West Windsor

Grovers Mill and the Panic That Wasn't

On 30 October 1938 Orson Welles broadcast his radio version of The War of the Worlds on CBS, with Martians landing at the village of Grovers Mill in New Jersey — and the next morning the papers wrote of millions of Americans fleeing their homes. That second story was taken apart later. The C. E. Hooper ratings service polled five thousand people that evening: about two per cent were listening, and almost none of them called it news. The historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow showed that the scale of the panic was invented by the newspapers themselves — print was losing advertising to broadcasting and was glad to prove that radio was dangerous. The monument to the Martians at Grovers Mill was put up in 1988.