LEWISTON – The rest of the nation may have screamed, but Maine yawned.

While listeners to CBS Radio’s broadcast of H.G. Wells’ infamous Halloween 1938 broadcast panicked and rioted around the country, listeners in Maine “Refused to get excited,” according to a headline the next morning in the Lewiston Daily Sun.

“In Bangor, several cases of hysteria among women and children listening to the program were reported, and police headquarters and a newspaper office were flooded by telephone calls from listeners asking ‘Is it true?'”, according to a page five story in the Oct. 31, 1938, Daily Sun. The Sun’s rival, the Lewiston Evening Journal, ran the same Maine Associated Press dispatch.

Portland’s daily paper received one telephone call, according to the AP report, and papers in Lewiston and Augusta received a few. Police outside of Bangor had no panicked calls to answer, according to the report.

Both papers covered the reaction to Orson Wells’ notorious Oct. 30 broadcast, a dramatic adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” It told the story of an invasion of Earth beginning in Grovers Mill, N.J.

Many tuned in late to the broadcast, missing a disclaimer at the beginning and taking the drama for a live news report.

Some fainted, according to news reports. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church screaming that New York had been destroyed. Services at the church ended immediately.

An inopportune power outage in Concrete, Wash., came at a high point in the program, convincing many that the invasion had spread to the West Coast.

The panic ended almost as quickly as it began, but not before lawmakers and governors began calling for some sort of retribution.

“Radio has no more right to present programs like that than someone has in knocking on our door and screaming,” said Sen. Clyde L. Herring, D-Iowa.