Beginning late March 1954 in Bellingham, drivers reported dime-sized pits appearing in windshields; by mid-April the wave hit Seattle, police examined 15,000 cars and logged over 3,000 damaged, motorists flagged down squad cars, and the governor and President Eisenhower were notified. Candidate causes: BB-gun vandals, the Jim Creek naval transmitter, cosmic rays, H-bomb fallout, hatching sand-flea eggs. On April 15, Sergeant Max Allison of the Seattle police crime lab gave the diagnosis: 5 percent hoodlum-ism, 95 percent public hysteria. By April 17, the epidemic was over.
The mechanism: windshields pit from ordinary use, gravel, weather, age, but drivers look through glass, never at it; once newspapers announced an epidemic, everyone inspected their windshield for the first time and found the accumulated damage of years, reporting it as new. No cosmic ray required. It is the textbook case of collective delusion in the collective-behavior literature, more precise than mass hysteria: nobody hallucinated a pit; they discovered a backlog.
The claim: the windshield epidemic is the purest fossil of media-triggered perception, the Jim Creek radio tower was innocent, but another transmitter was guilty, the press itself, and every modern panic, from Havana syndrome counts to toilet-paper runs, runs the same loop: report, inspect, discover, report. Verdict: the loop is documented from 1954 to this week. The archive's note: they blamed a secret weapon for making them see things. There was a secret weapon. It was called the front page.
If the pits were always there, what else are you not seeing until the newspaper points?