Martians, extraterrestrials, pumpkins, Charlie McCarthy and SETI
'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.' -- Orson Welles' ending remark to the Mercury Theatre's CBS radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, Oct. 30, 1938
It's fun to talk about Martians and extraterrestrials, especially on the brink of Halloween 2009, so we take you today to two IU Home Pages archival sites: the first is a treatment done for the publication anniversary of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and Orson Welles' CBS radio broadcast of the same title on Oct. 30, 1938.
The stories were published Oct. 30, 1998, when the Internet was a fairly new purveyor of news and entertainment. We hope you enjoy it: http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/103098/.
The second archival element we point you to is an audiostreamed "Conversation online" featuring Jill Tarter, research director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, who was on campus to present the Konopinski Memorial Lecturer in Physics and Caty Pilachowski, the inaugural Kirkwood Chair of atronomy at IU.
The conversation went live on March 12, 2004: http://www.iu.edu/~ocmhp/031204/text/conversations.shtml.
