Sorting out fact from fiction following Sept. 11

  • Kevin Merida / Washington Post columnist
  • Saturday, November 10, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — Growing up here in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I still remember the rampant rumors of a giant costumed rabbit who chased and frightened kids. Supposedly, there were numerous sightings of the Bunny Man, as he was called, and pretty soon this furry menace was the talk of neighborhoods across metro Washington.

Was his suit white or pink? Was he fast or lumbering? Was he dangerous or harmless? Was he a city dweller or a creature of the woods? Whether he was real was never a question in my circle. Of course he was real. We wanted him to be real. For if he existed — scary or not — then one day we too might spot the Bunny Man and earn our place in local lore.

To this day, I don’t know whether an oversize carrot-eater stalked the streets. What I do know is kids have a wonderful capacity to embrace the world of make-believe. But during the current crisis, it’s the adults who are the biggest circulators of the legendary and the outlandish. If kids are now afraid of real life, they have adults to thank.

Terrorism and war and biological threats and fear, I fear, are driving the adult population batty, sending many of us into that make-believe state of mind that offers shelter when we need to explain the inexplicable. In times like these, we are most vulnerable to rumors, myths, hoaxes, tall tales, urban legends.

Thanks to the Internet, a rumor gets started and bounces like a Super Ball around the globe and maybe finds its way to your e-mail in-box five times in two days. Some of us are natural conspiracy theorists, so we forward the rumor to everyone we know, figuring it must be true if it has come our way multiple times. Others of us are inclined not to believe hard-to-believe stories, and certainly not those trafficked en masse by e-mail. Then again, before Sept. 11, who would’ve believed there’d be a Sept. 11? Which is why some normally skeptical grown-ups — just to be on the safe side — are passing along rumors.

"The dilemma facing the broader population is: How do you tell a hoax from a useful, perhaps lifesaving piece of information?" says Redman Lucas Wells, editor of the Australia-based Urban Legends Research Centre Web site (www.ulrc.com.au).

His Web site is there to help, as are other sites devoted to the exploration of lore — www.snopes.com, for example. But the avalanche of panic-inducing bad information has brought mainstream media outlets into this line of work, too. At www.abc.com, "Nightline" has a "fact check" feature examining some of the most widely disseminated tales. And some stories traveled so far and so wide that the FBI decided to debunk them publicly. One was the tale of the Afghan man who mysteriously stood up his girlfriend on Sept. 6. On Sept. 10, she supposedly received a letter from him begging her not to fly on commercial airlines the next day or go to a mall on Halloween. Not credible, the FBI said.

Meanwhile, traffic to the Urban Legends Research Centre site has tripled since Sept. 11. And yet, as Wells points out, "there are countless people out there who will work hard to resist any message that attempts to dilute their sense of fear or concern."

So here’s some dilution, courtesy of snopes.com and the Urban Legends Research Centre:

False: More than 30 Ryder, U-Haul and Verizon trucks — many of them rented by people of Arab descent — were reported stolen shortly after Sept. 11 and never returned.

False: Some 4,000 Jews, warned of the terrorist attacks by the Israeli government, were absent from their jobs at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

False: A crackpot has been mailing out gift packages containing sponges infected with a deadly biological agent, the so-called Klingerman Virus.

False: Osama bin Laden owns Snapple.

It’s also not true that Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees, that Marilyn Monroe had six toes on each foot and that Liz Claiborne appeared on "Oprah" and said she didn’t design clothes for black women. Spike Lee fell for the Claiborne rumor, going so far as to urge blacks to boycott her clothes in 1992.

Still, not every alarm is false and not every rumor is bogus.

True: Posters carried by pro-Taliban demonstrators in Bangladesh featured a doctored photo of bin Laden next to Bert the "Sesame Street" muppet.

True: Actor James Woods observed and reported what he believed to be hijackers making a dry run on a Boston-to-Los Angeles flight before Sept. 11.

Hmmmm. Come to think of it, maybe that was the Bunny Man I saw stumbling through the woods three decades ago as I left the basketball courts in our neighborhood. Urban legends are always better when they’re true.

Kevin Merida’s e-mail address is meridak@washpost.com.

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