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Londoners Mistake Thai Dish for Terror Weapon
by
findingDulcinea Staff
Reports of “noxious” fumes close down a district in London, England, but investigators trace the suspect smell to an innocuous restaurant kitchen; the line between caution and hysteria can be a thin one.
30-Second Summary
Oct. 3—Police closed roads and evacuated homes after several members of the public reported a suspicious, unpleasant odor in Soho, Central London.
First responders, dressed in protective suits and breathing apparatus, arrived on the scene to investigate.
A Turkish journalist working locally, interviewed by the BBC, said, “I was sitting in the office when me and my chief start coughing and I said this was something really dodgy.”
The terrorism squad forced entry into the kitchen of a Thai restaurant, where they traced the smell to a pungent 9lb pot of chilies.
The restaurant was cooking nam prik pao, a highly spiced dish made with burnt chili peppers.
The BBC online coverage of the story includes the recipe for anyone tempted to try it.
Although the incident ended in levity, it had its serious side. From the Salem witch trials of 1692 to a guerrilla ad campaign that alarmed Boston this year, it is apparent how mass hysteria might be provoked amid a nervous population.
First responders, dressed in protective suits and breathing apparatus, arrived on the scene to investigate.
A Turkish journalist working locally, interviewed by the BBC, said, “I was sitting in the office when me and my chief start coughing and I said this was something really dodgy.”
The terrorism squad forced entry into the kitchen of a Thai restaurant, where they traced the smell to a pungent 9lb pot of chilies.
The restaurant was cooking nam prik pao, a highly spiced dish made with burnt chili peppers.
The BBC online coverage of the story includes the recipe for anyone tempted to try it.
Although the incident ended in levity, it had its serious side. From the Salem witch trials of 1692 to a guerrilla ad campaign that alarmed Boston this year, it is apparent how mass hysteria might be provoked amid a nervous population.
Headline Links: Chili dish causes major evacuation
A pungent chili dish cooking in a Thai restaurant led to reports of poison gas in Central London. Police closed the fashionable London district of Soho for three hours while they worked to trace the source of the unpleasant odor.
Source: The BBC
Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon, the chef cooking the suspect dish, told the Times of London, “I can understand why people who weren’t Thai would not know what it was.”
Source: The Daily Telegraph
History: Scares and mass hysteria
The Peruvian meteorite
September 2007—Fear spread through a Peruvian town of Carancas following a rumor that a meteorite had brought disease to the community. The object reputedly left a crater 20 feet deep and almost 100 feet wide, from which, said witnesses, noxious gases were released. Later locals reported vomiting and nausea.
September 2007—Fear spread through a Peruvian town of Carancas following a rumor that a meteorite had brought disease to the community. The object reputedly left a crater 20 feet deep and almost 100 feet wide, from which, said witnesses, noxious gases were released. Later locals reported vomiting and nausea.
Sept. 19—The BBC reported that some experts were suspicious that the supposed crater might in fact be a lake, and have no connection to the fireball or meteorite that locals had spotted.
Source: The BBC
A Q&A titled "Do meteors make you ill" suggests that the locals alleging they became unwell after the meteorite struck could well be suffering from "what is known as a Mass Sociogenic Illness"—in other words, symptoms caused by mass hysteria.
Source: The BBC
Bogus Boston terror alert
Police and terrorist squads closed central Boston in Jan. 2007 when a marketing gimmick designed to promote a cartoon set off a terrorist alert. First responders rushed to disarm “light boxes” that flashed images of a character from “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
Police and terrorist squads closed central Boston in Jan. 2007 when a marketing gimmick designed to promote a cartoon set off a terrorist alert. First responders rushed to disarm “light boxes” that flashed images of a character from “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
According to CNN, passersby mistook the boxes for bombs on account of their discreet placement and the wires protruding from the back of them. Two men faced felony charges in connection with the incident.
Source: CNN
As part of a plea deal, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, the two men arrested for the Boston marketing campaign that triggered bomb alerts, apologized to the court and agreed to perform 80 hours’ community service. In return, prosecutors dropped the criminal charges against them.
Source: The Boston Globe (free registration required)
The 1938 Martian 'War'
Oct. 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, thousands of residents in New York and New Jersey became convinced aliens were invading the Earth. They had mistaken a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel “War of the Worlds,” performed by Orson Welles’s theater group, for a genuine news report.
Oct. 30, 1938, the night before Halloween, thousands of residents in New York and New Jersey became convinced aliens were invading the Earth. They had mistaken a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel “War of the Worlds,” performed by Orson Welles’s theater group, for a genuine news report.
The New York Times’s coverage of the panic can be viewed at the paper’s online archive. “More than twenty families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what was believed to be a gas raid,” The New York Times wrote the next day. Thousands of people reportedly called the police.
Source: The New York Times
The radio adaptation mimicked news coverage, but its fictional nature was made clear in the introduction to the program. However, many listeners missed that important announcement because they were tuned to a rival network for the first ten minutes of Orson Welles's broadcast, listening to the end of the popular show “The Chase and Sanborn Hour.” National Geographic considers the panic from a modern vantage.
Source: National Geographic
Orson Welles’s theater group, who performed “War of the Worlds,” was called the Mercury Theatre. A dedicated Web site commemorates the group’s achievements and carries an audio recording of many of its shows, including the famous panic-inducing broadcast of ’38.
Source: The Mercury Theatre
The Salem Witch Trials
In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a young woman’s mysterious illness set off a chain of events that led to accusations of witchcraft in the local community and the hanging of 19 men and women. One man in his 80s was crushed to death by heavy stones for refusing to submit to trial on charges of witchcraft. Many historians now think Betty Parris’s condition might be explained by “some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis.”
In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a young woman’s mysterious illness set off a chain of events that led to accusations of witchcraft in the local community and the hanging of 19 men and women. One man in his 80s was crushed to death by heavy stones for refusing to submit to trial on charges of witchcraft. Many historians now think Betty Parris’s condition might be explained by “some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis.”
Other than the 20 fatalities, hundreds of people faced accusations of witchcraft between June and Sept. 1692. “Dozens languished in jail for months without trials until the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts subsided,” writes this law school account of the hysteria.
Source: The University of Missouri-Kansas Law School
'Mass Delusions and Hysterias: Highlights from the Past Millennium'
What do the Milanese poisoning scare of 1630 and the Nigerian vanishing genitalia epidemic of 1990 have in common? They are examples of mass hysteria, a phenomenon examined by two U.S. sociologists in their essay "Mass Delusions and Hysterias." The Nigerian “epidemic” arose when the belief that thieves were magically stealing the sexual organs of unsuspecting victims. Many of these people “claimed that the penis had been returned once the alarm had been raised or that, although the penis was now back, ‘it was shrunken and so probably a “wrong” one or just the ghost of a penis.’”
Source: Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Reference Material: 'The Baloney Detection Kit'
Carl Sagan compiled a list of rules he referred to as the “Baloney Detection Kit” to help people avoid the kind of fallacious ideas that lead to infectious hysteria. Sagan was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and during his life won many awards for his academic achievements and for his work popularizing science. The first rule in baloney detection, advises Sagan, is “wherever possible, there must be independent confirmation of the facts.” To access the Baloney Detection Kit, visit the Carl Sagan homepage and click on ideas.
Source: CarlSagan.com
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