Well, this brings our six-month look at 1954 to a close.

Jack Benny again had radio’s highest-rated show the following season in what would ultimately turn out to be his swan song. Benny’s last new radio episode aired in May of 1955.

Joseph McCarthy would finally be censured by the Senate in December. He never recovered from that political storm, and died three years later, ravaged by disease and addiction, at the age of forty-eight. Although in some ways the Red Scare ended in 1954, the cold war was just reaching its height.

But fears of nuclear bombers were only half the reason people were looking up. It’s time we focused on the other.

Next time on Breaking Walls, in honor of its seventy-fifth anniversary, we examine our places in the universe with the utterance of a single word: Roswell.