Rumor has it...

Published on 10/01/2001 Daily Egyptian (SIUC)

I love rumors - say the silliest thing and someone will not only believe it, they'll help pass it along. And if it comes over the Internet, it has to be true, right? Rumors get started for a variety of reasons, and we pass them along like they were gospel and we got it from the mouth of God Himself.

I admit to starting a few rumors myself. Aboard a Navy ship, we often had a plethora of time on our hands and a paucity of things to do. So in an idle moment, one of us would spin a yarn and sit back and see how far it would go. If it got all the way to the skipper and he felt compelled to dispel the rumor over the ship's public address system, why that was the Stanley Cup of the rumor mill.

Take the terrorist attack on our country - the rumor mill has been running over time with that one. One of the best is the so-called Nostradamus prediction of the World Trade Center attack. The quatrain goes like this: "In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb, the third big war will begin when the big city is burning." The email attributes this to Nostradamus in 1654. Pretty good for a guy who had been dead for 98 years.

Actually, except for the last sentence, the entire quatrain was written in 1997 by a Canadian college student for a critical analysis he did of Nostradamus. His intent was to write a vague prophecy and show how it could be made to fit several scenarios, none of which involved airliners or skyscrapers. Later variations of this hoax have been changed to better fit the event.

One that my daughter brought home from school involved all of us going out on our front lawns the night of September 14 with lighted candles, and NASA was going to photograph the candlelit U.S. from a satellite. There was a movement to get everyone to go out that evening with a candle to honor the victims of the terrorist attack, but NASA had no plans to photograph it. While such a photograph would have turned up quite few streetlights, I doubt the candles would have shown up. Apparently someone thought a little incentive was needed to get us all out there with our candles.

Finally, one we would hope would be a rumor but is true. On the September 13 broadcast of the 700 Club, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson put part of the blame for the attack on the ACLU, feminists, gays, lesbians, abortion rights supporters and the Supreme Court. These groups pissed God off so He let the bad guys get in the cockpits to punish us. The only rumors here are that Falwell didn't mean to blame anyone and Robertson misunderstood what he said.

And Falwell and Robertson tried starting those rumors themselves.