Fear of public panic as the prime reason to oppose Disclosure always traces back to the events of October 30,1938.
That was the year when, on Halloween night, radio listeners who changed stations during the popular Chase and Sanborn Hour to avoid the singing of Nelson Eddy got the surprise of their lives. They heard a frightened eyewitness in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, stating that large tube-like spacecraft were on the ground and he could see them. People were riveted, they called their friends, and the audience grew. As it did, listeners were informed that the human race was under attack by Martians. The aliens were massacring American troops and marching on New York City, even as other spacecraft were landing across the United States.
These terrified listeners had tuned in to Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre of the Air. They were listening not to a news broadcast, but a radio play -- an adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the book authored by H. G. Wells (no relation) four decades earlier.
Orson Welles told the drama as a news story based on breaking events because he wanted it to be realistic. It certainly was. But many people never heard the disclaimer that the broadcast was a play.
Numerous people became hysterical. One couple, it is said, dressed in their best clothes and prayed, waiting to die. The experience of that night in 1938 and the image of couples waiting Titanic-like for the end to come have been invoked again and again as evidence that people will panic at the truth of ET reality.
In fact, this lesson was taught more than once. When The War of the Worlds was rebroadcast in Chile in 1944, it caused riots. Five years later, the same thing happened in Ecuador. As late as 1988, citizens of Portugal panicked and lives were lost. In these cases, it appears that crowds were so stirred up that when they realized they had been duped, their fright turned into hostility. Radio stations were stormed, some were burned.
Fear of panic -- citing this example -- is not a good reason for the UFO reality to remain secret, certainly not seven decades beyond that broadcast. The times were different. The broadcast told of an invasion and loss of life as if it was happening in real time.
Disclosure, when it comes, may be disturbing, and many people may not like hearing the truth. But Disclosure does not mean aliens attacking world cities, despite what Welles's broadcast depicted and dozens of Hollywood movies since. Disclosure means telling the truth as we know it, and letting the people deal with it themselves instead of elites.
We are ready to be told and to let the ghosts of H.G. Welles and Orson Welles rest.
