The writers had picked a small town in New Jersey, Grover's Mill, as the site of the Martians' landing. When the show was broadcast, it was so realistic that frightened farmers in the area grabbed their shotguns and headed into town, looking for the Martians and their spacecraft. There in the moonlit October night, they looked up into the sky and spied the town's water tower. Seeing the spaceship they expected to see, they opened fire. Locals report that if you look carefully at the old water tower you can still see the buckshot markings.
Expectation is powerful.
We see only what we expect to see. When the people came out to hear John the Baptist, what attracted them was not simply that he preached powerfully or that he offered baptism for the forgiveness of sins. It was that John matched their expectations of what a prophet should be and should say. In fact, John so perfectly matched the religious expectations of the people, the rumor was floating around that he was the long-expected Messiah. In the same way that the farmers of Grover's Mill saw what they expected, the people standing on the banks of the Jordan looked at John and saw the figure for whom their hearts hungered.