Has there ever been an event in the long and fabled history of urban legends that has generated so many instant legends as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
Rumors (the birthplace of urban legends) began showing up on the Internet within hours of the attacks, and within a few days, Barbara and David Mikkelson of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, who maintain the Urban Legends Reference Pages www.snopes.com, had catalogued 31 attack-related ULs.
But the Folklore Society didn't just list the legends and let it go at that. They made a good-faith attempt to check them out and gave each a rating of 1-4 based on their truthfulness — which begs the question of whether something can be true and still be an urban legend, but that's too deep for me.
Rating One means the society believes it's true, rating two means it's false, rating three legends are of "undetermined or ambiguous veracity" and rating four defines legends of "indeterminate origin," which sounds a lot like rating three.
I thought it would be easy to separate the fakes from the real deals, but that's not always the case.
For example, one legend has it that during his Sept. 11 marathon newscast, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings said President Bush should "quit hiding behind the Secret Service, come out and face the nation, and explain his failure to protect the country from these terrorist attacks." Kind of sounds like something a harried anchor man might blurt out in the heat of reporting the atrocity, but the society says it's false.
Conversely, the legend that the president declared "I'm not gonna fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt," sounds unlikely, but the folklore folks say it's true.
Another legend, just odd enough to perhaps be true — truth, we're told, is stranger than fiction — is that 4,000 Jews employed by companies housed in the World Trade Center stayed home on Sept. 11 because they had been warned in advance of the impending attacks. Didn't happen.
But the legend that a Starbucks coffee shop manager charged firefighters and ambulance workers $130 for three cases of bottled water intended for the injured during the search and rescue efforts at the WTC is true. (The company later apologized and returned the money.)
Some other gems that caught my eye:
Images of the WTC fire reveal the face of Satan. (Indeterminate, says the society.)
The planned cover for a hip-hop CD to be released in November depicted an exploding WTC. (True)
CNN used old footage to fake scenes of Palestinians dancing in the street after the attacks. (False)
A Nostradamus prophecy of the fall of "two brothers" (the twin towers) predicts the imminent start of World War III. (False)
A U.S. company banned its employees from displaying American flags. (True)
Blue envelopes containing sponges saturated with a deadly virus are being anonymously mailed to random Americans. (False)
A bound pair of hands was found atop a building near the WTC. (True)
A photo captured an unlucky tourist posing on the observation deck of a WTC tower seconds before an American Airlines jet smashed into the building. The camera is found later in the rubble. (False. This digital manipulation made the rounds of computer screens at the Deseret News. Snopes notes that the guy is wearing a winter coat and hat on what was a warm sunny day. The shadows don't correspond to the light source, the date-time stamp on the picture is in the wrong font and the plane in the pix is a Boeing 757, smaller than the wide-body AA Boeing 767 that hit the tower.)
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