Category: history

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When Martians Invaded Earth

by David Kubicek

War of the WorldsI was in elementary school when I first read about how the Orson Welles radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds scared the bejesus out of everyone.  Or at least that’s what my young mind got from it–Welles did this radio show about Martians invading Earth, and everyone thought it was real, and widespread panic ensued. I learned many years later that, like with most legends, the size of the panic has been greatly exaggerated over time.

This Saturday, October 30, 2021, marks the 83rd anniversary of that Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast . The show began with an announcer breaking into a music program with a series of news bulletins about astronomers seeing flashes on the planet Mars, objects landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and Martians emerging from said objects to zap people with death rays. The theory goes that listeners who tuned in late did not hear the announcement at the start of the program that it was fiction, so they believed the “news bulletins” were real.

There was even a 1975 TV Movie, The Night That Panicked America, about the making of the show and the panic that ensued. I’ve seen estimates that one million or more people were panic-stricken, but this seems unlikely since the listening audience wasn’t that big to begin with, and those who listened from the beginning of the program knew it was fiction. On that fateful Sunday evening the C.E. Hooper ratings service survey of 5,000 households found that only 2% were tuned in to Welles’ program, which was competing with the extremely popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and and his main wooden man, Charlie McCarthy.

The reason the producers decided to go with the news bulletin format was that the writer, Howard Koch, came to them in  distress because he couldn’t make an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ book interesting. So they used news bulletins. They also updated the story from 1897 to 1938, moved it from England to New Jersey, and used real names and slightly modified names of places to give it more of a real and immediate feel.

The show apparently caused a bit of a ruckus, mainly in New York and New Jersey.  Shortly after the show began at 8 p.m., CBS’s switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with viewers asking if it was real. Reporters from various news outlets invaded the network’s office because they smelled a good story, and good stories sell papers.

Orson Welles worried that, at the ripe old age of 23, his career was over. He went on the air the following day, Halloween, to apologize for the broadcast and asked the viewers to think of it as a Halloween prank. But, arguably, the debacle may have given his career a boost. He was summoned to Hollywood where he made Citizen Kane.

I asked my mother or grandmother (it’s been so long that I don’t remember which) if she listened to the program. She said that they’d heard about it, and no, Grampa didn’t grab his shotgun and an extra box of shells and usher the family into the storm cellar.

If you want to hear the original Mercury Theatre on the Air production, I have linked to it above, but unless you are a true Martian invasion history buff, you might be disappointed. Because it is dull!

Or Maybe, having been a science fiction reader and writer for most of my life, I’m just jaded.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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Touchdown at Tranquility Base: The First Moon Landing

by David Kubicek

Eagle Lunar Lander

The touchdown at Tranquility base in July, 1969, the first Moon landing by men from the planet Earth, demonstrated that humanity has the potential for miraculous achievements when we are all united.

The plaque Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left in the Sea of Tranquility on the lunar surface on this day fifty years ago reads: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”

We had achieved the goal President John F. Kennedy had set for us on May 25, 1961, when he declared that the United States, before the end of the decade, would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.

Few people understand what a gutsy, ambitious goal that was. This declaration came only 20 days after Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a 15-minute suborbital flight. To reach the moon we had to develop lots of new technology, and we had less than a decade in which to do it. 

The Cold War Drove the Space Race 

A few years earlier, the Soviet Union had been first to put a satellite (Sputnik) into orbit, and nearly three weeks before Shepard’s flight the Soviets had launched a man (Yuri Gagarin) into orbit. So far the Soviets had been ahead of the U.S. every step of the way, and that could not be tolerated. What if they established a base on the moon and aimed nuclear missiles at America? [Spoiler alert: This presumed danger was a paper dragon because the Soviets had little hope of competing with the U.S. to land on the moon–David Dvorkin explains why in his short memoir, When We Landed on the Moon].

I don’t know if anyone pointed out what a crazy idea it was to establish a base 240,000 miles away where it would take three days for a missile to reach its target. But people were afraid that would happen, and that fear helped fuel the space race.

The Action Plan

NASA created a plan and followed it step by step. A publicity campaign was launched. The government gave NASA the money, and the media went wild reporting on the space program. There were articles, there were commercials (remember Tang, the drink of the astronauts?), there was TV coverage of every space launch, splashdown and activity in between.

The U.S. left the Soviets behind and made President Kennedy’s vision a reality–with more than five months to spare.

Moon Landing: A Dividing Line in History

I was in high school when the Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility. After I watched the moonwalk on TV, I went outside and looked up at the stars (I honestly can’t remember if the moon was out). It felt strange that men were up there. When I’d gotten out of bed that morning, there were no men on the surface of the moon. Now, as I was preparing to go to sleep, two men were also preparing for sleep on the surface of an alien world.

I was acutely aware that a dividing line had been drawn in the sands of history–on one side of the line, humans had not walked on the moon; on the other side they had.

The moon landing was a national goal which took a nation united to reach. It demonstrated that we have the ability to do miraculous things if we all pull together in the same direction–this doesn’t apply only to space travel, but to everything, to every seemingly insurmountable problem.

After five decades, it’s time to come together to pull off another miracle, don’t you think?

Recommended Reading and Viewing

Apollo 11 Documentary (2019): Todd Douglas Miller’s film chronicling the moon landing from lift-off to splashdown in film clips taken at the time, much of it newly-found footage. A great way to experience the event as it unfolded in mid-July 50 years ago.

When We Landed On The Moon (2019), a memoir by David Dvorkin: This little gem was written by a scientist who worked on the Apollo program at the time of the moon landing. Lots of behind-the-scenes stories and little-known information make this a fascinating read.

The Right Stuff (the movie, 1983): Philip Kaufman’s movie about the Mercury Program, based on Tom Wolfe’s book.

