By Stephanie Richards
Astonished by Tuesday''s attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, BYU students and people throughout the world have turned to urban legends for comfort and support.
One rumor quickly spreading through campus by word-of-mouth and mass e-mails states that 40 BYU interns working at the World Trade Center went out to dinner Monday night for Family Home Evening and got food poisoning.
Consequently, none of the interns were in the towers when they were attacked.
Scott Dunaway, head of the Washington Seminar, denied this story saying no BYU interns work in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
'The rumors are all false,' Dunaway said.
However, Charlotte Monson, a Washington Seminar administrator, confirmed the story that 17 interns in the Washington Seminar program woke up Tuesday morning with the flu and did not go into work.
'The flu was going around the program earlier in the week and several woke up sick Tuesday morning,' Monson said. 'It made it easier for us to reach them and they did not have to worry about fighting the traffic downtown,' Monson said.
There are currently 36 interns in the Washington Seminar working in a building across the street from the Pentagon.
Furthermore, a mass e-mail titled Testimony Builder has been circulated around many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The e-mail claimed that a three to four zone conference was scheduled to be in the World Trade Center towers at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
Supposedly, every single missionary had problems getting to the meeting, either not waking up on time or experiencing transportation problems, the e-mail said.
According to the e-mail, even the mission president was stuck in traffic for more than an hour and did not make it to the meeting on time.
The only missionaries not accounted for were the APs who showed up three hours later. They had arrived at the towers'' rubble to make sure no missionaries were there.
Sister Money, the New York City South, New York mission secretary said, 'it is a nice story, but unfortunately it is not true.'
All of the missionaries in New York City are safe and busy teaching, she said.
'We are grateful to share the gospel and the knowledge that we have that Christ is at the helm,' Sister Money said. 'We are comforted to know and to share about life after death.'
Also, people throughout the world have turned to the prophecies of Nostradamus, a 16th Century French physician and astrologer.
One version of the prophecy states:
'In the year of the new century and nine months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror...The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city.'
The second verse of the prophecy says:
'In the City of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.'
Three books about Nostradamus made it on the tope five best sellers on the Amazon.com and many stores throughout Utah such as Barnes and Nobles, Sam Weller''s and Borders quickly sold out of their copies, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Both Google and the Lycos search sites reported that Nostradamus was included in Tuesday''s top ten searches.
However, Nostradamus never made those predictions.
Most versions of the e-mails say that Nostradamus made the predications in 1654, but Nostradamus died in 1566.
According to the USA Today''s Web site, Stephen O''Leary, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, who studies Nostradamus said, 'Finding an event predicted in prophecy gives people some kind of comfort, as if there is more order.'
Nostradamus'' prophecies were drawn from the web page authored by Neil Marshal, a Canadian student, according to urbanlegends.com.
'I have found that a lot of humans like to trust emotion and superstition rather than logic and common sense,' said Marshal on his Web page. 'Sometimes our imaginations seem to keep high above what is truly the case.'
As the prophecies started to spread throughout cyber space people began to add their own versions.