6/5/2004: Strange cassettes found in downtown Philly

[Undertoad]

Wednesday morning, a patrolling cop finds a cassette tape, taped with a paper airplane, attached to a pole near city hall. A street cleaner tells him there was another one that he took down nearby.

The tapes were enclosed in plastic sandwich bags and paper airplanes were taped alongside. The officer played one tape in his patrol car and says it contained "a Middle Eastern language." The area was cordoned off. Federal investigators and bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in.

And that's where this story ends so far. Hoax? Confusion? Game? Innocent communique between friends? Or the evidence of a more serious plot? Well, who the hell knows. No further information.

So many of these things turn out to be nothing that it's hard to know whether to pay attention to them. A storage locker full of C4 plastic explosive at the bus station. An empty rocket launcher found at the bottom of the river.

For a long time in 2002-2003 it really felt like the shit was going to hit the fan, but it was the same feeling in some ways as we had in an earlier era, when there was always a chance of a nuclear bomb being dropped. In some ways it still feels like that.

But I'm still going downtown today.

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