When the Beatles hit America on Feb. 7, 1964, America was too stunned to hit back.

"Like a good little news organization, we sent three cameramen out to Kennedy Airport today to cover the arrival of a group from England known as the Beatles," Chet Huntley reported on the "NBC Evening News" that night. "However, after surveying the film our men returned with, and the subject of that film, I feel there is absolutely no need to show any of that film."

Huntley didn't know he was missing out on one of the biggest events in popular culture. The public did; 4,000 screaming teenagers and 110 policemen greeted the Beatles as they debarked from a Pan-Am jet. That was only the beginning.

The Beatles were a sensation -- no one before or after them, with the possible exception of Elvis, has ever had such an impact on the masses.

Their debut on the "Ed Sullivan Show" 26 years ago today took mass hysteria to epic proportions. By playing three songs -- "All My Loving," "This Boy" and "Till There Was You" -- the Beatles started a cultural revolution, with a little help from conservative "friends" like Huntley.

Nicholas Schaffner wrote in The Beatles Forever: "Thanks to all the controversy fanned by the media, 70,000,000 people -- by far the largest audience ever drawn to an entertainment program --switched on their TVs."

They liked what they saw. Advance orders for the band's first stateside LP, Meet the Beatles, sent the record straight to number one; soon their American record label, Capitol, rush-released early Beatles singles which had been ignored six months previously. Within weeks, incredible amounts of merchandise flooded the market, only to be gobbled up by famished fans.

And what about the fans? Well, their reaction was . . . unique, to say the least.

"From the moment the Beatles began by blasting out 'All My Loving', the kids bounced in their seats like dervishes to the driving beat," reported "The New York Daily News" on Feb. 10. "The screams reached a pitch dangerous to the eardrums."

The screaming never died until the Beatles stopped touring two and a half years later.

After the first Sullivan appearance, the Beatles played three concerts --two at Carnegie Hall in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. -- and took a working holiday in Miami. There they taped five more songs for Sullivan that aired Feb. 16.

By the time they returned to England after only two weeks, the Beatles ruled the American rock scene.

The rest, as they say, is history.