The day before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles put on a radio play, The War of the Worlds. The famous (infamous?) radio play it was all fiction convinced countless tens of thousands of people that earth was being invaded by Martians. Their landing point was Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
Hearing the radio announcers interrupt the regular programming to report the invasion, people hid in cellars, packed their guns, wrapped wet towels around their heads to protect against the poison gas from Mars and took to the roads, to flee.
At one point, a fake newscaster in the field reported the first sighting of real Martians:
Good heavens, somethings wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now its another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the things body. Its large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face. It . . . its indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate . . . the thing is raising up . . .
Etc.
People, masses of people, fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
Well, today, I wonder what would happen if the Martians returned to earth and took another look at us. How different human being look today maybe just as scary to them as Welles Martians looked to us in 1938.
First of all, the human ear no longer looks the same. A noticeable minority of human ears now sport a black protuberance, an ugly item, shaped like a mini-scythe, permanently attached. Then, suddenly, as if they have gone crazy, people respond to some unheard signal, apparently emanating from the spearlike ear piece and start speaking to no one in particular. Mysteriously, and just as suddenly, their lips stop.
As if this were not enough, many other human beings have a stringlike item hanging out of their ear, attached to a little rectangular box. Here, too, mysteriously, suddenly, as if responding to some unheard signal, people start smiling and jumping or humming, or they close their eyes in deep spiritual abandon, appearing transported.
It is not just the human ear that would jar our poor Martians 1938 memory of the human race, and frighten him. Something has gone wrong with the human beings lap, too. There is this small, flat item, with moving images and colors, seemingly permanently attached as the human being is sitting down.
The human being no longer has two legs alone; he has this incongruous, ill fitting flat item somehow glued to his legs.
Sometimes the human being peers most intently, as if hypnotized, into this image-color box; and sometimes he just stops when, apparently, his scythelike ear piece signals him and he starts speaking into the thin air.
Crazy, the Martians would think.
Speaking of eyes, if the human being is not hypnotized by this little flat item on his lap, he is hypnotized by a much larger version in his home, standing a few feet in front of him. Here, too, the images and colors bounce and move every which way, while the human being sits in front of it like a zombie, although sometimes, inexplicably, he starts laughing so hard he cant control himself.
The human ear, lap, eye and the human hand, it too has changed. Seemingly permanently attached to it is this small rectangular object, full of tiny buttons and knobs, which the human being is incessantly pushing, usually only with its thumbs.
The Martian is baffled. Strange as the human being seemed in 1938, now it is blotched with an ear protuberance, ear wire, lap attachment and magnetizing box in his home and his misshapen hand.
So much else about human beings has changed, too.
In 1938 the Martians could discern the commercial transfer of objects via a large machine that stood on counters, with levers and numbers. The levers went up, the levers went down, as different numbers floated in and out of view, and when everything stopped the object was transferred from one human being to another.
Now the Martians see this oblique replacement. A small, almost razor-thin piece of plastic is slid through a device. There is an awfully lot of this kind of sliding back and forth by human beings now; and with each slide, the object is transferred.
Or gasoline suddenly shoots out of a pump.
Shazaam!
If the human race seemed odd the day before Halloween in 1938, today the Martians would not be able to figure it out at all. In fact, upon witnessing the bizarre behavior of human beings, the Martians would take their own turn to flee. Who knows? Maybe all those ill fitting additions to the human anatomy and other strange devices contain human poison, for which the Martians have no defense.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
