on this day farmers and police at the New Jersey town of Grover's Mill gathered near the crash site of what was initially thought to be a meteor.

Part OneCloser inspection of the object, however, revealed it was actually an extraterrestrial spacecraft; even more astonishing, when the craft's occupants emerged they identified themselves as the advance party of a diplomatic mission from the planet Mars sent to establish what one of the Martians called "an alliance between the royal house of our planet and the free peoples of Earth against the tyrants who would seek to oppress both our worlds".

Please click to comment on Reddit.Under heavy police and military escort the Martian ambassadors were driven to a US Army Air Corps base on Long Island; from there they were subsequently flown to Washington for an emergency meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What Roosevelt heard at that meeting alarmed him: a group of Martian militarists seeking to overthrow their homeworld's monarch had sent its own emissaries to Earth to make pacts with Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mussolini's Italy, and the generals' clique that was increasingly dominating the Japanese government. There were even disquieting hints one such emissary had made preliminary overtures to Spanish Falangist warlord Francisco Franco.

on this day Martian diplomatic envoys landed in the British town of Woking for a historic meeting with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his inner circle.

Part TwoThere was a certain irony in the locale for this meeting, given that in H.G. Wells' classic novel War Of The Worlds Woking was the site where Martian war machines had launched their first attack on Earth; journalists covering the meeting were quick to note the contrast between that violent fictional confrontation and the more cordial actual summit between the Martian diplomats and Chamberlain's cabinet.

For one man present at the summit, the event had a special personal significance -- H.G. Wells had agreed to write a commentary on the Woking conference for the London Times. In later years his article would come to be regarded as the definitive journalistic account of Great Britain's first direct encounter with extraterrestrials. Back in the United States, meanwhile, President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, were debriefing selected members of Congress on FDR's discussions with the Martian delegation that had landed in Grover's Mill the previous night.