"We Annihilated the World..."

Listeners with relatives living anywhere near the placid village of Grover’s Mill tried desperately to telephone them, only to find that all circuits were jammed. One man finally managed to get through to a cousin of his who lived in the town of Freehold, N.J. “Are the Martians there?” he gasped. “No,” came the cool reply, “but the Tuttles are, and we’re about to sit down to dinner.”
Even before the broadcast was over, news of the widening panic reached the control room at CBS. The prospect that he might be held legally accountable for the havoc wrought by his innocent radio play shook even Welles’ colossal self-assurance. Attempting damage control, he made a bantering curtain speech:
“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’ Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you have learned tonight: That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian – it’s Halloween.”