Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.
A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,
You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.
A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.
You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.
And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.