At approximately 8:07 am on January 13, 2018, the state of Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency in Honolulu sent out a frightening alert on TV, radio, and cell phones across all of Hawaii: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” A second alert saying the original alert was a false alarm was transmitted thirty-eight minutes after the initial broadcast. The episode transpired during a period of heightened tension between the United States and North Korea, and it generated widespread fear and anxiety. A member of the state’s House of Representatives, Matthew LoPresti, told CNN: “I was sitting in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers” (Cohen 2018). The New York Times reported that “People flocked to shelters, crowding highways in scenes of terror and helplessness” (Nagourney et al. 2018).
Since the early twentieth century, there have been numerous false alarms of attacks, broadcast either intentionally or by accident. On the evening of October 30, 1938, a radio drama about a Martian invasion caused widespread fear after being broadcast on 151 syndicated stations across the United States and Canada. Princteon University psychologist Hadley Cantril estimated that upward of 1.7 million listeners were frightened, while a relatively small number panicked and attempted to flee the epicenter of the fictitious attack: Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The impact was most disruptive near “ground zero.” The next day, the city manager for Trenton, New Jersey, Paul Morton, told the Trenton Evening Times that the deluge of phone calls “completely crippled communication facilities” for the city’s police department for three hours.
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