Martians didn't land in Jersey

ON THIS NIGHT, 75 years ago, nothing happened in a little slice of New Jersey no one's ever heard of, and the story's only grown ever since.

It was Oct. 30, 1938, and Orson Welles and cast members of the "Mercury Theatre on the Air" put their own twist on the H.G. Wells science-fiction classic, War of the Worlds, telling CBS radio listeners that Martians had landed on the Wilmuth Farm in the Grover's Mill section of West Windsor Township, about 12 miles from Trenton.

"I seen a kinda greenish streak and then - zingo! Somethin' smacked the ground. Knocked me clear out of my chair!" Farmer Wilmuth told CBS radio that night.

Then came the tentacles, the death rays vaporizing flesh and bone, and giant mechanical machines setting off from Jersey to destroy the world. Chaos and panic supposedly swept through the Northeast, according to the following morning's New York Times and other newspapers. In the decades that followed, the legend of the Welles broadcast has flourished.

It's also grown a little out of hand, according to media and communications experts.

"There was not this mass panic," said American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the broadcast in Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. "The fright that night was very limited to a few pockets of people who were concerned. To most listeners of that show, it was very clear it was entertainment."

Back in August, in Alabama, it seemed pretty clear that aliens didn't really take control of Star 94 FM, either, but folks were fooled again.

"And what is a Facebook?" a male alien asks on the Aug. 26 broadcast. "It is something the humans use to display photos of their food," a female's robotic voice responds.

The Alabama invasion didn't reach Welles-ian proportions, but enough chatter spread through social media to get school officials and law enforcement concerned.

"It may have started as something innocent," Tuscumbia Police Chief Tony Logan told the New York Daily News, "but it has gotten out of hand and turned into an issue concerning public safety."

Anyone with a cellphone today can get information instantly from citizens in the middle of a horrific event or reporters on scene. There's more misinformation floating around than ever, though, everything from innocuous Facebook death hoaxes that siphon off our attention to a whole slideshow's worth of fake Superstorm Sandy pictures.

There are much graver errors spread by new and old media, too, most notably in the recent, round-the-clock coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. On April 18, the New York Post placed a large photo of two runners on its cover, identifying them as the "BAG MEN" feds wanted to talk to after the bombing. The next day, users of the social-media sites Reddit and Twitter identified Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student from Radnor, as a bombing suspect.

The good news, experts say, is how fast the bad information corrects itself, often by the same sources that spread it. Each major news event is often followed up by countless critiques of its media coverage and how it can improve.

"Today, there's a bigger forum to spread panic but the misinformation is usually quickly debunked," said Jeff Pooley, an assistant professor of media and communications at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Lehigh County.

Welles apologized at a Halloween news conference the day after his broadcast, a victim of his own talents, but the myth remained.

Pooley believes the War of the Worlds "panic" reported by the nation's newspapers was deliberately overhyped in an effort to paint radio, a competitor for advertising, as dangerous and unreliable.

"There was a campaign by newspapers to wage war against radio," said Pooley, who co-authored a recent article for Slate on the subject.

The numbers of people who've listened to the broadcast live has always varied as well, Campbell said, sometimes as high as 6 million.

"There's just no way to make that kind of determination," he said.

Robert Sanders remembers his father sitting him down at the family farm on Cranbury Road in West Windsor to tell him the broadcast wasn't real. Sanders was just 6, and did recall an invasion of sorts.

"This road was just full of cars," Sanders, 81, said. "The only thing I know, is there were people who put their family in their cars and took off."

There are more houses and fewer farms there today, but West Windsor is still more rural and quiet than most of New Jersey. The 1938 Martian invasion was the most exciting thing that never happened there, and down at Grover's Mill Coffee, the walls are decorated with all the aliens that never nearly destroyed mankind.

If the invasion happened tonight in Grover's Mill, there'd be a few hundred people on Instagram or Facebook within minutes, reporting nothing but frost on the pumpkins.

Some prefer the legend that landed on Wilmuth's Farm 75 years ago.

"Some people are gullible, sure, but others want to be fooled by this kind of stuff," said Mark Moran, co-publisher of Weird N.J. magazine. "People watch shows about ghost hunting and Bigfoot all the time, and no one ever finds anything. It's not about finding the ghosts, or seeing the aliens - it's the story that surrounds them."