Both elements of the story are totally fictitious but by feeding into far older tales of

Both elements of the story are totally fictitious but, by feeding into far older tales of Jewish conspiracies, and equally widespread belief in the fiendish duplicity of Americans, they gain millions of adherents among those keen to believe the worst.Other stories feed a hunger for some sort of religious message to be derived from those terrible events: the reports of the head of the devil seen in the smoke rising from the World Trade Centre for example, confirming the supernatural provenance of the atrocity; and the story that the only thing to survive the wreck of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon was a copy of the Bible.Yet other new legends are nourished by terror of being the victim of a new attack, and the fantasy of being miraculously saved from it. We never stop telling stories to each other, plausible and nonsensical at once; but it is in time of war and crisis that they become truly compelling.Today at the conference in Abana Terme an Italian expert in urban legends, Lorenzo Montali, presents a paper on the legends that have sprung up since the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001.Because when nations go to war and the newspapers and television media are charged with images of fear, death and destruction, stories of a particular type are born: legends that tell people who to blame, where to look for salvation and security, and what terrible things may lie in the future. These are stories that help to fill the fearful void in people’s souls. They always seemed to think that folklore belonged to somebody else, usually in the past, that it was something quaint and outdated.

So I started asking them what kind of stories did they learn by word of mouth; what did they repeat. Once I started collecting these stories, I just became fascinated with them.”The crucial factor in making urban legends believable is plausible detail. In July 2004, for instance, the BBC reported that an Iranian woman had given birth to a frog; or more precisely, the corporation reported that an Iranian newspaper had reported the grotesque event. The same basic stories are told in lots of different places, always localised and with different variations. Those are the crux of what I call urban legends.”People believe them, he says, “First, because people hear them from credible sources: family members, co-workers, neighbours, friends at school Hairdressers are always ‘reliable’ sources.

The sources say that the story happened to a friend of a friend. Another reason people believe them is that they are not that incredible. They are about familiar places like shopping malls, familiar experiences like travelling, things we are worried about like crime. It seems as though they could have happened.”Mr Brunvald goes on, “I was motivated to focus on urban legends by my students.

The occasion is the congress of the World Skeptics [sic] Congress, meeting in Italy for the first time.Among those present is Jan Harold Brunvald, the veteran American folklorist who invented the term “urban legend” and who has published numerous collections of them. Brunvald says of the urban myths: “These are stories told with some conviction as if they are true, attributed to a friend or a friend of a friend, but which are too coincidental or bizarre to be literally true. Yet despite scientific progress, the legends produced by modern civilisation are quite as charming, sinister, evil, beguiling or delightful as those of the old days. And thanks to the internet they travel faster, and the same stories are found – with local variations that make them more believable – all over the world.This week, experts in the study of urban legends are meeting in a spa town in north-eastern Italy to debate what it is about urban legends that makes them so compelling even today, in societies which like to believe that they are governed by reason. There is a supermarket in Taiwan where you can buy jars of that famous Chinese delicacy – new-born baby brains. Among the lesser-known perils of the Iraq war are the formidable spiders of the desert – huge, screaming, with a preference for human flesh.