FARMERS BATTLE ALIENS IN NEW JERSEY

  Deep dive with original radio broadcast clips follows at 1001 Heroes....

 Imagine it's October 30, 1938. You're scanning the radio dial, and you stumble upon a live orchestra. Suddenly, a news bulletin cuts in: "Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin." A scientist reports strange explosions on Mars. Within minutes, the music is gone, replaced by "live" reports of a giant metallic tripod incinerating a field in Grover's Mill, New Jersey.

  For decades, we've been told that millions of Americans took to the streets in a blind panic, convinced an alien invasion was real. But here is the first thing you probably didn't know: The "mass hysteria" was largely a myth created by newspapers.

  Why would newspapers lie? At the time, radio was a brand-new medium that was stealing all the advertising revenue from traditional print. The morning after the broadcast, newspapers saw a golden opportunity to discredit their rival.They ran sensational headlines about "Radio's Death Scare" to prove that radio was "irresponsible" and needed more regulation. In reality, most people were listening to Chase and Sanborn Hour on another station—the most popular show at the time. Ratings data later showed that only about 2% of the radio audience was even tuned into Orson Welles. Most of the country was actually laughing at ventriloquist Edgar Bergen while the Martians were supposedly "landing."

 If you weren't there, it's hard to understand why anyone believed it. But Orson Welles was a genius of sound. He didn't just tell a story; he mimicked the exact "dead air" and technical glitches of a real news broadcast. One detail you might not know: Welles and his team, the Mercury Theatre on the Air, almost got bored during rehearsals because the script felt too "silly." To fix it, they decided to stretch the first two-thirds of the show into a series of increasingly frantic news flashes. They even used a real-life catastrophe—the Hindenburg disaster—as a template for the actor's performance. If the reporter sounded terrified, it's because he was acting out the most famous real-life tragedy of that decade.
 

 After the show, Welles was brought before a room of furious reporters. He looked shell-shocked, apologizing profusely and claiming he never intended to cause fear.
But here's the twist: People who knew Welles personally said he was secretly thrilled. He knew this "scandal" would make him the most famous man in America. And he was right. The notoriety from that single night is exactly what landed him a "blank check" contract in Hollywood, allowing him to make Citizen Kane just a few years later. The "War of the Worlds" wasn't just a radio play; it was the ultimate audition for his career.

  The Lesson of Grover's Mill So, why does the legend of the panic persist? Because we want it to be true. It's a story about the power of media and our own gullibility. Even today, the backstory of the broadcast reminds us that the line between "fake news" and "entertainment" has been blurry from the very beginning.
The next time you hear a "breaking news" alert, just remember Orson Welles and the night he convinced a tiny, terrified fraction of the country that New Jersey was under Martian rule.