I was doing my shift at a catering company at Manchester Airport…from the moment the issue of flight cancellations occured, the biggest issue was which flights would go tomorrow. Sorry to say it, but it was business as usual from minute one.
I only saw the TV pictures some hours later, when meeting friends in a pub. And yes, it freaked me out, but I also thought “well that’s what it WOULD look like”. guess it hadn’t sunk in entirely.
the great zamboni, vix is safely down south with fellow doper sua.
Yeah, vix was in the lobby of WTC2 when the plane hit it, and she walked out safe and sound, thank Goddess. The SDMB community was on edge until we finally got word of her safety.
http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/rather.html
FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), a media watchdog group, got all over Dan Rather’s case for reporting the “bomb outside the State Department.” And Rather didn’t even retract the story after it was known to have been false! Another spurious report from that day, you might remember, was two guys arrested under the George Washington Bridge with explosives. There were no two guys under the bridge and no explosives. Or, if there were… was it hushed up!!! Nah.
I was rereading the as-it-happens 9/11 thread on another message board, and one of my neighbors here in Northern Virginia kept asking over and over about that plane that was said to be circling Dulles Airport. It really had us spooked around here. Then between 11:00 and noon the word came that all flights were accounted for. So maybe there was no plane circling Dulles and we were getting scared for nothing. Or was there…? I don’t know how I’ll ever find out for sure. I still wonder about it.
Reading about this question on other message boards, I came across someone’s theory that the rogue plane reported over Dulles “was” actually Flight 93, which was known to have been hijacked and heading toward Washington. Feverish speculation was rife once this became known. Someone voiced aloud that it was getting near Camp David — presto, next thing you know, the media report rumors of a crash at Camp David. Someone else hears “Washington,” thinks “Dulles,” and starts to speculate the plane is headed for Dulles. Next thing you know, the media report rumors of a hijacked plane above Dulles.
Very curious how in the heat of the moment these wild speculations are rapidly transformed into rumors that actually get reported on the news. As “news.”
One of the more troubling parts of that day on the SDMB was that someone–who probably meant well, I’m sure–actually started a eulogy thread for her after we hadn’t heard from her in a few hours. Mercifully, the mods removed it.
Ugh, that still gives me the creeps.
I live in Dearborn, MI, which has ~30,000 Arab-Americans living there as well, so on 9/11, the rumors were out of control.
I was working for the local newspaper at the time, so by about 10 a.m., we were bombarded with phone calls from all over the country because people were hearing about riots in Dearborn. People had heard there was an Islamic uprising, and the police were no match for the rioters.
My mom, who lives across the state, heard there were thousands dead in Dearborn, so she spent all morning trying to get ahold of me, but couldn’t get through. When she finally did, she was in hysterics, thinking I was out covering the “riots.”
ABC News called us, too, because they had gotten wind of these “riots.” Someone called and heard there were 100,000+ people dead :rolleyes:
At lunch, I went for a drive to see what kind of activity was happening in the city’s south end (the center of the Arab-American population)-- the streets were eerily quiet-- but the local news radio station was reproting “significant activity” in Dearborn. They even reported that Dearborn students had all been sent home for the day-- which was true, because the teachers were having an inservice and it was a previously scheduled half-day.
At the end of the day, the only “situations” to arise in Dearborn were: 1) Two rednecks were arrested for walking the streets with baseball bats because the wanted to “crack some Arabs,” and 2) A man in California sent a threatening email to a number of Arab-American organizations. He was arrested and sentenced to community service working with one of the organizations. He was very remorseful, saying the email was sent in the heat of the moment, and ended up enjoying the community service work very much.
Jomo Mojo, that is a great piece of history. You should try and hold on to a hard copy and also an electronic copy. I worry that in the furure it will be harder to do historical research because so much of the web is transient.
