The following frantic alerts all came to me via e-mail during a recent week:

1. "Please pass this on to everyone you know: During the next few days, there will be gang initiations occurring, during which the initiation is to kill a mother and small child shopping in Walmart. Please tell everyone you know not to go shopping at Walmart alone, especially if you are a woman accompanied by a small child."

2: "Subject: Removal of Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer and other pastors from the airwaves. An organization has been granted a hearing before the FCC in Washington. Their petition would ultimately pave the way to stop the reading of the gospel of our Lord and Savior on the airwaves of America. You as a Christian can and must help!"

3: "Barack Hussein Obama is plotting to set up a global currency and force the United States to submit itself to world Muslim rule. Patriots have a duty to unite and do everything they can to stop him!" (That last one is paraphrased, since I seem to have zapped the original.)

All those dire warnings either originated locally or were forwarded to me by someone local. What they have in common, as near as I can tell, is that they're all a bunch of wild-eyed baloney attempting to foist itself off on gullible victims for whatever twisted purpose.

Primitive men used to live on fears and superstitions communicated to each other by jungle drums. I thought we had put that kind of thing behind us at least by the time the Age of Reason rolled around and we supposedly learned to think in calm and rational terms, demanding that others back up dubious assertions with empirical evidence that all listeners could examine and evaluate for themselves before going off the deep end.

Now I fear we're back to some electronic version of fevered jungle drums beating in the night, sounding the alarm to rouse us against some imagined evil monster lurking out there, preparing to destroy all that we hold dear.

In our cyber age, a single misunderstood or exaggerated or manufactured bit of data has the power to multiply itself by a million as impressionable recipients retransmit it exponentially, turning it overnight into instant urban legend. In such a world, truth can have a hard time catching up with distortion and outright fiction.

These myths can mutate locally. Whereas panicky e-mails elsewhere portrayed the sinister Walmart murders as about to unfold in Wisconsin or New Jersey, the e-mails I received had shifted it to specific local locations: Southern Pines in one case, Laurinburg in another, Biscoe in a third.

In many cases, there may be some small element of truth down there under all the wild hysteria. For example, maybe someone somewhere would like to get religious programming off the air for whatever twisted reason. Never mind that it's not going to happen.

The critical link in the chain that's missing so often in our modern-day Global Village is individual discernment and skepticism. Before forwarding an alarming rumor along to 50 people and urging each of them to forward it to 50 more, few ever seem to stop and take a moment to check with the people involved or go onto snopes.com or consult some other reputable authority -- or, God forbid, ask the local newspaper.

Traditionally, one of the most important functions of a paper has been rumor control: getting out facts to combat this kind of ignorance and gossip and deception. But, of course, many contemporary Americans have been carefully taught to distrust the "MSM" (Mainstream Media) anyway. Better to believe some nut case with a computer in his basement.

The most worrisome thing about all this is not that there are people out there trying to turn America into a frightened mob armed with pitchforks. It's that so many of us seem ready to fall for it. That's scary.

Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at sbouser@thepilot.com