Wild myths and outrageous stories are spread faster than ever on the Internet

Please read!

This is no joke!

It's only a matter of time until you are a victim of ... Scare Mail!

Thanks to the Internet, urban legends and myths, once dished out at the watercooler, are now e-mailed in bulk by friends and family -- and they're piling up in your electronic in-box.

You may have heard some of these false tales, such as how HIV needles are precariously placed on movie theater seats with a note attached that says: "You now have AIDS."

Or the few out there involving gang rituals: Either gang members smear hallucinogenic drugs on pay phone receivers so it will seep into the user's hands; or drive around at night with their headlights off, looking for their first victim to flash their lights so they can chase them with guns blazing.

Or the one about how the new detergent Febreeze, sprayed on furniture or clothes, kills kittens.

Why are we receiving so many of these fear-filled and fanciful tales?

Simon Gottschalk, sociology professor at UNLV, says such myths are just a verbal hiccup in the long breath of oral history.

"Telling stories or gossip has been a way to establish and maintain relationships," Gottschalk says. "They express some kind of anxiety we can't help but get when we live in a big city, surrounded by strangers ... you feel you have little social control."

Urban myths mysteriously appear and usually begin by explaining how a tale of woe befell someone else. "This happened to my brother's roommate's cousin.". Without fail, someone will emphatically back up the story with "it happened to my boss's aunt's neighbor, too!"

One perpetual myth that continues to surface involves baby spiders bursting from some innocent place -- crawling down beehive hairdos in the 1950s, from ratted and overly-teased hair in the '80s, from festering minor skin wounds or living room cacti in the '90s -- to the horror of everyone around them, usually school mates or family.

Some farfetched tales, though, have turned out to be true. For example, there was the man who called a computer help line to report that his cup holder jammed after he placed his iced tea in the protruding round hole. ... That was his CD-ROM drive.

Doh!

"You can find these stories in one form or another in all cultures," Gottschalk says.

And the 'Net provides a fertile playground for passing these types of stories on. It also lends some authority to the false fables received as documents urgently titled "Please read and forward to anyone you care about!"

"On the Internet, everything is possible to spread," Gottschalk says. "You can transmit made-up stories to millions of people and remain anonymous."

This faster-better-more mentality has yet to show how it will alter the way we communicate.

"The Internet changes the rules of communication in ways we don't understand yet," he says. "It's growing so fast, in terms of speed ... that we don't really understand what that is doing to people."

A recent racy rumor claims if you take the letters in Bill Gates full name and convert them to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (a standard computer code), they add up to ... 666, which proves he is the antichrist. Oh, and the World Wide Web is his playground.

Yup.

Barbara Mikkelson, an urban myth expert and co-creator of the dish-debunking site snopes.com, says people have less trust in the world around them, and believe myths because of the intimacy of their sources.

"Urban myths and 'Net lore come riding on the backs of people you trust," she says. Part of the problem, Mikkelson says, is media overload, and these tales tally society's thoughts.

"There is already mistrust out there of the government, the press and big business, so the only thing people want to trust is word-of- mouth," Mikkelson says.

So people may readily believe the e-mail they receive from a fake but official-sounding organization that the Internal Revenue Service monitors race by the fifth digit in their social security numbers.

"They are society's way of regulating itself. We tell these stories as cautionary tales," Mikkelson says.

For these stories to survive, they have to ring true in some deep part of people's belief systems. "You're going to believe certain things if they already agree with your world view," she says.

If you are afraid of gangs, then tales of rampant initiations that include innocent victims may seem realistic.

"People need to develop a new skill ... to judge the value of the information," Mikkelson says, adding that this would cut down on the amount of misinformation that becomes hype, such as the story of the scuba diver who was found dead in a smoldering forest fire.

"I'm still looking for the origin of that one," she says. "I think that came from one of those 60-second murder mystery (books)."

Lt. Richard Alba, of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, has received calls about some of these myths, particularly one involving ... the kidney incident.

The story usually starts with a tourist who hires a lady-of-the-evening and wakes up in an ice bath, a telephone and note close by that says to call 911: his kidney has been harvested.

"We called (local hospitals) and found nothing reported," Alba says. His office also tracked down the HIV needle story to a Texas police department and found no truth to the prickly parable. Alba receives most notices about such myths through e-mail or by word-of-mouth around the department.

"It's like everybody else, you're at home, everybody sends e-mail to everybody (and) when they get one of those (messages) that says to pass (it) along to everybody else ... they do," he says.

Ted Greenhalgh, web master for the National Supercomputing Center for Energy and Environment in Las Vegas, says anyone could put anything on the Internet and people will believe it.

"Practically anybody can put a page on the Internet," he says. "Then, if (users) read it on the Internet, (that) gives it a lot more weight."

Cruising the Internet, it's easy to get sucked into places touting true (wink, wink) stories. "It's just like the National Enquirer: They are fascinated@seeing what kind of strange things happen on the Internet, and the stranger the better," he says.

And the 'Net makes the words go around even faster. "Whereas before it took years for information to spread, now it takes months," he says.

And people will believe the urgently-labeled documents and spread them without questioning their sometimes ludicrous contents.

"You should always check with another source, no matter where you get your information," Greenhalgh warns.

Scare mail is often immediately forwarded without new greetings or salutations. So, it's not really a message from a friend as much as a lazy way to connect, he says.

"People will do as little as they can, for the most part," Greenhalgh says.

But they will forward those "Must read's" with the simple tap of a key, and feel that they have done their part.

"Quell the urge to hit the 'send to everybody' button," Mikkelson suggests. "Nothing is so urgent (that) you can't make sure it's real before sending it out there."

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