Here’s some of the whoppers I heard or read yesterday:
-2 planes crashed in Seattle
-A bomb exploded at the State Department
-A bomb exploded on Capitol Hill
-A plane crashed into Camp David
-There was a fire at Washington Memorial
-Riots in Detroit
There was a “blurb” thrown out there by the media before I went to bed that there was a van full of explosives on the GW Bridge in NY. Any confirmation or were these rumors too?
Oh and here is the sickest rumor . . .idiots calling into the Howard Stern Show and country stations saying that Palestinian-Americans are dancing ins the streets here in the U.S… One version has them in New York, the other in “Little Iraq” in Patterson, NJ.
And right now I’m chalking up the gasoline price gouging story as a rumor too.
The biggest one I heard was that gas production was going to be stopped, so “You better fill up your cars now!!” Local radio/TV tried to counteract it, but people still made a run on the gas stations. Of course, now many stations ARE out of gas until tomorrow when the trucks will get here.
There was some price gouging going on in my area, but it was with small, privately owned stations, and it was stopped before much damage was done.
– That the Mall in D.C. was on fire. Nothing specific, it was presented as if the Mall was entirely ablaze.
– That the White House was burning, via an announcement that there was smoke coming from one corner of it.
– That a total of 8 plans, not 4, were hijacked and at one point midafternoon, that one of the remaining 4 was heading toward D.C.
– That we, meaning our Air Force, shot down at least one of the planes, to prevent it crashing into a target. I was actually told this was confirmed, but have seen nothing myself on the news about it.
If I recall correctly, the Mall rumor was on TV and the White House one was on WPLJ here in New York. The 8 plane story came from several outlets but sort of faded away, and there was no follow-up that I’m aware of about the plane supposedly headed for D.C. The scariest part was when people around me started to wonder, “But what about the other four planes? Why won’t they say where they are or where they crashed?” No one on the news ever said, “By the way, it was only four planes, not eight,” so eventually most of us just started hoping it was pure rumor.