Fact Vs. Fiction: Urban Legends Prey on Our Fears

Will outdated pancake mix kill you? For that matter, if you freeze a bottle of water, will the chemicals in the plastic turn toxic?

Those are two urban legends again making the rounds on the Internet. Snopes.com, a reliable go-to source for uncovering truth and myth, along with Johns Hopkins, say no to the plastic bottle e-mails.

Snopes says mostly no to the pancake mix scare, but in this one there is validity if you are allergic to food molds — which you would likely know before you eat funny-tasting pancakes from a very old mix.

Both e-mails are making the rounds in various rewrites and both recently turned up in calls to the Sun Herald’s Sound Off line.

Urban legends have existed for eons. Surely you remember the one about Dead Man’s Curve in your hometown because most communities have a variation of it, or the water-skiing kid who fell into a nest of deadly cottonmouths in Bayou (you fill in the blank).

The difference in the 21st century is the Internet and e-mail make the storytelling fast and believable. The sheer number seems to add legitimacy to hoaxes, urban legends and what used to be called chain letters.

Some e-mails are created by deliberate scammers out to make (unproven, questionable, downright wrong) points about a product or person. Others are perpetuated by genuine concern to get the word out — even if the information is questionable. That’s the case in many health scares that turn out to be untrue or only partly true.

"If you think of it from a cultural point of view, every generation has a sense of unease and the Internet allows that to proliferate," said Ann Marie Kinnell, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

"It’s caused by the ease of transferring information quickly to a lot of people combined with the general unease of our society about our safety, our children’s safety, the safety of food and finances. So these e-mails get a hook on us and we pass it along to others, because it’s so easy."

Kinnell compares the phenomenon with chain letters that used to promise all kinds of things from wealth to health and love — and the opposite if you didn’t send them.

"But now you don’t have to write on paper, address envelopes and go to the post office," she said. "These sorts of modern chain letters can build on a sense of unease — ‘If I don’t send to 10 of my friends, something bad will happen to me.’

"For the ones that may touch on genuine health and safety concerns, even if you aren’t certain, you still push a button and send it to 50 of your best friends — just in case."

Some e-mails play on gullibility; others ooze legitimacy to the uninformed. Also, people realize there are real scares, such as the tomatoes causing salmonella this week, so when another health scare circulates, e-mail users take note.

Kinnell’s husband is a computer data analyst, so she understands how the forwarding of untold numbers of urban legends and chain letters can junk up cyberspace.

"But it’s not going to stop," Kinnell said. "As soon as one computer tech figures out how to stop spam, another person has found a way around it. The best thing to do is not pass it on, or at least check it out before you do on Snopes.com or BreakTheChain.org or some other reputable site that debunks or confirms Internet rumors."