Mars Attacks

                  Dateline Grover's Mill

                  Wait a minute!  Someone's crawling out of the hollow top.  Someone or ......... something.  I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks ......... are they eyes?  It might be a face.  It might be ......  Carl Phillips, International Radio News reporter.

                  Seventy-five years ago this week, Orson Welles turned a sleepy burg outside Trenton into ground zero of an alien invasion.

                  After dinnertime on Oct. 30, 1938, his Mercury Theater on the Air presented a radio version of H.G. Wells sci-fi thriller The War of the Worlds ---- a rewrite in which Martian spacecraft made Grover's Mill, N.J., their beachhead.

                 News flashes interrupted a night of dance music by Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra, broadcasting from the Hotel Park Plaza in Manhattan:  An atmospheric disturbance ........ incandescent gas exploding from the surface of Mars ......"like a jet of blue flames shot from a gun."

                 The first Martian cylinder crashed to earth at Grover's Mill, where correspondent Phillips described the unscrewing of a hatch amid ratcheting terror.

                 This was fiction, of course.  There was no Phillips, Like Ramon Raquello, and his orchestra and the Hotel Park Plaza, he was made up ----- portrayed by actor Frank Readick.  Nothing had disturbed the stillness of the town, which was little more than a mill pond, a feed store, a general store and a filling station in West Windsor Township.

                But to many tuning in to Welles' Halloween drama across the country, it sounded like a living nightmare.

                The Inquirer played a role in this reality play.

                Sheldon Judson was a junior at Princeton, a member of the University Press Club, and a stringer for The Inquirer.  A few minutes after 8, another student told him the newspaper wanted him to call back.  The editor asked him, "Do you know anything about a meteor falling in Princeton?"  Judson did not.

                "Then go find out."

                Judson had just declared his major as geology.  He contacted the department chair, who had not heard anything either, but together with another geology professor, they traveled to Grover's Mill, about four miles to the southeast.

                There, they found a sleepy town and nothing else.

                That's not to say there was no news in what happened.

                The next day's Inquirer carried the banner headline, "Radio Drama Causes Panic."

                Under that: "Play Portrays Men of Mars Invading N.J."

                And then: "Thousands in Nation Flee Homes After Fake News Bulletins Tell of Destruction."

                The Inquirer of Oct. 31, 1938, described how in Philadelphia, women and children ran from their homes screaming.  In Newark, N.J., ambulances rushed to one neighborhood to protect residents against a gas attack.  In the Deep South, men and women knelt in groups in the streets and "prayed for deliverence."

                WCAU was one of 151 stations on the CBS network that broadcast the play.  Before night's end, the FCC had promised an investigation.  One U.S. senator from Iowa said there ought to be a law against such disturbances of the peace.

                 In Philadelphia neighborhoods, families scurried to pack their belongings, The Inquirer reported.  One hotel proprietor said every guest had evacuated.  During that one hour, more than 4,000 phone calls flooded the Philadelphia Electrical Bureau.  The Inquirer got so many calls ---- more than 1,000 ------that it put on more operators.

               WCAU was swamped as well and broke into a later program to explain that aliens had not actually landed.

                But that was later.  During the broadcast, panic was the norm, according to the newspaper.  The report, since anthologized as examples of fine newswriting, went like this :

                In scores of New Jersey towns women in their homes fainted as the horror of the broadcast fell on their ears.  In Palmyra, some residents packed up their worldly goods and prepared to move across the river into Philadelphia.

               A white-faced man raced into the Hillside, N.J., police station and asked for a gas mask.  Police said he panted out a tale of "terrible people spraying liquid gas all over Jersey meadows.

              A weeping lady stopped Motercycle Patrolman Lawrence Treger and asked where she should go to escape the "attack."

              A terrified motorist asked the patrolman the way to Route 24.  "All creation's busted loose.  I'm getting out of Jersey," he screamed.

              And who could blame him?