around
Weed and Mt. Shasta in 1991. According to the notice, "Madalyn M. O’Hair, an atheist"
will be appearing before the FCC with a petition (referred to as Petition 2493)
to convince them "to stop the reading of the Gospel on airways of America." The
bottom of the notice consisted of a short form to be given to ten other people
and filled out and mailed to the FCC protesting "any human effort to remove from
our Radio and Television, any program designed to show faith, God, or a Supreme
Being or to remove Christmas Songs, Programs or Carols from public schools."
I quickly saw that the notice listed no sponsoring organization, included no date for the hearing, and listed no deadline date for the forms to be sent to the FCC. Further, the notice was wretchedly written, illogically appealed to the FCC to not remove Christmas songs from public schools (never under the FCC control), and indicated that the writer knew nothing about established free speech protection. Despite these shortcomings, those in possession of the notice, most often obtained from a FOAF, seemed to have no doubt as to the truthfulness and significance of the notice.
A week or so after the above event I attended a conference of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. While listening to Jan Harold Brunvand, author of your course text, I was surprised to hear him refer to a "fictional O’Hair petition." Shortly after the conference Mr Brunvand was kind enough to send me the facts behind the imaginary petition. I also picked up one of Brunvand’s books, The Choking Doberman. Not only does the book discuss the O’Hair affair, it contains a comprehensive history of the elevator legend. The O’Hair petition legend is even older than the elevator legend. Since 1975 the FCC has received well over 30 million letters addressing Petition 2493—a petition that has, for all practical purposes, never existed. For although there once was a petition 2493, it had nothing to do with O’Hair, would not have done what the notice indicated, and was turned down by the FCC in 1975. The plethora of mail that was arriving each month when I contacted the FCC was costing the gullible thousands of dollars in postage stamps each month and creating a postal abyss within the FCC. You can even visit the FCC and read about The O'hair petition at the FCC.
Curious as to how the phony notice first came to Siskiyou County, I began a little amateur sleuthing. Although many of those taken in by the flyer were tight-lipped, I learned the flier was acquired when a local woman responded to an ad in an untra-conservative Christian magazine. It seems to me that even a cursory analysis of this incident offers some evidence that people are likely to believe in a specific incident, and continue to believe despite contrary evidence, if the incident tends to support other strongly held beliefs. For example, the still popular belief concerning George Washington and a cherry tree undoubtedly tells more about our cultural values than a particular president’s childhood. The folklorists I have met seem to be more than a little bit skeptical of bizarre claims, and they seem quite careful that their acceptance or rejection of information, whether elevator anecdote or scientific theory, is not merely based on the information’s relationship to other beliefs held dear.