<P> Later studies indicate that many missed the repeated notices about the broadcast being fictional, partly because The Mercury Theatre on the Air, an unsponsored CBS cultural program with a relatively small audience, ran at the same time as the NBC Red Network's popular Chase and Sanborn Hour featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen . At the time, many Americans assumed that a significant number of Chase and Sanborn listeners changed stations when the first comic sketch ended and a musical number by Nelson Eddy began and then tuned in "The War of the Worlds" after the opening announcements, but historian A. Brad Schwartz, after studying hundreds of letters from people who heard "The War of the Worlds", as well as contemporary audience surveys, concluded that very few people frightened by Welles's broadcast had tuned out Bergen's program . "All the hard evidence suggests that The Chase & Sanborn Hour was only a minor contributing factor to the Martian hysteria," he wrote . "...in truth, there was no mass exodus from Charlie McCarthy to Orson Welles that night ." Because the broadcast was unsponsored, Welles and company could schedule breaks at will, rather than arranging them around advertisements . As a result, the only notices that the broadcast was fictional came at the start of the broadcast and about 40 and 55 minutes into it . </P> <P> A study by the Radio Project discovered that fewer than one third of frightened listeners understood the invaders to be aliens; most thought that they were listening to reports of a German invasion or of a natural catastrophe . "People were on edge", wrote Welles biographer Frank Brady . "For the entire month prior to' The War of the Worlds', radio had kept the American public alert to the ominous happenings throughout the world . The Munich crisis was at its height...For the first time in history, the public could tune into their radios every night and hear, boot by boot, accusation by accusation, threat by threat, the rumblings that seemed inevitably leading to a world war ." </P> <P> CBS News chief Paul White wrote that he was convinced that the panic induced by the broadcast was a result of the public suspense generated before the Munich Pact . "Radio listeners had had their emotions played upon for days...Thus they believed the Welles production even though it was specifically stated that the whole thing was fiction". </P> <P> Historical research suggests the panic was far less widespread than newspapers had indicated at the time . "(T) he panic and mass hysteria so readily associated with' The War of the Worlds' did not occur on anything approaching a nationwide dimension", American University media historian W. Joseph Campbell wrote in 2003 . He quotes Robert E. Bartholomew, an authority on mass panic outbreaks, as having said that "there is a growing consensus among sociologists that the extent of the panic...was greatly exaggerated". </P>

How did the police respond to the panic caused by the radio version of the war of the worlds