I also learned that the broadcast was nationwide—in other words, the cast did not return 3 hours later for the west coast feed. I learned this from a microfilm of the Los Angeles Times dated Oct. 30, 1938. The Mercury Theater came on at 5:00 p.m. that Sunday night.
http://members.aol.com/jeff1070/wotw.html
But panic they did. Some researchers now doubt the estimate of nearly one million hysterical listeners. And early reports of deaths from stampedes, traffic deaths, and suicides were false.
http://www.livescience.com/technology/050722_war_world.html
The authority of radio was never greater than in the fall of 1938. News came every day of the Japanese war on China; Hitler spoke at the annual Nuremburg rally in September and demanded the partition of Czechoslovakia at meetings with England’s Chamberlain starting Sept. 15. A news bulletin of the Munich crisis had broken into his radio broadcast of Sherlock Holmes on September 25. The world listened to live broadcasts of the pact concluded in Munich Sept. 29, the return of Chamberlain to England Sept. 30 waving the agreement at the airport that he had made “peace for our time,” and the German occupation of the Sudetenland October 1. The British government began to distribute gas masks.
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/filmnotes/waroftheworlds1938.html
The year was 1949, the date February 12th and the place Quito, the capital city of Ecuador and home at the time to some 250,000 people. By the end of that evening, the local newspaper offices would be burnt to the ground and at least six people would be dead at the hands of an enraged mob.
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm