Can I Sell You an Underground Bunker?

When CBS broadcast fictional reports that an invading army of Martians was slaughtering thousands in the streets of New York, listeners across the country panicked. “New York destroyed; it’s the end of the world,” the New York Times quoted (paywall) an Indianapolis woman screaming as she ran into a church. “You might as well go home to die. I just heard it on the radio.” Orson Welles incited this chaos 74 years ago, when he performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds over the air.

These days, a radio show about the end of the world airs on weekend nights from a bunker in Dallas. But instead of pretending aliens are invading, its host, Scott Bales, 42, tells his audience what to do if this or other catastrophes—such as a large meteor hitting the planet, nuclear war, or a dollar crash—actually happen.