Obtained from: http://www.csicop.org/hoaxwatch/ and http://purportal.com/

September 20, 2001

The terrorist attacks in Manhattan, Washington, DC and the Pittsburgh area constitute the most tragic and violent events ever perpetrated in the United States. As with other tragedies, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and other forms of misinformation crop up almost immediately, playing on people's hopes, fears, and appetite for amazing tales. E-mail has multiplied the speed and extent to which hoaxes, rumors and urban legends spread.

CSICOP extends its sincere condolences to the victims and their families: they are in our thoughts.

—Kevin Christopher, Public Relations Director, CSICOP

Charity Scams

September 18, 2001
Charity scams are without a doubt the most reprehensible form of misinformation circulating in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Quoted in a Friday, September 14, story on CNN.com, Margie Arbon, manager of market and business development for Mail-Abuse Prevention Systems (MAPS), an organization that fights e-mail spamming, and Phil Zepeda, director of online media at the Red Cross, both warn of unsolicited bulk e-mail scams that take of advantage of the public's desire to help victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks and their families.

The fraudulent e-mail messages use several different tactics. Some messages claim to be part of a relief fund or survivor funds, according to John Mozena, a member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). Some messages claim to link to the Red Cross Web site but actually link to an unrelated site.

In her article for CNN.com, writer Sharon Gaudin provides the following advice from representatives of MAPS and CAUCE:

Go directly to the Web site of the organization you want to donate to. The Red Cross' Web site is www.redcross.org.
If you don't know the organization or the person who solicited you, stay away from it.
Keep in mind that, generally, no legitimate relief organization solicits for donations through bulk e-mail.
If you do click on any link to make a donation, examine the URL shown in the browser to make sure you are where you think you are.
Much of this advice also applies to telephone solicitations. Never give your credit card number out over the phone. The Better Business Bureau provides information about the precautions you should take before donating to any charitable organization. By no means should you be discouraged from giving, but your contributions should come from both your heart and your head.

For more information on e-mail charity scams go to the following Web sites:

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE): This organization's press release in the wake of the terrorist attacks is extremely informative and the site also provides several other resources useful for citizens trying to trace and report their spam.

Nostradamus

September 18, 2001
Almost immediately after terrorists attacks, the after-the-fact prophesizing had begun. Fabricated quatrains attributed to Nostradamus and alleged to have foretold the destruction of the World Trade Center are circulating all over the Internet. John Hogue, who describes himself as a "'Rogue' scholar, [and] world authority on Nostradamus and the prophetic traditions of the world" has set himself to the task of poring over the real verses of the French seer to make a connection with the terrorist attacks and the obscure quatrains. (See www.hogueprophecy.com.)

Before getting into the issue of the fake quatrains of Nostradamus, it should be made clear that even the real quatrains have no prophetic powers whatsoever. Nostradamus' verses are flowery and vague enough to apply to just about any event past, present, or future. All it takes is a little skill at metaphors, allegories and obscure symbolism—along with a healthy dose of distortion—to tease out connections to great wars, tragedies and other events. Incidentally, wherever Nostradamus has been specific, he's turned out to be a lousy prophet.

As for the fake verses attributed to Nostradamus that now circulate on e-mail and the Internet, one is claimed to be a 1654 quatrain of Nostradamus predicting that World War III would begin with the fall of "two brothers," an alleged reference to the destroyed World Trade Center towers. The verses read thus:

"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"

Nostradamus 1654

The date attributed to the verses is itself a dead giveaway, since Nostradamus died in 1566. the quatrain actually originates from a 1990s paper written by Neil Marshall, a student from Brock University in Canada. Ironically, Marshall crafted the verses to demonstrate how any obscure verse can be interpreted to fit just about any historical event. A similar experiment was reported in the May/June 2001 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, "The Antinous Prophecies," in which author Clifford Pickover created nonsensical poems and presented them as recently discovered prophecies. Many people created elaborate, real-world interpretations of the fictional lines. Pickover termed the prophecies "verbal ink blots" which rely on modern readers to easily interpret vague descriptions.

