The War of the Worlds

A notable feature of "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast was the (small, and likely overstated by the newsies) panic during the live broadcast. The broadcast was in 1938 so the (small, other shows were more popular) audience was likely dialed up a bit over war fears, soon to be (or already in China) rather too true.

    [thrig]   good old Arson Welles
    [quintin] Really lights a fire in the imagination
    [x2180]   I just heard about it causing a real world scare at the
              time, when folks didn't have digital signals to mention
              it was a show and just tuned into the fun at random
    [thrig]   what's the XML metadata for "not actually an alien invasion"

Proper tagging of invasions may swiftly run into various objections, such as why the aliens wouldn't set the "not an invasion" flag and thus confuse us. Nah, bro, can't be aliens. See, the metadata here is wrong.

Another point is that we were quite a bit more ignorant of space back then; the "canals on Mars" thing took until 1965 to get properly debunked (or covered up, if the paranoid style in politics is your thing), so who knew if there were Martians with expansionist agendas like that chap in Munich had. Now? Space looks to be a big empty, which is underselling the empty by a lot. And where are the Venusian swamp babes and Mercury twilight vampires? Apart from the pages of golden era pomp, that is. Even getting a rocket to Mars is pretty hard, to say less of trying to run an industrial war. You could maybe send a virus over, which would cause certain folks to elect a Clown, and then…