H.G. Wells published The War of the Worlds as a magazine serial in 1897, and this film tracks how the story of a Martian invasion kept escaping the page. It starts with Wells's original text and the science ideas circulating when he wrote it, then moves to Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast, which convinced enough listeners it was real news to send people into the streets. A lesser-known 1968 rebroadcast did the same thing in Buffalo, New York, decades after the original panic. The film's darkest example is a 1949 Ecuadorian adaptation that triggered a riot and left twenty people dead when the broadcast was mistaken for a genuine attack. Interviews and archival clips carry the story through the novel's film adaptations, and the production gets access to a new animated version of the tale, using its effects and reenactments to show how each generation redrew the Martians. The throughline is simple: one Victorian novel, repeated for a century, kept fooling audiences into believing it.