Quite a scare for a number of people either visiting or living in Hawaii on Saturday. 

A message flashed to their phones said that a ballistic missile was headed their way and it was NOT a drill. 

A number of TV news people were in Hawaii at the time. 

Poynter writes that Lorenza Ingram, a CNN producer who is in Hawaii a few days away from her wedding,  said as soon as the alert went out via cell phone alerts, she saw people running with their families off the beach. She said she got more information by calling the CNN news desk than she was getting from local officials or the hotel. 

WCAU-TV Philadelphia anchor Vai Sikahema, who is vacationing in Hawaii, said he saw the alert on his phone and told his wife he figured they had about 15 minutes before impact. He said he called his children and told them where the family will is, then he said, he called the TV station assignment desk to say if he was still alive in a few minutes, he would be available to report what he saw.

NBC News' Jacob Soboroff reported that he just happened to be in Hawaii right now, on the last day of producing a special report on emergency nuclear response. The NBC journalist is part of the NBC Left Field digital video journalism unit. 

Only yesterday, he said, he had been in a Civil Defense command center on assignment. Soboroff said Hawaiians have heard the alarms in test drills before, but he said there were no sirens sounded today. 

Phone calls and texts from Hawaii to the mainland were numerous:

Hawaii was trending on Twitter for much of the day and after it all turned out to be a big mistake, some of the tweets were even funny. 

Like the one from this guy: