The sons of Medea are an Italian "teledramma", broadcast live on 9 June 1959 on the National Program. It became a sensational media event because many viewers, not realizing it was a fiction, perceived the event as real, similar to what happened with Orson Welles's radio broadcast The War of the Worlds in 1938 in United States (to which the authors of the program were inspired). The transmission of the first episode of the drama The children of Medea was abruptly aborted by RAI to announce the kidnapping of Alida Valli's son by the actor Enrico Maria Salernor.