After cheering on the runners at the Blob Half-Marathon on Sunday morning, I fired up the Blobmobile and set a course for upstate New York to visit dear friend and loyal reader Ross M., whom I hadn’t seen in years. Along the way I passed through Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

Now, the name Grovers Mill seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it…

While still pondering the name I stopped at a local park to answer the call of nature. And upon exiting the loo I saw this plaque:

The morning shadows make it a little hard to read, but the plaque commemorates Orson Welles’ 1938 live radio broadcast based on H.G. Wells’ [no relation] story “The War of the Worlds.” The broadcast, which aired the night before Halloween, was presented as a series of urgent news bulletins interrupting a scheduled music program. And the crux of the thing was that Martians had landed at this self-same Grovers Mill, NJ, and were slaughtering the locals and wreaking havoc as they made their way toward New York. Later in the broadcast we learn that additional Martian craft had landed in other cities across the US. The world is doomed.

Famously, the broadcast triggered frantic calls to police stations by terrified listeners. According the plaque, which may or may not be exaggerating, “for a brief time as many as one million people throughout the country believed that Martians had invaded the earth, beginning with Grover’s [sic] Mill, New Jersey.” The full extent of the panic is disputed, but there were reports of heart attacks, suicides, car accidents, and the like, all supposedly prompted by Welles’ broadcast. One or more residents of Grovers Mill itself are said to have shot at a local water tower, thinking it to be a Martian craft in the darkness.

The incident spurred fervent debates about mass hysteria, the media’s culpability for promoting hoaxes, what qualifies as entertainment, the gullibility of Americans (none other than Adolf Hitler weighed in on this one), and other topics. For me, one question rose above all the others: Can I find that water tower that the locals shot up?

Turning to ChatGPT–which itself might destroy civilization as we know it one day soon–I learned that the water tower still existed, and wasn’t far from the park where I saw the plaque. After a bit of searching I found it behind a tall white fence on a residential street:

With a little more jockeying for position that some might define as trespassing, I got a better shot:

I have to admit this old water tower, mounted on spindly iron poles, does generally fit the description of the Martians’ war machines: “giant tripods [with] stilt-like legs, thin as wire.” Maybe if I had a cocktail or two in me, I might have shot at it myself.

This whole War of the Worlds broadcast thing intrigues me for several reasons. In part I wonder how today’s Americans would react to a Martian spaceship. I suspect we would all break out our phones and take pictures, oblivious to the danger. I also am nostalgic for the time when families would gather around the radio or TV and share a program together. And I am grateful to the good people of Grovers Mill for keeping this story about rural America, Orson Welles, Martians, and Halloween hijinks alive. But most of all, I am astounded that Orson Welles had this kind of impact at age 23. It’s very humbling.