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On Monday, buildings throughout Manhattan’s financial district were evacuated, emergency responders were inundated with panicked phone calls, and one pregnant woman had to go to the hospital after a Boeing 747 apparently chased by a F-16 jet flew less than 1500 feet above the city’s sky-line.
Federal officials had an inkling that the stunt may cause “public concern,” but that didn’t stop them from going ahead with their plans to buzz traumatized Lower Manhattan. But the incident – and the sound raking over the coals the feds have taken in its wake – put us in mind of other “innocent” ideas that prompted fierce and quick mass hysteria. Here are some recent examples.
Holy Hand Grenade evacuates city block
In March, London Police evacuated several buildings, including a pub, in an East London neighborhood after water company workers discovered a suspicious-looking device under a manhole cover.
The suspicious-looking device? A replica of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, it was painted gold and said “Holy Hand Grenade” on it. Yes, it was just like the one used in the movie to slay the vicious killer rabbit (“It’s got fangs!”). And yes, it shut down a Shoreditch block for nearly an hour as police tried to figure out if it was dangerous.
Police confirmed that the unknown object was indeed a Holy Hand Grenade, but there’s no word on whether the Holy Pin was still intact.
Cartoon ads bring Boston to standstill
It must have seemed like a pretty great gig for two video and light artists not long out of college: Employed by a marketing company, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, got to instigate a guerilla marketing campaign to advertise a cult cartoon on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
In January 2007, the duo was hired to put up battery-operated LED-light up boards featuring the Mooninites, characters from the show. The little light-up Mooninites, each one frowning and exuberantly wagging a middle finger, were placed in slyly visible places – like under bridges.
At night, the light-up images were clearly, if cheekily discernible; during the day, however, the black boxes and electronic wiring prompted multiple bomb scares, completely shutting down bridges all around Boston, a portion of the Red Line (incidentally, my main ride from my office to home), as well as portions of the Charles River. Of course, when police and bomb squads finally got a hold of the devices, rather than a nefarious plot to bring Boston down, all they got was the middle finger.
Boston didn’t find the whole situation nearly as funny as everyone else in the world did, and Berdovsky and Stevens were arrested. Mayor Thomas Menino said, responding to questions from reporters about the role of Turner Broadcasting, the company that essentially owned Aqua Teen hunger Force, in the debacle, “I just think this is outrageous, what they’ve done … It’s all about corporate greed.” Police Commissioner Ed Davis decried the stunt as “unconscionable” and “a foolish prank.” A police spokeswoman called the incident “a colossal waste of money.”
Nor were they amused when, during a press conference following their arrest, the two merry pranksters refused to answer questions and instead talked about hair.
It was all incredibly embarrassing for Boston – especially as it turned out that the devices had already been in place for two to three weeks without anyone noticing or crying “homeland security threat.” The lite-brite style boards had also been in place in some nine other cities, without prompting the same fierce hysteria.
In the end, Turner Broadcasting, the media corporation that owns Cartoon Network and was thus responsible for the ridiculousness, paid $2 million in restitution to Boston for the inconvenience. Prosecutors ultimately dropped criminal charges against Berdovsky and Stevens, though the pair had to perform 80 and 60 hours of community service respectively and issue a public apology.
College student arrested in circuit-board airport scare
Still smarting from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force scare, Boston authorities jumped the gun again when an MIT sophomore went to Boston Logan Airport on September 21, 2007, with a circuit board attached to her sweatshirt. MIT students do weird, weird things with “fashion” all the time, but Star Simpson, class of 2010, may have wandered a bit too far from Cambridge that day – she was arrested by Logan officers and charged with possession of a “hoax device.”
The homemade circuit board, which was attached to a 9-volt battery, featured green LEDs in the shape of a star. Simpson later told authorities that she had gone to the airport to pick up her boyfriend and said that she had approached an airport employee to ask which baggage claim to head to; State Police and MassPort authorities said Simpson was found by MassPort security roaming around the terminal and that she refused to say anything other than the LED board was “a piece of art.”
The situation was further complicated by the fact that Simpson was carrying five or six canisters of Play-Doh in her hands, which, State Police said at the time, could have been mistaken for plastic explosives. Simpson was confronted outside the Terminal, where she complied with officers’ demands. “Thankfully, because she followed instructions as was required, she ended up in a cell as opposed to the morgue,” commented a State Police spokesman at a press conference following the incident. “Had she not followed instructions, deadly force may have been used.”
Simpson was later sentenced to 50 hours community service and required to write a letter of apology for her actions. (One year later, BoingBoing interviewed Simpson.)
Beware all cylindrical objects
Back on April 22, a “suspicious package” left on a counter shut down Bank of America in Columbia, South Carolina. Bank employees phoned the police, who ordered an evacuation of the building and then evidently called every authority they could, from the fire department to local Homeland Security.
The “suspicious package” was a burrito. Police have no clues as to who may have left the burrito and news reports did not indicate what kind of filling was involved.
