War of the Worlds and my Last Sunday of the Oughts

What did they have in common? They both started out with a presentation of fiction, and wound up as unintentional hoaxes that created a lot of alarm!

I got calls both from the Clarks Summit Police and from the Times on Monday, asking me to clarify something that was in my Xmas greeting that I'd stuck into all of the papers on my route on Sunday morning. All that I'd done was include - under a 1962 photo of myself on the greeting - an admittedly-convoluted sentence alluding to "a great explosion in 2010".

Well contrary to how some people apparently interpreted it, I'm not predicting, in that sense of the word, any great explosion in 2010.

I meant, rather, that I wish everybody a great explosion of success in 2010. Everything else about that allusion to "a great explosion in 2010" was simply a boast about the existence, in my archives somewhere, of a mentioning-of-2010 science fiction drawing that I did in 1965 or thereabouts when I was about 10.