The Right Stuff (the book, 1979), by Tom Wolfe: The book is about the early days of the space program and covers a lot more ground than the movie, which focuses mainly on the Mercury 7 astronauts. Read the book and watch the movie; both are riveting.

Photo Courtesy of NASA

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

 

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Apollo 11: What the Documentary Left Out

by David Kubicek

I recently saw the Apollo 11 documentary which follows the first moon landing mission–through newly-discovered film and audio footage–from its launch on July 16, 1969, to its splashdown nine days later. It’s an excellent film. This is a part of history you won’t want to miss. But the documentary left out something about the first moon landing.

But the documentary left out something that I found exciting at the time, even if in the grand scope of the mission it was a minor glitch. There was one audio clip in the film that referred to that difficulty, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll miss it [the exact snippet of dialogue was Armstrong referring to a crater full of boulders, or something like that].

I was a space nerd. I followed the space program feverishly throughout my school years, and I was in high school when Apollo 11 set out for the moon. After watching the launch, I listened to coverage mostly on the radio. Our TV was in the process of having a nervous breakdown, and I was afraid it would die soon, so I wanted to conserve its energy so it would be functioning at the time of the moon walk on July 20.

I don’t remember if I heard about “the incident” on the radio while the Eagle was landing, or if I found out about it later from reading and watching news coverage. I suspect it was a little of both. But here, basically, is what happened:

Long before the launch, the NASA folks had selected what looked like a good landing site, but they didn’t have the advantages of the high-resolution photography we have today, so they couldn’t get a really close look at the area.

The computer was programmed to guide the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), nicknamed Eagle, to a soft landing on the moon’s surface. For most of the descent the Eagle was tilted so that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn’t see where they were going, but as the Eagle neared touchdown, it would tilt upright so it could set down on its feet. At this time, the astronauts would get their first look at the  landing site out the window.

But when the landing sight came into view, they saw an area strewn with rocks and boulders. If one of the Eagle’s footpads came down on a decent-sized rock, the spacecraft could tip over, stranding the astronauts on the lunar surface–if they survived the crash at all.

So Armstrong turned off the autopilot and took control of the Eagle, basically cruising over the landing area looking for a place to set down. He didn’t have to travel far, which was good because fuel was rationed precisely, so they didn’t have enough go-juice for extended sight-seeing.  The rock-strewn area was about the size of a football field. Armstrong found a parking place on the other side, and the Eagle touched down with enough fuel remaining for only 45 seconds of flying time . [For those of you who aren’t familiar with LEM construction, it looked like a four-legged spider and had two parts; the lander would serve as the launchpad for the ascent vehicle, which would return the two astronauts and their cargo to the command module where Michael Collins was orbiting above].

I think whenever the moon landing story is told, they should tell this little tale of heroism–although the late Neil Armstrong was a modest fellow and wouldn’t have considered it heroism. But it adds a little suspense and conflict to the story, and as a writer of stories I’m a fan of suspense and conflict.

And on July 20, I did get to watch the moonwalk on TV. In fact, our TV managed to limp along for several more years before it wheezed out its last breath and succumbed to old age.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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The Devastating Midwestern Flood of 1993

by David Kubicek

In the fall of 1993, Midwest Food Service News (MFSN), a regional monthly trade newspaper, asked me to write a series of articles about  the Great Midwestern flood of 1993 which would end up causing $15 billion in property damage over eight states between April and October of that year.

I wrote several stories, most of them dealing with how the flood would affect grocery prices, food processors’ reactions to the flooding, disaster planning and other topics of interest to the food producers and retailers who made up MFSN‘s primary readership. I gathered information for most of the stories through phone interviews, but there was one story I felt could not be told from a distance. I wanted to show how the flood had affected the people who lived in its path, and to do that I had to visit a floodplain.

The Platte River flows through Nebraska and empties into the Missouri River, which runs along the Nebraska-Iowa border. Since my wife, Cheryl, grew up in Plattsmouth, a town of about 6,500 which sits near the junction of these two rivers, she introduced me to former neighbors who farmed along the Platte.

We spoke to a middle aged couple who could see the Platte River from their house. Every morning they would step out onto the porch to see how much closer the flood water had crept to their home during the night. One morning they found that the water had reached the edge of their yard, perhaps a hundred feet away, and they began thinking that the time had come for them to leave. But they delayed for another day and another day after that while the waterline hugged the edge of their yard. Finally, there came a morning when they stepped out onto their porch to see that the water had receded a few feet, and day after day they watched as the water continued to pull back until it was within the banks of the river once again. The flood, for them, was over.

After we visited with this couple, Cheryl and I walked along the river’s edge, and what we saw impressed upon us how lucky those folks had been. They, like other farmers along the river, lost some good crop land because the receding flood water had left a layer of sand in its wake. But scattered along the shore, perhaps for miles, were pieces of the lives of other families who hadn’t been so lucky–the flood water had not stopped at the edge of their yards but had crept across their lawns and invaded their homes.

As Cheryl and I trudged through the sand along the river, we saw an Easy-Bake oven half buried in the sand. A lawn chair. A doll. Various household appliances and pieces of appliances. Part of a table. Articles of clothing. A basketball. A tricycle.

This is only a sampling of the destruction we saw along the shore. These items may have come from nearby farms or they may have been swept away from homes miles upriver only to be abandoned here when the water receded.

After 25 years, I have forgotten the specifics of the other stories in my series,  but this experience is still lodged vividly in my memory. After the water receded, the economy bounced back, but many of the people who were at the center of the flood still carry scars. 

Author’s note:  Mary C. Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service, told the New York Times that the 2019 flooding may end up being worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011, with 13 million people in 25 states facing major flooding.  

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.