This was also not the first time a burrito has prompted terror, evacuations, and, dare we say it, mass hysteria. In 2005, a student at Marshall Junior High School in Clovis, New Mexico, was spotted carrying a two-and-a-half-foot long cylindrical object wrapped in tinfoil. It was only after school officials called in the cops, who shut down the street and kept the place covered with armed officers on nearby rooftops, that they found out the object was a burrito. The student had made it for extra credit.
Moving on, April was evidently a big month for cylindrical objects wreaking havoc across the nation. The Sheriff’s Office of Washington County, Oregon, was forced to issue a somewhat contrite press release on April 12 after they went full-tilt after a suspicious package found right outside the Sheriff’s Office front door. The Sheriff called into the Portland Police Bomb Squad and their bomb robot to investigate the package, which appeared to be a brown canvas bag containing a cylindrical, silver-colored object.
In this case, the cylindrical object was, in fact, a titanium prosthetic leg. And, as with the burrito, the owner of the leg remains unknown.
And finally, in a story that marries both national paranoia and the abysmal economy, fire department officials closed a street in San Diego and evacuated all the buildings on it after another suspicious cylindrical object was found in front of a business on April 23. The business was a pharmaceutical company that had recently laid off a number of employees, employees who were now angry and potentially seeking retribution. This situation, however, was nothing so dramatic. The object turned out to be… an empty cardboard tube.
Each of those examples has occurred in what authorities and the news media call the “post-9/11” world, a world currently dominated by a certain amount of righteous and somewhat justified paranoia. But hearkening back to a more innocent day, there have been more than a few incidents of mass hysteria – the granddaddy of them all, of course, being the famous War of the Worlds debacle, in which Orson Welles managed to convince scads of listeners that the world was in fact being invaded by aliens.
Any other incidents of mistaken intentions causing mass hysteria that come to mind?
Comments (26)
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Aqua Teen rules, but the Mooninites are not my favorite characters. Now Lite-Brite representations of Carl, that would have been sweet!
ReCaptcha: bazaar coiffure
posted by My Name Is... on 4-30-2009 at 1:09 pm
not to be forgotten MIT had another bomb scare this past weekend. When a cement block in the shape of a cartoon bomb was found outside a dorm. The people responsible had notified the campus police before putting the cement bomb out. It was used to promote a dance at the dorm. None the less the next day there was cambridge police trying difuse a cement brick.
click on my website to view and article
posted by capecoddan on 4-30-2009 at 2:24 pm
A couple years ago there was a scare at a BofA branch somewhere on the East Coast because of a fax they received. I don’t remember the specifics but it was a promotion from HQ about mortgage rates and bombs or something… the employees at the branch apparently didn’t read the whole fax and thought it was a bomb threat.
posted by Sarah in CA on 4-30-2009 at 2:41 pm
Random comment… My name is:
I had that same exact recaptcha one day!
I thought we were suppose to be saving some literature here?!
posted by Chrystani on 4-30-2009 at 2:43 pm
Mass Hysteria? How about “Swine Flu”? Over 5000 Mexicans die of regular flu every year – this one has only claimed 150.
posted by wee willie on 4-30-2009 at 2:50 pm
During the anthrax scare of 2001, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had to have a press conference to say that guacamole is not anthrax, and is in fact good for you.
posted by Chicago ExPat on 4-30-2009 at 4:16 pm
The University of Oklahoma locked down the entire campus on a rainy day last year because someone was carrying a “gun” into the gym. It turned out to either be an umbrella or a yoga mat.
posted by Lizzie on 4-30-2009 at 4:35 pm
Although fictional, the turkey promo on WKRP in Cincinatti definitely fits the category. The promo was to drop live turkeys from a helicopter at a shopping mall on Thanksgiving. However, as Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson noted after the hysteria … “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
posted by Johnny2Kings on 4-30-2009 at 5:09 pm
I heard the Holy Hand Grenade caused traffic jams for five–wait, no—three hours.
posted by Michael on 4-30-2009 at 5:27 pm
It’s so easy to laugh at these places(even I almost did it, despite having lived near Boston for the Aqua Teen scare), but if you think about it, would you rather have people get into a tizzy over nothing, or be nonchalant about something that winds up being serious?
posted by scamps on 4-30-2009 at 5:28 pm
Ahh, I remember the Lite Brite scare. And as far as the “circuit board fashion” goes, anyone living in Mass should know that MIT kids are a little, well… off.
posted by Cassie on 4-30-2009 at 5:29 pm
Okay, this isn’t exactly mass hysteria, but the bomb squad blew up a suspicious box in front of the school where I work one time…which turned out to be Arby’s coupons delivered for the softball team.
posted by Fruppi on 4-30-2009 at 6:39 pm
I remember hearing something about a bomb scare at a college because a student had a sticker for the band “This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb” on his actual bike.
posted by Lisa on 5-1-2009 at 5:12 am
Back in the late ’90s I was staying in a hotel in NYC (perhaps ironically it was the Marriott World Trade Center). At any rate, at one point during my stay there was a banging on my door and one of New York’s finest informed me that I had 30 seconds to get shoes and a coat and get out. Apparently, while cleaning a guest room, a maid found a aluminum and glass canister filled with a neon green liquid. When I got downstairs the lobby was jammed with first responders (bomb squad, s.w.a.t., etc) All of us hotel guests were kept out of the building for hours until the situation was cleared up.
