Broadcast: 8th February 1955

Starring: Dana Andrews

Added: Feb 07 2004

No one would have believed in the middle of the twentieth century that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than mans. Yet across the gulf of space on the planet of Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our earth with envious eyes slowly and surely drawing their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun and for centuries it has been in the last stages of exhaustion. The inhabitants of this planet looked across space with instruments of intelligence of which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate. Their nearest world was giant Jupiter where the atmospheric pressure is thousands of pounds to the square inch, they could not go there. Nor to Saturn nor to Pluto, planets encased in eternal ice. They could not go to Neptune or Uranus twin worlds in eternal night and surrounded by un breathable atmospheres of methane gas. They could not go to Mercury; its temperature is that of molten lead. Of all the worlds the intelligences on Mars could see and study, only our own warm earth was green with vegetation, ripe with water and possessed a cloudy atmosphere eloquent with fertility. It did not occur to mankind that a swift fate may be hanging over us and that it would come with the time of our nearest approach to the orbit to Mars that it would begin or over the mountains North East of California on a pleasant summer evening…