ABSTRACT
All of Orson Welles' [radio] techniques come together in the most famous Mercury broadcast, The War of the Worlds. To his usual magical mix he added something unprecedented. Much has been made over the years about the Martian hoax being a Halloween broadcast, in part because Welles ends the show by declaring it to be a trick-or-treat prank. The occasion was actually Halloween Eve, which hardly has the power of segué of, say, Christmas Eve in evoking a sense of the holiday to follow. To regular listeners of Mercury Theatre on the Air the broadcast was not a complete surprise, although the format might have been. Welles' media sense led him to explore a starker realism: dead air again, followed by a pause and then a resumption of the narration through a radio transmission from another location.
