This is Only a Test. Repeat: This is Only a Test.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 47% of Americans believed the world was ending. The other 53% knew it for a fact.
Alright, it’s 2:17am out there on the lonesome highway, clear skies all the way up to the ionosphere, and this one’s going out to Bobby in the back of a Chevy somewhere near Poughkeepsie. He says things are getting a little… tense. Well, Bobby, you just keep the dial right here. We’ll ride it out together.
October 27th, 1962. A Saturday. The DEW line is lit up brighter than a Vegas marquee, Strategic Air Command has B-52s crawling all over the sky, and every man with a tie and a security clearance is sweating through his shirt in a bunker somewhere under Virginia. This is it. The big one. The whole world’s holding its breath, waiting for a flash. And just then, up in CONELRAD headquarters, a technician named Dave—just Dave, history never gives the good ones a last name—reaches for the standard-issue Emergency Broadcast System tape. The one with the calm, reassuring man telling you to stay tuned for instructions. He slots it into the machine. He presses play. Except it isn’t the calm, reassuring man. It’s the other tape. The one they use for drills. The one some genius with a love for classic theatre remixed with Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast for a little added spice. Whoops.
At 9:32pm Eastern Standard Time, the reassuring drone of the EBS test tone cut into every radio and television program from coast to coast. Then came the klaxons. Then the screaming. Then a very, very convincing announcer breaking in with news of a… meteorological disturbance. Over Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. A large, cylindrical object. That has unscrewed its top. And is now deploying several metallic tentacles, which are mounting what appear to be heat-ray devices. For roughly twelve million Americans, the nuclear anxiety they’d been nursing all week was suddenly, cosmically, fantastically irrelevant. The Russians weren’t coming. *They* were here.
The White House switchboard didn’t just light up; it melted. Kennedy, already juggling a downed U-2 pilot and a Soviet sub commander with a case of the jitters, now had to deal with panicked reports of Martian tripods wading across the Hudson and vaporizing the Jersey Turnpike. Curtis LeMay, never a man to be outdone in apocalyptic enthusiasm, reportedly demanded authorization for a full nuclear strike on Grover’s Mill, just to be on the safe side. The ensuing 45 minutes of Martian-induced chaos completely jammed every civilian and military communication line east of the Mississippi, preventing anyone from, say, ordering a retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union based on a flock of geese over Greenland. By the time Dave the Technician managed to yank the tape and slap on a Perry Como record, the moment of greatest danger had passed, everyone having been far too busy dealing with the alien invasion to start World War III.
The official story was a technical malfunction. A regrettable, but understandable, error. Dave was quietly reassigned to a weather station in Antarctica. But out here on the spaceways, we know the truth. For one glorious, terrifying night, the Martians saved the world. And as for Bobby in Poughkeepsie? I hope you found a good place to watch the show. This next one’s for you.