The following is another example of the e-mailed prophecies:

"Two steel birds will fall from the sky on the Metropolis.
The sky will burn at forty-five degrees latitude.
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up.
Within months, rivers will flow with blood.
The undead will roam the earth for little time."

Much was made of the second line, as New York City (the putative Metropolis), lies at about 40 degrees north latitude-though not 45. This piece is a hybrid of actual Nostradamus verse and fiction, though the author was sloppy and even a glimmer of skepticism betrays this as a fraud. It lacks the usual quatrain form, and steel was not widely used until nearly 200 years after Nostradamus died.

For more information on Nostradamus' quatrains go to the Web site snopes.com, an informative clearinghouse of urban legends, scams and other menaces to public information.

Coincidences

September 20, 2001
This is the text of an e-mail claiming amazing coincidences among the date, buildings, planes and other circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks.

It's very strange, maybe a coincidence maybe not.
The date of the attack: 9/11 - 9 + 1 + 1 = 11
September 11th is the 254th day of the year: 2 + 5 + 4 = 11
After September 11th there are 111 days left to the end of the year.
119 is the area code to Iraq/Iran. 1 + 1 + 9 = 11
Twin Towers - standing side by side, looks like the number 11
The first plane to hit the towers was Flight 11
I Have More.......
State of New York - The 11 State added to the Union
New York City - 11 Letters
Afghanistan - 11 Letters
The Pentagon - 11 Letters
Ramzi Yousef - 11 Letters (convicted or orchestrating the attack on the WTC in 1993)
Flight 11 - 92 on board - 9 + 2 = 11
Flight 77 - 65 on board - 6 + 5 = 11

Conspicuously missing from this litany of coincidences involving the number 11 are: "Osama bin Laden" (13 Letters); "World Trade Center" (16 Letters) "Al-Qaeda" (the name of bin Laden's terrorist organization: 7 Letters); "The United States (15 Letters); and "(The) Taliban" (7 or 10 Letters, depending on how you dice it). According to CSICOP Senior Research Fellow, Joe Nickell, this is a case of "picking the hits and ignoring the misses," a practice common to those who hunt for prophetic coincidences.

People tend to be extremely poor judges of probability when it comes to coincidences. An excellent article by Bruce Martin in the September/October 1998 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, titled Coincidences: Remarkable or Random?, deals with what seem to be striking coincidences between assassinated U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the likelihood of any two people sharing the same birthday, and other seemingly improbable phenomena.

Strange Images

September 21, 2001
A few photographs taken by news photographers and amateurs have been touted as containing images of everything from Satan to UFOs. Claims of this sort are circulating from around the world. For example, the image shown below—forwarded to CSICOP by the Argentinian skeptics society, C.A.I.R.P.—alleges in its caption that it shows the disk of a UFO next to the flaming World Trade Center towers. It is, in fact, an unidentified object—perhaps a dust particle on the lens of the camera, or a distant aircraft—but the suggestion that the object captured in this image (hardly bigger than the pixel resolution of the picture) is an Unidentified Flying Object of the alien variety must be rejected, given this poor sort of evidence. It is unfortunate that these sorts of idle claims are made, since they trivialize the disaster.

Others see images of the Satan or some demon in pictures of smoke billowing from the doomed New York towers. These images are, in fact, examples of "simulacra" (singular "simulacrum")--a Latin term which means likeness. It is the same effect that leads people to believe that they see a face in the knot of a tree or an animal in the shape of clouds. The human brain is constantly searching for meaningful visual patterns: it's a survival skill. Unfortunately it often convinces us that it sees "something" in an object that is essentially random, as in the billowing smoke in these photographs.

Other Misinformation

September 19, 2001
One story circulating by e-mail is the allegation that CNN used 1991 footage of celebrating Palestinians in its September 11th, 2001, coverage reporting that some inhabitants of East Jerusalem were partying in the streets immediately after the terrorist attacks.

