I remember a friend getting concerned about something he heard on his scanner and then finding out that he was listening to the wrong channel for emergency services and was getting one side of a conversation that was scene by scene discussion of an action movie.
For a few minutes it sounded like there was something major going on.

Pretty easy to combine the precautionary principle, a bit of latent paranoia, and some free-floating imagination and get yourself worked into a lather over nothing. Or be reassured that there is nothing to worry about because you don't hear alarm calls on your scanner.

Remember that HGWells announced many times during his radio play "War of the Worlds" that it was fiction but many people thought it was real. Raw broadcasts delivered in fractured form and out of context are devilishly hard to interpret.