Recently, something very interesting landed in my inbox.

I couldn't stop looking at it.

That something was a 50-page PDF.

This PDF included letters from a governor and even a playwright.

There were also news clippings from big publications like the New York

Times and variety. There were even maps. Everything was about an event that happened almost a century ago.

This PDF was a pamphlet made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this very event.

That event is Orson Wells' 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds, that reenacted an alien invasion.

A lot of people fell for it. It sounded like any other radio broadcast at the time.

And there was no internet to confirm or deny if aliens had touched down.

Wells' radio play proved the power of media and subsequently changed how we experience media

today.

But while everybody talks about this radio play,

what's left out of the story is where the story was set.

A little town in New Jersey.

I'm Morgan Johnson, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're going to that little town because it's real.

And though it took decades, the people who live in Grover's Mill now have come to embrace their part in one of the biggest media hoaxes.

In fact, they've turned it into something to be proud of.

War after this. Imagine, it's October 30th, 1938, the night before Halloween, or as some know it as, Mischief Night, and you turn on the radio.

It sounds like any other radio show.

There's your usual weather report, music that gets interrupted by news reports.

...