Bob Johnson was 12 when the Martians came.

It was after 8 p.m. on Halloween eve in 1938. What the East Toledo boy heard on the radio was terrifying.

"It seemed to me that someone called and said listen to the radio," the now-79-year-old man recalled. "Orson Welles was rattling on about spaceships landing."

It was the infamous War of the Worlds radio play being produced by Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air. Like the current Steven Spielberg movie, the broadcast was based on H.G. Wells' 19th-century novel. But the Johnson family - and many others across the nation - didn't know that.

They listened intently to the news bulletins announcing that Martians had landed in large meteor cylinders in Grovers Mill, N.J. and turned a heat-ray on the crowd, killing 40 people, including six state troopers.

The bear-sized Martians had tentacles and glistened "like wet leather." They brought with them tall robot machines, released poison gas, and wiped out a militia of 7,000 before advancing on New York City.

The radio reports, designed as news bulletins interrupting musical programming, came complete with sounds of the terrified population fleeing as Martians released gas on New York and an announcer who died at his post with a few coughs.

"We were all just tense and listening to that radio," said Mr. Johnson, who now lives in uptown Toledo. "At that time, that was very believable."

The public was used to these sorts of bulletins breaking in on their regular programming with news bulletins from Europe, where Hitler's Germany already had annexed Austria.

Many took it seriously and panicked - jamming traffic as they tried to flee, clogging lines of communication with calls to police, radio stations, and loved ones, and interrupting religious services with word that the world was going to end.

By the time 9 p.m. rolled around and the Martian invasion failed, some listeners already were in hysterics. Fortunately for Mr. Johnson, his father proclaimed the whole thing a spoof after about 30 minutes.

"Dad said, 'It's not real. That's just radio,' " Mr. Johnson said.

Looking back, that should have been obvious. Four times during the broadcast, including the beginning, announcers said it was just a radio adaptation of the Wells novel. Many people either missed or overlooked them.

Orson Welles himself addressed listeners at the end of the program, assuring them that it was just some Halloween fun and nothing more than a "radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!"

There were other clues. One correspondent in the program made it from Princeton to the site of the alien landing 11 miles away in a matter of seconds of real time, and the second part of the drama took the form of a narrative by one character over the course of more than a day.

None of this helped Elsie Keckstein, 77, of Oregon. She was home listening with her younger brother and two older sisters.

"I was only 10 years old, but I have a sister who's afraid of everything," she said. "[We] were so frightened. It was terrible. My mom came home while it was still on and she got us calmed down."

"I've just never forgotten it because my sister and my other sister and I were so afraid," she said. "I remember the next day just everybody talking about it."

About 6 million people listened to the program, according to a Princeton University study. Unknown numbers who didn't tune in were caught up in the hysteria. (You can join them if you like. Copies of the broadcast are still available for listening at the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library and Bowling Green State University's Jerome Library.)

"I heard there were people committing suicide, running to the mountains, all that kind of stuff," said Bill Cameron, who was an 11-year-old living in Lorain, Ohio, at the time. "People were freaking out to some extent."

Even though the now-78-year-old South Toledo resident wasn't taken in by the ruse, he admits, "It sounded hauntingly real."

In Toledo, news reports indicated that at least one local person suffered a heart attack during the program. Calls to newspaper offices were too numerous to tabulate. One local woman talked for nine minutes with her daughter in New Jersey trying to get her to come home at once.

Across the country, people fled their homes to escape the invasion. Others took to rooftops, where they claimed to smell the invaders' poison gas and see the approaching Martian robots.

There was enough commotion for New Jersey State Police to teletype the following: "Note to all receivers - WABC broadcast as drama re this section being attacked by residents of Mars. Imaginary affair."

First Published July 13, 2005, 11:48 a.m.