The Real Scary Thing on Halloween

Halloween is here.Just look around your neighborhood that probably has scary looking creatures on the front lawn and some trick or treating ready kids ready to dress up in sometimes frightening looking costumes.

And a lot of adults on Halloween have scary movies they watch.

But no Halloween has ever been as scary as the one way back in 1938, when Americans heard coming out of their radios, what they thought was a news bulletin.

An announcer breaking in with the news that a crash site had been discovered in a farmer’s field in New Jersey, with an extra-terrestrial emerging from a spaceship. 

The report included accounts of Martians in tall metallic cylinders firing heat ray weapons and that widespread panic had broken out near the landing site with thousands of people trying to flee.

Of course, the breaking news was just a story, a fictional radio tale called The War of the Worlds.

But so many people believed what they were hearing was real, there was some real panic across the country.

The FCC investigated but found no law was broken.  But going forward, the radio networks agreed to be more cautious in their programming in the future.

Fast forward to 2025, and with the internet and social media, it’s kind of scary sometimes not knowing what is true and what is not.

(Photo Getty Images)