Turned out, the canister was full of green dishsoap, and the whole thing was part of some team building scavenger hunt being put on by microsoft.
posted by Doug on 5-1-2009 at 9:48 am
I have to agree, this whole swine flu thing is getting out of hand. People are panicking because the mass media is hyping this thing up. 300+ people have it WORLDWIDE. During normal flu season, that many people have the flu in the school where I teach.
p.s I love the burrito/cylindrical object stories. People can be so stupid.
posted by Jessi on 5-1-2009 at 9:53 am
Um . . . is referencing the turkey drop episode of WKRP some new internet meme to which I have beeen oblivious? 4th reference I’ve seen on comment boards in the last 2 days.
posted by EMStoveken on 5-1-2009 at 11:00 am
This was in my high school, pre 9/11 but post Columbine. We’re all in class and all of a sudden, the administration announces over the loud speaker they have found a “suspicious fox” in one of the boys bathrooms. (They meant to say box, but every student at that school will swear to you they said fox). We were all evacuated outside in February to the football field with no coats for about 2 hours. Then I guess they decided the box wasn’t THAT big, so they moved us into the gym and auditorium instead while the bomb squad took care of it. It turns out that the box was a gag gift for someone’s birthday and was in fact empty. I was in the gym when the principal announced they had “diffused the empty box.” We laughed her out of the room.
posted by Hastings on 5-1-2009 at 11:08 am
I can’t believe they still charged the girl with the circuit board. Possession of a “hoax device?” Does that cover cans of peanut brittle with those snakes in it? Or rubber dog poop? Did she not have a lawyer?
posted by Jim on 5-1-2009 at 11:27 am
Does the first reading of War of the Worlds count? Since they first landed in ‘Jersey, the real fear was that no one would be able to tell the aliens from the residents!
posted by Brian on 5-2-2009 at 10:22 pm
I remember once when a large section of the University of Georgia campus was shut down because of a “suspicious” package in a news bin. It was a brown paper bag filled with muffins. Muffins. Needless to say, the now had something more than donuts that they.
posted by Steve on 5-3-2009 at 12:57 pm
I was at OU (Ohio University, Athens, OH) when the “This Bike is a Pipe Bomb” scare happened. Closed down the whole green for a day, cancelled classes, brought out the bomb squad and dogs. It was hilarious.
posted by Cassie on 5-4-2009 at 4:37 pm
“O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy!”
posted by Cody on 10-22-2009 at 1:16 pm
We had a scare once at my dad’s art gallery, there was a briefcase left outside against the building. It was odd because it was kinda ragged looking and this was post 9/11 so everyone was very cautious. Turned out some neighborhood kids found it and left it behind.
The bomb squad came out and after x-raying or something, all was cleared. We were a little nervous, but no one was terrified.
What I remember most about the event was how brave those bomb squad men are, what balls!
I also rememeber the facial expressions on the kids faces when they came back to get their briefcase…
posted by graham on 10-22-2009 at 2:38 pm
I was in an airport a few years ago; I think it was Atlanta, when they sounded the announcement to evacuate the terminal. I was already sitting at the bar and had a full beer so I really didn’t want to leave. The bar tender was surprised that I didn’t move or seem slightly concerned. I asked “doesn’t this kind of thing happen all the time?” She said it a couple times a week but most people ran for the doors pushing girl scouts and old ladies out of there way. I told her my bag was heavy plus I hadn’t paid for my drinks yet.
The funny part was nearly every one at that bar had left without paying there tabs. And when they did let everyone back in 2 minuets later not a single person came back to make good on there bills. I was really disappointed in people that day, not only are most American’s way to paranoid buts here is a young girl working her way threw collage and an entire bar full of people jipped her out of tips just because they had an excuse too. I saw several people who had been sitting in that bar eating food or having a drink walk by, and you could see in there faces that were thinking about weather they should come back in and pay there bills or just take the free meal.
It’s not terrorist I’m scared of its other people hysteria and greed. The bar tender was so happy that I stayed and tipped her well to try and make up for some of the money she had lost due to cheap paranoid idiots that she gave me free drinks for the rest of my layover. The only problem was after all the free drinks I was so drunk they almost didn’t let me on my plane.
posted by chris on 10-23-2009 at 3:27 am
In her boingboing interview, Star Simpson says she wasn’t carrying any Play-Doh, let alone “five or six canisters in her hands”, which I can’t even visualize. She said she had a hardened clay rose that she had made, but that was it.
posted by Aaron on 10-23-2009 at 2:10 pm
The first time I went to New York, I was five. I went to FAO Schwartz where my mom bought me a toy Ghostbusters proton pack.
Turns out, when those things go through the airport scanner, they really look like bombs. At least the bomb squad thought so…and the SWAT team.
posted by Rob on 10-23-2009 at 2:13 pm