Still strange after all these years

"Planes circling, ready to strike. A thousand yards and we'll be over the first — eight hundred yards... six hundred... four hundred... two hundred... There they go! The giant arm raised..."
After stepping into a Brussels taxi at around 1 a.m. the other night, it took me a couple of minutes to realise what I was hearing: Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air's 1938 radio version of H.G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds'.
This broadcast is legendary for the panic engendered by its realism. Even today, the piece, when it catches you unawares as it did me in that taxi, has a verissimilitude that entrances the ear. The response:'What on earth is going on?' A truly brilliant work of art.