Bob Sanders was in Grovers Mill when Martians invaded the Jersey town — 75 years ago today.
“William Dock saw the water tower in the moonlight, thought it was a spacecraft,” recalls Sanders, now 81 and a lifelong resident of the West Windsor hamlet. “He took a couple shots at it with his double-barreled shotgun.”
The town was in a tizzy. The nation was in a panic. Murderous Martians had invaded Earth, their unlikely first landfall Grovers Mill, outside Princeton.
“We sat down and listened to it on the radio,” Sanders says of “The War of the Worlds” broadcast on Oct. 30, 1938. “Some of the local people put their families in their cars and drove out of town.”