In fact, the footage shown to CNN viewers and the reports themselves are both current, and corroborated by many other news organizations. The best follow-up research and documentation on this e-mail rumor is available at www.snopes.com.

The first few lines of the indignant e-mail accusing CNN of using old stock footage reads:

All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors, and one of them - as you well know - is CNN. Very well, I guess all of you have been seeing (just as I've been) images from this company. In particular, one set of images called my attencion: the Palestinians celebrating the bombing, out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera. Well, THOSE IMAGES WERE SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait! It's simply unacceptable that a super-power of cumminications as CNN uses images which do not correspond to the reality in talking about so serious an issue.
In a nutshell, the scoop from www.snopes.com is this: To begin with, the claim that CNN used old footage obscures the real issue of whether the September 11, 2001, reports from the Palestinian territories are true. Reuters, the LA Times and Fox News all corroborate the reports. Furthermore, the footage, was in fact shot in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to www.snopes.com:

Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video footage used on CNN was in fact shot Tuesday in East Jerusalem by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91—a fact proved by its inclusion of comments from a Palestinian praising Osama Bin Laden, whose name was unlikely to have come up ten years earlier in connection with the invasion and liberation of Kuwait.
It is possible that the bogus e-mail was inspired by the fact that CNN and other television news organizations had reported an unsubstantiated claim of responsibility from a group called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine while the attacks were in progress.

Another interesting apocryphal tale is that of the firefighter, or officeworker, or policeman who managed to survive the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers by surfing his way down among the falling debris. This alleged lucky man fell from either the 71st, or the 82nd, or the 92nd floor of either World Trade Center One or World Trade Center Two.

The story, to put it gently, extremely improbable. The writers at www.snopes.com attribute its inspiration to a gesture of hope in the face of the certain disaster that befell most of those trapped in the collapse. They also point to a real-life story in the September 13, 2001, New York Times which might have inspired the the urban legend. The article, written by Dexter Filkins, relates how "It happened when Sgt. John McLoughlin, a 21-year veteran of the Port Authority police, was pulled alive from the mountains of rubble, having survived for nearly 24 hours after the south tower collapsed around him." The sergeant was outside securing the Trade Center when it fell. Filkin quotes Port Authority Battalion Chief Gary: "It's wonderful. "None of us can imagine how he survived."

Fonts & Fools

September 21, 2001
One of the more idiotic genres of e-mail hoaxes circulating is the "False Flight Number in Wingdings Font for Your Anti-Semitic Rebus Puzzle of the Day." A typical version of this e-mail reads:

If you have MS Word, type in capital letters Q33 NY (the flight number of one of the airplanes that crashed into the WTC).
Then, change font size to 26 and change the font to Wingdings of what you just typed.

Rebus or not, "Q33NY" is not the number of any flight that was hijacked and crashed on 9/11/01. The actual flight numbers were AA11, AA77, UA93, and UA175.

This e-mail appears to be very widespread: CSICOP has received reports of this e-mail from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, and the UK - in addition to the United States. Thanks to Derek Bauer, Alberto Lentati, Dr. Leighton Pritchard, Hartmut Samtleben and others for reporting this e-mail hoax.

Links

Here is a list of useful links to Web sites that provide accurate and useful information on scams, hoaxes and other bogus claims:

The Better Business Bureau's Web site provides a "Giving: Consumer Information" page with precautions you should take before donating to any charitable organization.

The Central Iowa Skeptics, headed by Rob Beeston has an informative Web page devoted to misinformation in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

The Skeptics Dictionary is an excellent, easily searchable source for information on a wide variety of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.

On their Web site, www.snopes.com, Barbara and David P. Mikkelson have been doing yeomen's work in keeping track of the various claims circulating on by e-mail and Internet. Their research into the claim of CNN using old footage and various other rumors is impressive.

Handy and Edifying Links from http://purportal.com

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