‘According to popular myth,’ said the completelynovel website, ‘a 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a HG Wells story about a Martian invasion, was so convincing that thousands of New Yorkers fled their homes in panic with terrified citizens around America running out into the streets to view a “space battle”.
‘The reality seems to have been a lot tamer, with the panic largely confined to the town of Grover Mills, featured in the broadcast as the site where aliens has landed. Locals in the town decided that a water tower with thin iron legs was one of the “tripod machines” of the Martian invaders, and shot at it.’ http://writ.rs/lithoaxes