As I mentioned over the weekend, a few weeks ago a guy named Tedd Petruna, a NASA employee, sent friends and family an email describing a November 17th incident at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport in which he singlehandedly thwarted an attempted hijacking by a dozen Muslim men. Then the email went viral and Petruna became a cult hero in the right-wing blogosphere and on sites like Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. Only the incident, as he describes it, seems never to have happened. And according to the airline, Petruna wasn’t even on the plane in question.
Now TPMMuckraker’s Justin Elliott has reported out the story and even spoken to Petruna, who’s sticking to his story.
But gets even better.
The people who gotten taken in in the first place are doubling down. Now not only did Petruna actually pull off the cartoonish smackdown of the porn-watching (just read the story) Muslim terrorists. Now AirTran, the airline that seems to have proven pretty conclusively that Petruna wasn’t even on the plane, is supposedly in on the grand conspiracy to cover up for the Muslim terrorist doing dry-run hijackings on our commercial aircraft.
