Sat - July 24, 2004

Aliens are among us, but seeing them everywhere is as dangerous as not seeing them at all. 

On a perfectly ordinary fall evening in 1938, Americans packed the roads, hid in cellars, loaded guns, even wrapped their heads in wet towels to protect themselves from poison gas being delivered by invading Martians fictitiously and famously depicted in an Orson Welles radio drama.

The next day, the New York Times reported that "coming after the recent war scare in Europe and a period in which the radio frequently had interrupted regularly scheduled programs to report developments in the Czechosolvak situation," the War of the Worlds broadcast "caused fright and panic" among the otherwise rational men and women who heard it.

In light of that precedent, in a summer when the government has continually urged our "vigilance" against terrorism, what are we to make of the intense public reaction to Terror In The Skies, Annie Jacobsen's anxious account of her flight on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles? That the threat of terrorism stirs up our worst fears or that this time aliens really have landed and Americans think their government is too politically correct to stop them?

Probably both.

Terror In The Skies

If you haven't yet read how the behavior of Middle Eastern men on a transcontinental flight so disquieted Wall Street Journal writer Jacobsen, her husband, and several other passengers that they thought these men were terrorists training to take American lives, here is a representative quote from her story:

After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified.

Jacobsen's terror was palpable, the account of the flight impassioned. But with the benefit of hindsight, the acts of boarding a plane, lounging in its aisles, and using the fore and aft restrooms, sometimes in groups did not prove that the foreigners meant harm. Indeed, investigative work by one dedicated blogger later revealed that the suspects were Syrian musicians flying to a resort performance—a prospect that terrifies only if you've ever heard a concert of Middle Eastern music.

Annie Jacobsen understandably lacked these hindsights on her plane at 39,000 feet. Her fear was real, her suspicions aroused, her patience tested almost to the breaking point. But everyone who read or discussed her account afterwards could evaluate her ordeal more dispassionately. Everyone who considered it objectively had the chance to conclude that the painfully conspicuous restroom habits of 14 Syrian males were neither the stuff of a Hollywood thriller nor an effective means through which to probe American air defenses. How then, do we account for the more than 300 blog postings written about her story in less than a week's time, or the nearly 100 fold increase in page views the paper's web site received after printing it?

War Of The Worlds

Clearly, Jacobsen's tale resonated with something deep in the American psyche, something that began one cool September morning and still churns emotions four years later. The coordinated act of crashing passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field once seemed as inconceivable as a Martian invasion. But now that we know that real aliens live amongst us, anything seems possible. It makes no difference that they are fundamentalist illegal aliens who want to revert our world to the 7th century, rather than aliens from space who would return it to the stone age. It matters only that these hidden fanatics want us to die—and that they do not discriminate between men or women, adults or children, the able-bodied or the infirm.

We understand all too well that we are engaged in a War of the First and the Islamic Fundamentalist Third Worlds in which airliners are already designated battle sites. Because we know this, we fear to fly. And because we must fly for business and for pleasure, we bury our heads in airline magazines, recall the odds against bombs and hijackings and secretly deny what troubles us most: The possibility that the government is no better at protecting us now than it was on 9/11.

But really, who can fault our alarm?

In similarly dark times, President Franklin Roosevelt told Americans that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Tom Ridge tells us that deadly attacks on American soil are inevitable and our "vigilance," essential. The difference in effect is palpable. Months of ambiguous calls for watchfulness have reduced the Department of Homeland Security to little more than a teller of Al Qaeda ghost stories around our national campfire. Rather than fighting terror, the government now sows it.

Beware the Bogeymen!" Ridge bellows in innumerable telecasts. "Be vigilant!"

Small wonder that neither Annie Jacobsen nor most of the blogs I've read that covered her story expressed faith in our national security apparatus. Almost none argued that current airport security measures are adequate. Instead, some writers lamented the absence of broad, sustained efforts to profile potential terrorists by their race and more relevant backgrounds. Others observed that we haven't seen passengers questioned before boarding planes like they do in Europe. A few recalled that we heard suggestions from no less an authority than 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman that it might have been government policy before and after 9/11 "to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory."

If Lehman misspoke, the government has yet to correct him.

All this worry and discouragement add up to a pretty sorry state of affairs. In a time when Americans need facts, not platitudes; reassurances, not lawyerly reservations of doubt, the Bush Administration may be winning the war on terrorism but it is rapidly losing ground in the equally important war on terror. American showed in 1938 that they have a pretty vivid collective imagination. If they today distrust government’s will to protect them, and if the Administration doesn’t trust the American people enough to speak plainly and to act decisively on their behalf, then that leaves plenty of room for imagination to run amuck and for vigilance to become vigilantism.

I know too well how easy it is for imagination to get the better of you. Not long before Annie Jacobsen's fateful encounter with 14 Syrians on a flight to Los Angeles, I sat across from a young Arab man on a Southwest Airlines plane from San Jose to the same city. Shortly into the flight, he rose abruptly and entered the lavatory. He was gone five minutes and returned looking nervous, pale, and sweaty. Then he opened the overhead bin, withdrew and opened a slim, well-worn Arabic text and began rocking slowly back and forth in his seat, murmuring indistinct foreign phrases.

As I sat there, heart racing, wondering whether to call a flight attendant and asking myself whether it would be effective merely to break his arm if he pulled a detonator from his coat pocket, he sensed my eyes boring into him. He turned to me, waved weakly, and stammered in words that bore right through me, "I'm so sorry to alarm you, sir. It's just that I'm so afraid of flying."

So was Annie Jacobsen. So are we all.