The rumor busters

At Snopes.com, Barbara and David Mikkelson debunk conspiracies and quash urban legends. Since Sept. 11, they've never been busier.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Oct. 31, 2001 | Osama bin Laden owns Snapple.

Ironing your mail will kill any deadly anthrax spores lurking inside.

And women who want to fight terrorism should strip off their clothes and run around naked outside.

Since Sept. 11, these are just a few of the more absurd rumors and half-truths that have circulated widely in e-mail, threatening to turn the United States into a nation of naked, Snapple-boycotting women brandishing hot irons at postal workers.

But between our fractured psyches, wracked by a full-blown case of the heebie-jeebies, and all-out social chaos, stands one skeptical Los Angeles wife and husband and their trusty Web site.

Two of the Net's most trusted hoax-busters are Barbara Mikkelson, 42, and David Mikkelson, 41, who run Snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages. Part research librarians, part gumshoes, the couple have turned their shared hobby into a public service, verifying or debunking stories that sound too good to be true.

Barbara and David met on the Net in a Usenet discussion group about urban legends, and have been publishing their truth-serum site for six years. After Sept. 11 they saw their traffic increase tenfold, as fears and theories about terrorism and war exploded exponentially.

Barbara told us what the lies, hoaxes and urban legends born of the terrorist attacks tell us about the terror in our heads.

What was the first hoax to come out of Sept.11?

The first one was up and running on that day and it was the Nostradamus prediction.

This one really grabbed people because what happened was horribly unbelievable and unthinkable. And it's normal in times like this that people try to look to their religion, and also to the occult, to try to find some clue that perhaps they missed that would have shown this was going to happen.

As strange as it must sound, it's far more comforting to believe that death, destruction and horror were predicted and were foreseeable than it is to coexist with the knowledge that such things can't be foreseen; that they could happen anytime.

So, folks were quite horrified by the supposed Nostradamus prophecy, because it appeared to be an accurate representation of what had happened on Sept. 11. The implicit message was: If only we'd known, if only we'd paid attention. And of course the thing was a hoax.

How did you find out it was a hoax?

The first thing I did is I went looking in the various online repositories of Nostradamus' writings. [And I found out that] it came off of a Web essay written by a Canadian university student, who wrote it when he was in high school. This was an essay that showed how anybody could put together an authentic-sounding Nostradamus quatrain, in that you just use a lot of important image-laden words. He went on from there to deconstruct his creation to prove exactly how vague it was and how it could be applied to anything, anytime.

On Sept. 11, people started playing mix and match with it. They started inserting lines, sometimes from real Nostradamus quatrains -- create your own prophecy of doom -- until they had something quite accurate about two silver birds and twin brothers and city of York.

Next page: Tales of the accidental tourist -- a last-second snapshot of our hopes and fears