Comment by staticman2

I'm not sure how that quote is supposed to show it was a prank?

I think you are missing the nuance that radio was a young medium and the radio program was unrealistic and introduced as fiction, so it wouldn't have occurred to anyone what effect it would have on the audience.

The people who were panicking for the most part heard the part about it being a radio production of war of the world' but their brain didn't process those words. Nobody could have expected that.

The audience would have also been less media savvy than they would be today, so would react more naively than the producers might have expected to an early experimental example of a "found footage" program.