One of the WAG news reports I remember hearing while the attacks were happening was that Islamic Jihad had claimed responsibility. Now if I was a conspiracy theorist…
One of the stories flying about that morning was that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had claimed responsibility. This was an out-and-out hoax. The PFLP denied that they had made any such claim as soon as they heard about this. There have also been stories that false bomb threats were phoned in around the Cleveland airport and other places, just to generate confusion and throw off the responders from being able to track what was really going on with the plane hijacks. I have never seen any followup on these alleged bomb calls. There should exist recordings of them if they were really made.
To sum up observations by several previous posters, there seem to be two factors at work here.
First is the way it is about inevitable that weird rumors will be generated whenever there is a sudden, unexpected distaster.
After the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, it is said, it was widely believed there that New York City had been engulfed in a tidal wave. It was also widely rumored that animals had broken free in the zoo and were attacking people on the streets.
There was a historic tornado in St. Louis in the late 1920s. After the tornado passed through midtown and all was calm, my aunt was standing out on the street near her high school waiting to take a streetcar home. She ran into her father, who was himself a streetcar employee. He was carrying a shovel. He had taken off from work to help dig her out; Rosati-Kain High School had been untouched, but it was rumored all around town that it was just a pile of rubble.
The second factor is the faith the public puts in the news media, even as the mania to be first with the news impairs the ability of reporters to report accurately.
I didn’t remember the story about the State Department bomb. I do recall, though, there was a story about an airliner in Canada having been forced to the ground which was believed to be in the control of hijackers. I heard that once, and never again. That afternoon I tried going to the public library in Clayton, Missouri, the seat of St. Louis County. It was closed and the staff were all gathered across the street. Someone thought a bag of some kind looked suspicious, and the bomb squad had been called. I expect a considerable list could be compiled of similar panic reactions around the country that day.
While we would like to think that reporters, as supposedly trained observors, would be less susceptable to rumors and panic, it often seems that the reverse is true.
On the day Reagan was shot I was working a job where I was taking short trips in my car continually. For a while, each time I turned on the radio I heard reporters retracting or contradicting information from the last report I had heard. It was said that Reagan had been shot at but not hit. It was said that his attacker was in his 40s and spoke with a foreign accent. It was said that there had been a second gunman, and that he had been able to run away. At the time he was carrying a mysterious black box. I remember that last detail particularly because even when I heard it the story sounded like some garbled, confused rumor.
In a similar vein, in William Manchester’s book The Death of a President it is reported that shortly after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas a theater manager in Las Vegas announced to patrons that President Kennedy had been killed, and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor Connally and a Secret Service agent. The theater then proceeded with its scheduled movie.
I think perhaps I should add a note to this thread, being as how I was in a bus full of people facing the state department building when we heard on the news that there was a car-bomb at the state department.
First, some background. It was a school trip, we were about to take a tour of the FBI building (imagine if we were in there when it happened… eek!), buying fake watches and sunglasses, when suddenly people hear rumors of planes hitting the twin towers. Naturally, most people dismissed these as just rumors. As the cellphone calls kept coming in, the teachers knew something was wrong. We got herded up onto the bus and the bus driver was told to get the hell out of Washington, DC. I remember one of the teachers saying that it was only a small plane, and that not many people got hurt. Of course, in terms of rumors, the worst one was from the kids in the bus. Someone said something to the effect of “A plane crashed into one of the towers, and another plane tried to rescue them but crashed into the other tower!” Riiight…
So now back to the topic at hand. We turn on the news to the first channel we find on the radio. Peter Jennings is on the air. Now let me tell you that hearing Peter Jenning’s voice in a time of danger and chaos is NOT my idea of comforting. He was talking about this being the spark of World War III, and other stuff. Again, I digress. We heard stories about there being a car-bomb in the state department building. I look out the window at… guess what? The state department building. No fires. Nothing. Just a load of crock. Of course we also heard the rest of the rumors, believing many of them until the truth was actually understood. We saw the pentagon flaming and smoking while crossing the bridge out of DC. I remember that the roads were so clogged that cops were driving their cars half-on and half-off the sidewalk. One clear memory of mine was the Police outside all the roadblocks along the way with automatic rifles and MP5s. Was one hell of a day for a group of kids on a school trip to Washington, DC.
Just a memory. 