On This Day in 1938...

You don't need ergotized rye, Salem-style witchcraft, or even Cthulhu to stir-up some real mass hysteria. All it takes is a decent script, some voice actors and radio. Oh and someone like Orson Welles or perhaps whomever really wrote the six installments of the Great Moon Hoax.

Re-listening to this classic radio broadcast is a fun Halloween-time thing to do. Especially while we're working on a few more Mucoid posts. But even while we're finishing-up a map of a Mucoid Cylinder, and jotting down doodles for possible tripod-designs, there's something intriguing about taking this sort of thing 180 degrees in the other direction and making it all one big hoax or hallucination, either orchestrated by nefarious ne'er-do-wells with some sort of anarchistic scheme of fomenting maximum chaos and panic (like Trey's Reds or Shaver's Dero?), or maybe it is all part of a sinister plan being put into operation by some evil Fu Manchu-type genius...or maybe it's just a bad batch of contaminated beer or bread, spreading weird visions thanks to the chemical peculiarities of some new strain of fungi accidentally discovered in the depths below some ancient ruins of a Lost City purported to be the ruins of some unknown pre-human race...

In the meantime, Watch the Skies and if you need a bit more Martian cheer during this most wonderfully frightful time of the year, go check out...

http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/

Happy Halloween!