles, including HG Wells’ “The Invisible Man” and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

'Fahrenheit 451' is a perennially banned dystopian story

This late-in-life interview with Ray Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451,” details the book’s origins, providing background for one of the most popular titles in dystopian literature. As a book lover, Bradbury was horrified by the book burnings of Nazi Germany and imagined a version of the United States where firemen were censors, protecting their fellow citizens from literature’s harmful ideas. “We are a democracy of readers,” Bradbury explains. “And we should keep it that way.”

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

Imagine thousands of alternate histories of the world

AlternateHistory.com has hosted fan-written "what if" timelines, discussions, and speculative fiction since 2000, making it the largest online gathering of alternate history enthusiasts, with over 10,000 active members and a wiki cataloging hundreds of user-created scenarios. Two highlights to pique your interest: what if the Vikings had settled North America? What would have had to happen for the storyline of George Orwell's "1984" to come true?

Watch the Challenger disaster unfold live

The broadcast from Jan. 28, 1986, captures the moment Challenger broke apart, followed by stunned, unscripted coverage that includes mission control audio stating there had been an explosion as anchors struggled to convey what had just happened.

'The Wizard of Oz' was panned by some contemporary critics

A 1939 New Yorker review by Russel Maloney said the movie displayed ''no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.'' The New Republic's Otis Ferguson wrote, "It has dwarfs, music, Technicolor, freak characters, and Judy Garland. It can't be expected to have a sense of humor as well."

J.P. Morgan provided Nikola Tesla with funding for the Wardenclyffe Tower

The structure was part of a project to transmit electricity and communication signals wirelessly across the globe. Shortly after construction began, Guglielmo Marconi beat Tesla to the punch and transmitted a trans-Atlantic signal, preventing Tesla from getting additional funding to finish his project.

Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post created an idealized American life

The Saturday Evening Post’s circulation exploded in the early 20th century, due in no small part to Rockwell’s iconic cover illustrations, which often portrayed idyllic portraits of American life from the not-so-distant past. This documentary explores how Rockwell’s covers played on national nostalgia, creating a vision of the country that grew to be associated with the American Dream.

'Rear Window' was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich

Hitchcock's 1954 film, which many consider among the director's greatest, was based on Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder." The story is characteristic of his dark, claustrophobic work.

What it means to call something 'Orwellian'

The adjective often refers to anything that resembles the dystopian governments of George Orwell, usually a state like the one in "1984" that monitors its citizens to ensure compliance. But as this video essay from Noah Tavlin makes clear, the more precise definition is a society that redefines language to control thought.

Tom Wolfe wrote a humorous account of the birth of New Journalism

Wolfe explains the style came from journalists attempting to make fact-based reporting read like a novel, arguing that traditional reporting left readers “bored to tears.” Instead of emphasizing an objective point of view, Wolfe favored detailed descriptions that established complex characters, painted interesting scenes, and shared dialogue.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

The US first hosted the World Cup in 1994, a tournament that lives in soccer infamy for its poor planning and the murder of Colombian player Andres Escobar, who'd accidentally scored on his own net.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Brian Wilson wrote the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby' for the Ronettes, but the legendary girl group rejected it.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world