Grover Mill is a grist mill and a small community located in West Windsor ,New Jersey.The actual mill was constructed in 1759, if not earlier.The town gained recognition on October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles’ radio played ‘The War of the Worlds’ and included it as the starting point of a Martian invasion. Welles threw a dart at a map of New Jersey and hit Grovers Mill.Prior to the being called Grover’s Mill road it was called Cranberry Hock road.
Orson Welles and a group of actors stopped a radio broadcast in 1938 to inform listeners that aliens had conquered the world.
Actually, they were only reading a script adapted from The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.The bogus news story went out of control and caused tremendous hysteria throughout the entire nation.The Mercury Theatre Group, which Welles founded, produced the 8:00 PM Eastern time presentation.
According to their account, the invasion began in Grovers Mill in New Jersey.Why is that?Howard Koch, the playwright for the Mercury Theatre, actually chose the location at, random from a map that was hanging in a gas station he stopped at while driving.
According to the story, the Martians had walking war machines that blasted heat rays at visitors on the crash site.
They swiftly killed 7,000 members of the National Guard.Following that, the US military launched an artillery and bomber strike, but the Martians weren’t deterred and retaliated by spewing poisonous gas into the atmosphere. More of the aliens than arrived in Chicago and St. Louis, continuing the invasion.
The Mercury Theatre troupe’s terrifyingly realistic performances as radio broadcasters and witnesses to events, along with fake witnesses in the event and bone chilling sound effects, gave the entire thing a degree of verisimilitude that led many to believe it was true.
Since the broadcast, several accounts have asserted that the news of the alien invasion caused thousands of people to panic.Some critics even increased those figures to around a million.
One of the more widely circulated tales was of a large number of New Yorkers flocking to the streets to see the invasion. It appeared that Wells’ decision to saturate the broadcast with phoney radio reports from the US Air Force and Infantry had escalated tension to exorbitant levels in an almost excessive way.Grovers Mill, New Jersey, bore the brunt of the fear, with locals fearing that there water tower had been seized that an alien spacecraft.
According to some tales, people have even tried shooting at it to defend themselves from the Martians.Even while it can be challenging to determine the veracity of those allegations, some people undoubtedly took the broadcast’s possible risks seriously..One of the Mercury Theatre Group’s actors later reported how police officers determined to stop the broadcast gradually filled the studio.
They battled with the pages and the CBS officials who delayed them until the show was finished.The moment it ended, the studio phones started nonstop ringing in frenzy .Paul White, who oversaw CBS News at the time, called the situation chaotic.
Ironically enough, he also met a discouraged Orson Welles.The retired director of Citizen Kane told him, “I’m through,” and appeared to think that this was the end of his career.Many people today assume that the legendary broadcast wrecked havoc in the streets and even cost some lives.
It probably never occurred anywhere near to the scale represented in the urban legends, despite multiple media reports of widespread panic in several towns.Modern experts claim that the vast majority of viewers understood that the program was a Halloween hoax.The voice on the radio that announced “the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the air in War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells” before the broadcast was heard”.The news of the claimed extraterrestrial invasion wasn’t being broadcast on any other stations, which was another cue.
Regarding the brodcast , even Hitler didn’t hesitant to use it as proof of degenerated and corrupt state of democracy. The Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, is the government organisation that has been in charge of keeping an eye on the public radio waves.Furthermore, they actually looked into the circumstances surrounding the broadcast following the purported War of the Worlds fear. But in the end, they came to the conclusion that no laws were breached.The most important factor in dispelling the rumor that the broadcast caused widespread panic is this.It is obvious that the FCC would have been more flustered with Orson Welles than it was if it had caused widespread alarming situation .In reality, the FCC discovered very little misconduct on the part of CBS and Welles.In essence, they claimed the fear was totally unfounded.They went as far as to by going so far as to bar objections about the program from being discussed during license renewal hearings. However it did poignantly at least 7 deaths due to the panic.Grover Mill building is still mostly intact and now has a Martin themed coffee house.This incident did reveal where people could get authentic certified information on how to react in a real emergency let alone a fake one.
websites used to re:
https://www.westwindsorhistory.com/groversmill.html#:~:text=Grovers%20Mill%20was%20thrust%20into,its%20original%20buildings%20still%20intact.
https://carolbrendlerbooks.com/2014/01/07/grovers-mill-new-jersey/
https://waroftheworlds.fandom.com/wiki/Grovers_Mill,_New_Jersey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNXtpfaGkVo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grovers_Mill,_New_Jersey
