The Sunday of October 30, 1938, had been as slow and languorous, as any other weekend in the United States. Little did anyone know then that "a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News," somewhere after 8 pm, would soon disturb this tranquil. It claimed that an extraterrestrial object had crashed to Earth, just 20 miles from Princeton. Events escalated quickly, with the radio announcer reporting that a tentacled alien had emerged from the spacecraft, who then wiped out the militia that had rushed to the site. The bulletin, in fact, was the radio adaptation of director-writer Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds. But, it had sounded so real, that it caused mass hysteria and panic in America.

"Thousands, maybe even millions, of people… were convinced that the country really was under extraterrestrial attack. Police and newspaper switchboards lit up. People went hunting for the downed spaceship. Families fled their homes. Highways were jammed. Churches and police stations were inundated with refugees and volunteers for the armed resistance. People died of heart attacks.