'We Take You Now To Grovers Mill'

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News . . . . It is reported that at 8:50 p.m. a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, N.J.

We take you now to Grovers Mill, N.J.

Mabel Dey -- you can call her "Lolly" like everyone else does -- was 16 years old when the Martians landed here. And even today, 63 years later, she can remember the smallest of eerie details from that foggy night when Grovers Mill found itself in the interplanetary cross hairs.

It was Oct. 30, 1938, and Dey was at church.

"That particular night, I was at the piano," remembers Dey, "when someone, I think it was a fella, came barging in and started shouting, 'Martians have landed at Grovers Mill!' Well, I was learning about Hitler in school then, and I thought -- and I know this sounds crazy -- maybe Hitler and the Martians had gotten together, and this was the end of the world.

"So I stopped playing the piano, and I just bowed my head, and I prayed to the Lord."

As one of a dwindling number of "survivors" from that Halloween Eve, Dey remains the de facto expert on the enduring legend of Grovers Mill, the sleepy, creepy farming town that mass media -- and mass hysteria -- plucked from obscurity. And still, despite what she now knows about that pudgy prankster Orson Welles and "War of the Worlds" and the greatest trick-or-treat in Halloween history, Dey will never forget how truly terrified she was that October night -- the night that taught a young teenager to be forever wary of what she hears coming from her radio.

"All I could think in the church that night was that my mother was home alone," Dey says. "And if this was the end of the world, I wanted to be with her."

Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadows like a gray snake. Now it's another one, and another. They look like tentacles to me. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable!

Give the Martians some credit: They might not have been the most gracious (or handsome) tourists, but on Oct. 30, 1938, those surly reptiles couldn't have picked a prettierplace in the eastern United States to raise an extraterrestrial ruckus.With its geese-populated pond, flora-framed streets and pumpkin-proud homes, Grovers Mill is still very much the sweet-dream embodiment of Small Town, U.S.A., that it was way back when. The loudest noise is usually the rustling of the autumn leaves, and the bustling modern world (that would be the bustling modern world of nearby Princeton) seems a million miles away. Even the chittering squirrels look from a Disney flick.

But then those Martians had to go and start zapping everyone with those nasty heat-ray thingies.

Oh sure, you chuckle now. But 63 years ago last night, Lolly Dey and a good number of the estimated 4 million to 12 million listeners very much believed in the power of those heat-ray thingies. News of a Martian rampage might have been a far-far-away-fetched notion, but a significant number of levelheaded people -- especially people in and around Grovers Mill -- bought into each and every warning that the 23-year-old Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air radio troupe were devilishly dishing out.