What should we believe about New Jersey’s drones?
The past few weeks’ frenzy around alleged sightings of mysterious drones flying above my home state of New Jersey reminds me of one of my grandfather Jack McCarthy’s favorite stories. He was a teenager on October 30, 1938 — the day that Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast claimed that Martians had landed in a rural Garden State hamlet called Grovers Mill, which happened to be one town over from where my grandfather lived. According to Jack’s frequent retellings of the story during family holidays, he and his friends hadn’t actually heard the broadcast themselves. They were loitering around Princeton when someone they knew drove by in a car and asked if they wanted to hop in and drive to Grovers Mill to see the Martians.
