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Coping with the 9.11.01 Aftermath

Did you Hear the One About...?

By Amy Argetsinger

The e-mail from an old roommate had the whiff of too many hoaxes, from its dubious opening -- "my friend's friend was dating this guy from Afghanistan . . . " -- to the overheated warning at the end: Everyone avoid the malls on Halloween!

Mary Beth Goodman didn't believe it. But in the days since Sept. 11, who knew what to think anymore?

"No one would have believed the towers would fall," said the 28-year-old District resident. "If that's the environment we live in, you can never be too safe."

Goodman, a government lawyer and nobody's fool, forwarded the e-mail to several friends.

The warning, it turns out, has no basis in reality, according to law enforcement officials. Neither does the one about hundreds of trucks reported stolen, supposedly by terrorists planning another massive assault. Nor, say other authorities, are many other rumors that have spread since the terrorist attacks, like the one about Osama bin Laden profiting from worldwide soft drink sales, or Peter Jennings accusing President Bush of cowardice on the air.

Stories like these, often called urban legends, have long thrived in our culture, astonishing but seemingly credible tales that are passed from friend to friend, many picking up speed with the growth of the Internet.

But in the weeks since Sept. 11, rumors like these have gained new currency as bright bits of intelligence in a world suddenly turned murky. Where once this genre of story had the power to amuse and astonish, now it also can cause anxiety and instill fear.

"Who would have imagined two weeks ago that suddenly we would look at our mail as a source of potential death?" said Gary Alan Fine, a sociology professor at Northwestern University. "In times of ambiguity, things we once thought of as normal seem frightening, and we become more open to rumor."

Even some of the most skeptical, hoax-savvy people -- the kind who never fell for the one about the poodle in the microwave or the drunk who woke up to find his kidneys stolen -- are heeding the new crop of warnings and nervously passing them on.

"You feel so stupid forwarding these," a freelance journalist from Baltimore e-mailed her friends, "but I still think I won't be at a mall on 10/31."

She was talking about the particularly compelling warning. It involves a woman who was dating a Middle Eastern man -- in some versions described as Arab, in others as Afghan -- who abruptly vanished in early September, leaving a note in which he warns her not to board any airplanes on Sept. 11 . . . or visit any shopping malls on Halloween.

Most versions go on to claim that the woman turned over the letter to FBI investigators. But agency officials say it's simply not true. And there is no reason to believe that shopping malls are a particular target on Oct. 31 or any other day.

Where do these stories come from? The rumor seemed credible to many people because it circulated in an e-mail whose author, a California woman, had left her name and phone number at the bottom. Apparently deluged with inquiries, Laura Katsis's employer, Volt Information Sciences, has shut down her old phone extension and e-mail service. Queries through either are met with a recorded statement or automatic e-mail response from company officials denying direct knowledge of the incident.

Experts on urban legends are less interested in where the stories come from than why and how they spread. Barbara Mikkelson, a Los Angeles woman who spends her spare time checking and debunking urban legends for the popular www.snopes2.com Web site, said they are "spontaneous and naturally occurring expressions" of the fears that well up in times of crisis.

The shopping mall rumor, she said, "is hugely comforting in the strangest way. We're reducing terrorism -- which can strike anywhere, anytime, to anybody -- to 'We know the place and time, so just avoid being there.'

"It puts a sense of control back in an out-of-control world."

But an urban legend also can threaten to stop a city in its tracks. In Massachusetts, state and municipal officials braced for a potential terrorist strike after an e-mail circulated stating that "a few drunk Arab men" had warned a Boston bartender of bloodshed on Sept. 22.

Urban legends can also sustain false hope. For weeks after the collapse of the World Trade Center, relatives of the missing clung to the story of a man who had survived a plunge from the 81st floor -- virtually unscathed! -- by "riding the wave" of the falling building. The story was based on brief and early news reports about a man pulled from the wreckage the following day but got far more circulation through word of mouth.

In fact, authorities later amended their account to say that the man had made it to the ground floor by foot before the tower collapsed.

Urban legends can also feed on prejudice and paranoia. In the days after Sept. 11, there were numerous reports of Arabs seen celebrating the terrorist attacks. At George Mason University, students heard about a young foreign man who supposedly stood up and cheered during a campus vigil memorializing the Sept. 11 victims and then was beaten up by ROTC members -- or maybe a campus police officer, in some tellings.

"I was at that vigil from start to end, and nothing like that happened," insisted an angry Bennett K. Smith, GMU's student government president. "Someone tells me that story and I say, 'Did you see it happen?' " Each teller would then admit he had heard it from someone else, Smith said.

It may seem strange that rumors continue to proliferate at a time when 24-hour television and Internet news coverage pursuing every possible angle of the terrorism threat leaves us with no vacuum of information.

Yet many people remain convinced there's much the media have not told them -- with good reason, Fine said. Some news organizations acknowledged having some advance inkling of when the bombing campaign would start -- based on the fact that the Pentagon flew a group of reporters to aircraft carriers on short notice -- yet did not report it.

"You can no longer say, 'If it's not in the paper, it didn't happen,' " Fine said. "You can say, 'The government doesn't want us to know this.' "

And so students at Harvard University continue to circulate a rumor that their campus is No. 5 on a secret federal list of likely terrorist targets. And millions of suspicious Muslims repeat a rumor that the Israeli Mossad was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Aaron Lynch, an Evanston, Ill., a scholar of a field known as thought contagion analysis, said people are drawn to pass on terrorism warnings by the "gratifying" sense that they might be saving the life of others, who might come back to thank them someday.

And those who traffic in such legends are unapologetic. Linda Harris, 46, an administrative assistant in Oakland for the University of California system, told several friends the one about the stolen trucks -- even though she sensed it wasn't true.

"It could be a hoax," she said. Then again, why shouldn't she alert her friends to be on the lookout for strange trucks? That's how Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

"I'm not advocating being paranoid," she said. "Just be aware."

By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page B01

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