At work in the University of Michigan library on Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds and The Art of Fake News,” A. Brad Schwartz felt like the reporter in Welles’ Citizen Kane who searches for the key to Kane’s life.

In the film, the reporter is sitting in a room at the fictional Thatcher library. He’s trying to reconstruct Kane’s past and find the meaning of the word Rosebud. A stern librarian delivers materials and commands him to stick to pages 83-142 and only pages 83-142. “The U of Michigan library isn’t as grandiose as the one in the film,” Schwartz says, “but I vividly remember when the librarian brought in two boxes, No. 23 and No. 24.”

The boxes contained 1,400 letters that listeners had written to Welles after his infamous radio broadcast of the venerable H. G. Wells’ short story in which Martians invade Earth. Like the reporter in Kane, Schwartz was looking for meaning, in this case the significance of the reaction to the broadcast on Halloween night, October 30, 1938.

Howard Koch’s radio script for the program had re-worked Welles’ story as a mock documentary, moving the location to New Jersey and relating the tale’s harrowing scenes as a series of bulletins in which hyperventilating reporters describe a Martian onslaught.

From that night on, folklore, news accounts and documentaries fanned a scenario in which the broadcast convinced listeners the invasion was real. Panicked listeners allegedly fled to the streets, jamming highways. There were even reports that some listeners committed suicide.

Schwartz had been fascinated by Welles’ War of the Worlds since childhood.

“I was always a bit of a night owl,” he says. “To quiet me down, my mother got some cassettes of vintage radio shows, including War of the Worlds.”

And so, when a librarian at the University of Michigan told Schwartz about the letters, Schwartz, majoring in history and screen arts and culture, found the topic for his senior honors thesis.

But as he read the letters, Schwartz didn’t find what he’d expected.

“There were letters that said, ‘Orson Welles, you scared my wife to death.’ And there was the letter from a pastor in Mississippi who thanked Welles because the program had sent listeners scurrying to church to get right with God before the Martians killed them.”

These letters, Schwartz says, were anomalies.

“What struck me was that for every letter of complaint, there were eight or nine letters that said, ‘We stand with you and we support you,’ ” Schwartz says. “People said they were not frightened and nobody around them was frightened. They said the U.S. senator who wanted to censor Welles should be horsewhipped. That was what convinced me that there was more to tell about the story.”

Moving on, Schwartz found that the press ran with the sensational aspects of the response to the broadcast, spreading what amounted to fake news. The notion that people fled in response to a Martian invasion, Schwartz says, is greatly exaggerated. He also found that the reactions of many listeners made sense.

“Many listeners tuned in late and missed the cues about Martian invaders. What they heard were accounts of a spreading invasion, gas attacks, bombing planes. I was able to understand a lot better why people were frightened.”

Schwartz also discovered a “country gossip” factor to the phenomenon.

“I kept noticing an unusually high number of reports from college campuses,” Schwartz says. “There was often someone who heard part of the show and thought it was about the Germans, who then rushed to a friend and said that something horrible was happening in New Jersey. That friend went to another friend. The story went viral very quickly.”

Schwartz found that the broadcast raised many issues.

“The War of the Worlds broadcast is a prism that takes white light and breaks it into colors that represent the cultural issues important at that time,” he says. “Welles has a role in it and the FCC has a role in it it. But the star of the piece is the American public and what was happening to them in 1938. They are thinking about what they see as the future of democracy.” In particular, as Schwartz points out in his book, audiences were wondering if a dictator—a Hitler—could commandeer the airwaves and incite the public to hysterical behavior.        

Schwartz believes the story continues today.

“Something like this [hysteria] happens all the time,” he says. “We’re not as aware of it since there are so many media outlets. A real threat goes off and any information level is lost—‘We’re all going to die of Ebola!’ My hope is that people who read this book and understand it will look at Twitter and cable news differently and be a little less likely to press the panic button when something like this happens.”

Gerald Bartell covers books for the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus.