Aliens Heart Petunias

It's October 30th, 1938. A radio drama about aliens invading Earth is playing across America. It's completely fake - just a Halloween special - but nobody knows that yet.

The broadcast describes Martians landing and attacking, and across the country, perfectly normal people are losing their shit. But here's the fascinating part - it's not just mass panic, it's how weirdly personal everyone's making it.

In Washington state, Mrs. Lockwood is staring out her kitchen window at some fireflies. Instead of thinking 'oh look, pretty bugs,' she's called the police twice because she's convinced these aliens have specifically chosen her farm to attack. As if beings from another planet crossed the vast cosmos just to mess with her property.

Over in Seattle, John Williams is hiding in his basement. His wife's pot roast is burning upstairs, but admitting he forgot about dinner? Hell no. Instead, he's absolutely certain he can 'smell their hostile intentions.' The police report notes he spent twenty minutes explaining how the aliens must be targeting his neighborhood specifically.

In Grover's Mill, New Jersey, chaos erupts: 200 people grab whatever weapons they can find - pitchforks, baseball bats, grandma's rolling pin - ready to throw down with space invaders who are "purposefully circling" their town. These menacing circles? Just shadows from a water tower, cast by Princeton's floodlights.

As the night goes on, people start attributing increasingly complex motivations to their imagined invaders. College students in Providence swear they can taste "alien hatred" in the air. Three families in Detroit pack up their cars because obviously, if Martians showed up right after they moved in, they must be the target. A priest in Boston is already preparing a sermon about why extraterrestrials might harbor such specific resentment toward Catholics.

The most detailed report came from a New York psychiatrist, documenting how his entire apartment building collectively decided the aliens were working their way up floor by floor, "saving the penthouses for last out of spite." One particularly confident woman kept insisting they chose her street because they were "jealous of her prize-winning petunias."

As the sun rose the next morning, newspapers across the country began gathering stories of a night when millions of Americans had created intricate emotional profiles for invaders who never existed. One man in Chicago had spent hours analyzing the aliens' "psychological warfare tactics," concluding they must have been raised in dysfunctional Martian families to be so passive-aggressive in their attack pattern.

The New York Times would later run a piece about mass hysteria and the power of suggestion. Buried on page 6, right next to an ad for cigarettes that promised to protect your throat, and three columns over from a story about a cat who had allegedly learned to play chess.