In 1938, hundreds of people from all over the eastern and southern states of America lodged damages suits against Columbia Broadcasting System. They claimed they had suffered a variety of physical injuries during the broadcast of one of its radio programmes. “Traumatic stress” hadn’t gained its current prominence in the medical and legal lexicon of the time and few of the claims cited psychological disorder – people said they had tripped or fallen, sustaining broken arms and legs, during a Halloween broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre of the Air. The title of the radio production was The War of the Worlds, an adaptation of HG Wells’s novel of the same name.

None of these claims ever went to court – although Columbia did pay a few thousand dollars in nuisance settlements. However, on subsequent, detailed study, it was believed that some of these people genuinely thought they had sustained severe injuries. Like many others on that night, they thought they were living the Martian invasion reported in The War of the Worlds and had fled from their homes, converged on police stations, churches and other public buildings, and hid in bunkers and out-houses. They had armed themselves against what they thought was a vanguard of Martian giants, tramping through the land and mowing down large portions of the population with poison gas.

Widespread incidences of panic were concentrated on the eastern seaboard but the effect of the broadcast was felt all over the country. “Fake Radio War Stirs Terror Throughout US” the New York Daily News reported on its front page the next day. The Mercury Theatre of the Air had been broadcasting for just 18 weeks and usually attracted less than 4 per cent of the radio-listening public. However, on the night in question, the decision to transpose the story of a Martian invasion of Victorian England to late 1930s America attacked the public imagination.

Hitler and dark threats of war in Europe were an essential part of the problem. For the first time in history, the public could tune into their radios every night and hear, boot by boot, accusation by accusation, threat by threat, the rumblings that would lead inevitably to a world war. Nazi troops had occupied the Sudetenland on the Czech border and further incursions seemed certain. Japanese power in the Far East was seen as a major menace and, just a few weeks before the Mercury broadcast, fascist newspapers in Rome had ordered people to boycott the films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers because their humour was not Aryan.

The world was in turmoil, the Depression had eaten into the fabric of American life, and people felt insecure and under threat. US radio listenership figures for September and October 1938 indicated a massive and concerned audience. Although the author later objected to the broadcast and the changes that Welles had made to his story, the incident had dramatically shown the cathartic power of radio and of the story of The War of the Worlds.

Wells’s book has been adapted to virtually every medium, from comic strip and long-playing record to movies and the stage. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film version probably said more about the cinema and its need to showcase developments in computer technology than the times in which it was made, but the story has been used time and again to check the public pulse at various stages in social history.

More than any other genre, science-fiction films were employed in the 1950s to describe and comment on Cold War relationships between the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union. A fairly florid 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, by pioneering special-effects producer George Pal, is a pungent example.

The recent revival of the Jeff Wayne stage version – derived from a concept album – with his dramatic hologram of the late Richard Burton as narrator, would suggest that The War of the Worlds is again being used to check the health of the times in which we’re living.