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> A Massachusetts man heard all he could stand, ran and planked down his savings ($3.25) for a railway ticket. He traveled 60 miles before he found out he was fleeing a bogeyman.
> One unruffled husband, to prove to his wife that there was no danger, tuned in another radio station with music on. Humphed his wife: "Nero fiddled while Rome burned."
> At another exasperating husband, a stickling wife screamed: "Dan, why don't you get dressed? You don't want to die in your working clothes!"
> Said one come-what-may man later: "The broadcast had us all worried, but I knew it would at least scare ten years' life out of my mother-in-law."
> One Glory-bent citizen, driving 80 miles an hour for a priest to be shriven, turned over twice on a curve, lived to tell it.
> How the Law behaved in Maplewood, N. J.: "We know as much as you do. Keep your radio tuned in and follow the announcer's advice. There is no immediate danger in Maplewood."
One quality that might have tipped everyone off to what was really going on, according to Dr. Cantril, was pure, uninfluenced "critical ability." Some child listeners possessed and used this. They recognized Orson Welles's voice as that of The Shadow of a year prior. Compared to The Shadow's well-remembered activities, the War of the Worlds was tame stuff. On the whole, college-bred listeners who first thought the program was a news broadcast were twice as successful as grade-school graduates in detecting that what they heard was fiction. But generally, Dr. Cantril's researchers found, critical ability was affected by other factors tending to create susceptibility. Most significant of these were universal insecurity, worries, phobias, fatalism, war fear. To sum up, Dr. Cantril quoted the late Heywood Broun: "Jitters have come to roost."
Two persons upon whose critical ability Dr. Cantril does not comment were the two hard-rock Princeton geologists who heard that something had fallen near by, promptly set out, hammers in hand, to have a scientific go at it.
* On April Fool's Eve, two Sundays ago, Jack Benny in his NBC radio half-hour held an imaginary telephone conversation with Orson Welles, jokingly blamed recent sunspot magnetic storms on him, worried about the end of the world. In Philadelphia, Press Agent William A. A. Castellini of the Fels Planetarium telegraphed Benny, care of Station KYW: "Your worst fears that world will end are confirmed by astronomers of the Franklin Institute. Scientists predict that the world will end at 3 p. m. E. S. T. April 1." A KYW announcer read the telegram—an obvious plug for a Planetarium show called "How the World Will End&"—following a news broadcast, with no mention of Jack Benny. Result: a minor panic in the City of Brotherly Love, jammed switchboards, perspiring cops, an editorial rebuke from the Philadelphia Inquirer. * Princeton University Press; $2.50.