People began to notice tiny holes in their windshields in Bellingham in March of 1954. A combination of police "detective work" as well as newspaper reporting began to blow this discovery way out of proportion, contributing to fears that the "great windshield pitting" epidemic was coming south to Seattle. North of Seattle, police set up roadblocks to check cars and their occupants.
In April of 1954 the mayor of Seattle considered the threat so serious he wired the Governor and the President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower asking for state and federal help.
There were lots of wild theories about what caused the dings/pitting/holes - Cosmic radiation, a large Navy radio transmitter, nuclear bomb testing, sand flea eggs that had been laid in the windshield glass and then hatched.
There was a secondary panic involving finding of particulate matter on windshields as well. Given this was during the time of nuclear bomb testing any unexplained particulates in the air were of course a bit scarey.
In 1953 a large thermonuclear device was detonated in the Nevada desert that carried a lot of radioactive material into the atmosphere which eventually came down on the unlucky down-winders. In March of 1954 another device had been detonated over the Bikini Atoll. So people were a bit antsy about weird stuff coming out of the sky.
The most likely scenario for the windshield pitting epidemic was that people began to look at their windshields after the intial police/newspaper reports and lo and behold saw -
Dings and particulate matter.
Which had always been there but they hadn't really paid attention.
The dings were due to rocks and gravel and the particulate matter due to coal dust in the air from incomplete combustion of bituminous coal.
From the essay -
"The Seattle pitting incident contains many key factors that play a part in collective delusion. These include ambiguity, the spread of rumors and false but plausible beliefs, mass media influence, recent geo-political events, and the reinforcement of false beliefs by authority figures (in this case, the police, military, and political figures).
This combination of factors, added to the simple fact that for the first time people actually looked "at" their windshields instead of "through" them, caused the hubbub. No vandals. No atomic fallout. No sand-fleas. No cosmic rays. No electronic oscillations. Just a bunch of window dings that were there from the start.
You probably have them on your car right now. Please don’t alert the media or your local police."
