Again, this is a hoax.

Subject: MISSING CHILD

Maybe if everyone passes this on, someone will see this child. That is how the girl from Stevens Point was found by circulation of her picture on tv. The internet circulates even overseas, South America, and Canada etc. Thanks

Please pass this to everyone in your address book.

We have a Deli manager (Acme Markets) from Philadelphia, Pa who has a 13 year old daughter who has been missing for 2 weeks. Keep the picture moving on. With luck on her side she will be found.

“I am asking you all, begging you to please forward this email on to anyone and everyone you know, PLEASE. My 13 year old girl, Ashley Flores, is missing. She has been missing for now two weeks.

It is still not too late. Please help us. If anyone any where knows anything, please contact me at: HelpfindAshleyFlores@yahoo.com, I am including a picture of her. All prayers are appreciated!!”

It only takes 2 seconds to forward this. If it was your child, you would want all the help you could get.

While there is an Ashley Flores in Philadelphia, she isn’t thirteen and she isn’t missing. In fact, this email was cobbled together from several previous missing-child emails and sent out as a prank. Unfortunately, it has tied up resources of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and various law enforcement agencies who diligently look into cases like this.

What happened was that Ashley’s friend, Vixter609, sent out the email as a joke sometime in May, 2006 and people took it seriously and wanted to help. Obviously Vixter609 is not a deep thinker and probably meant no harm, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this sort of nonsense can interfere with efforts to find real missing children.

The Email

I don’t usually like to send these but this is weird. This is actually really freaky!! (mainly the end part, but read it all first): New York City has 11 letters, Afghanistan has 11 letters, Ramsin Yuseb (The terrorist who threatened to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993) has 11 letters, George W Bush has 11 letters.

This could be a mere coincidence, but this gets more interesting: New York is the 11th state; the first plane crashing against the Twin Towers was flight number 11, Flight 11 was carrying 92 passengers. 9 + 2 = 11; Flight 77 which hit the Pentagon, was carrying 65 passengers. 6+5 = 11; the tragedy was on September 11, or 9/11 as it is now known. 9 + 1+ 1 = 11; the date is equal to the US emergency services telephone number 911. 9 + 1 + 1 = 11.

Sheer coincidence..?! Read on and make up your own mind: The total number of victims inside all the hi-jacked planes was 254. 2 + 5 + 4 = 11; September 11 is day number 254 of the calendar year. Again 2 + 5 + 4 = 11; the Madrid bombing took place on 3/11/2004 . 3 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 4 = 11; the tragedy of Madrid happened 911 days after the Twin Towers incident.

Now this is where things get totally eerie: Try this and see how you feel afterwards, it made my hair stand on end: Open Microsoft Word and do the following: Type in capitals Q33 NY. This is the flight number of the first plane to hit one of the Twin Towers; highlight the Q33 NY; change the font size to 48; change the actual font to the WINGDINGS.

What do you think now?!! makes ya think?????

What do I think now? I think someone is full of it. Was the first plane to hit the towers Flight 11, or was it Flight Q33 NY? That is weird. Wait! “that is weird” has 11 letters! I heard the news on 9/11 and 9 + 1 + 1 = 11 and “heard the news” has 11 letters! Oh, my, that is crazy! Whoops! “that is crazy” has 11 letters! OH NO!

Some Facts

Flight 77 had 64 passengers on board when it hit the Pentagon. Madrid was 912 days after 9/11/01. Bill Clinton has 11 letters in his name too and he was more responsible for 9/11 than George W Bush, the 43rd President of the USA. But then on the other hand, W is the 22nd letter and 2 + 2 + 4 + 3 = 11 and 22 = 2 x 11. (Yes, I know W is the 23rd letter, but that wouldn’t be quite as “spooky.”)

There were 265 total passengers (2 + 6 + 5 = 13), or if you discount the 19 hijackers, you get 246 (2 + 4 + 6 = 12). Not 254 (that’s just wrong).

The email chooses a very weird name variant (Ramsin Yuseb) for one, admittedly high-profile, terrorist connected to the Twin Towers. It’s one of many possible transliterations of his Arabic name, most often rendered as Ramzi Yousef or Ramzi Youssef, born Abdul Basit Mah moud Abdul Karim. He has dozens of aliases, and is most often known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef or Ramzi Mohammed Yousef.

But, wait! What about Mohammed Atta or the rest of the actual 9/11 hijackers? Khalid Almihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf Alhazmi, Salem Alhazmi, Hani Hanjour, Satam Alsuqami, Waleed Alshehri, Wail Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari, Marwan Alshehhi, Ahmed Fayez, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, and Zaid Jarrah?

Only one 9/11 hijacker, Ahmed Alnami, has 11 letters in his name. Besides the fact that these “men” have many aliases, there are dozens of ways to transliterate their Arabic names.

There are thousands of names and phrases associated with September 11th and the World Trade Center that this email conveniently ignores. Try this exercise: write down all the names, topics, and phrases you can find or think of that are tied to 9/11. Now count the letters in each. Some have eleven letters, of course, but others have three or ten or twenty or seventeen letters.

Whoever is responsible for collecting these supposed 9/11 facts has hand-picked some things that can get you to “11″ and made up a bunch of other junk out of thin air. No doubt peddling some moonbat conspiracy theory.

Recommendation

Set the record straight. Reply-All to the email, change the subject to “Spooky Email is Bogus,” and include the above explanation or your own variant of it.

A little bit of searching turns up some websites claiming it’s “false, but…” and others claiming it’s “true, but…” Chalk that up to the bias of the individual website. You’ll also find a defensive rebuttal by the San Antonio Express News.

Well, obviously the best source for info is the Fisher House themselves. There you can find a Stars and Stripes article, for which another search turns up the original at the Stars and Stripes site itself.

So it’s a good story, but a little confusing. The attacks on media bias are understandable, since celebrity nut jobs do get a lot of press. The attempt to brag about Mr. Washington’s support for the troops and his generosity is certainly warranted. However, blindly forwarding erroneous information hurts rather than helps.

Other annoyances with the email include referring to the Brooke Army Medical Center as “Brooks,” big crazy formatting of the text, underlined text that is not a link, and the obligatory plea to forward it to everyone “This needs as wide a distribution as we can create” (of course in huge, blue underlined text).

So do you just delete it? Ehh… how about changing the Subject: line from “Fwd: Fwd: Re: Denzel Washington” to “Denzel Washington’s True Generosity” and recording the real story? Then forward that to your email friends (and back to whomever sent the flawed original to you). Politely set the record straight. Then if it really moved you, donate to the Fisher House yourself!

According to the Stars and Stripes,

Officials from the Fisher House Foundation want the public to know the Academy Award-winning actor is a generous donor to their efforts. But an e-mail forward which has him single-handedly building new facilities for them is nothing more than an urban legend.

See also articles at the Fisher House website here and here.

Denzel and Pauletta Washington also became members of the Fisher House Board of Trustees.

It should be noted that arch-liberal Garry Trudeau is also donating proceeds to Fisher House. From the Fisher House Angels page: “Mr. Trudeau has donated the advance and all royalties from his newest book to Fisher House Foundation™.”