The tall tale of Tedd Petruna first emerged this weekend. Tedd Petruna sent an email that soon went viral about his brave actions thwarting a terrorist attack dry run on an airplane.
In an email account of his experience that went national on right-wing blogs last week, Tedd Petruna describes a group of 11 Muslim men “in full attire” who created a disturbance on a Nov. 17 AirTran flight on the runway at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport.
In Petruna’s telling, the men fanned out through the plane, and one of the men called a companion in the back of the plane, “talking in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively.” He ignored a flight attendant’s request to put away his phone before takeoff.
Petruna, who works as a diver at a NASA lab in Houston, says two of the Muslim men began “to show footage of a porno they had taped the night before, and were very loud about it.” It’s unclear what he means by “taped the night before,” and how Petruna would know what the men had been doing the previous night. But he describes porn viewing as an activity Muslims would be permitted to engage in only before Jihad. When a flight attendant objected to their use of an electronic device, she was told to “shut up infidel dog!”
Don’t ask me where Mr. Petruna gets his extensive understanding of terrorist porn-watching habits. Anyway, the airline completely debunked Petruna’s story. There was no law enforcement and the incident involved a Spanish-speaker who didn’t understand the direction to get off of his cell phone. Plus, the airline confirms Petruna wasn’t even on the flight.
Mr. Petruna is standing by his story, though:
Reached at the Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab this morning, Petruna told TPMmuckraker that despite AirTran’s assertion, he was on the flight. He wouldn’t say much, though, because “I’m in the middle of a lawsuit about this right now.” We’re not sure whether a lawsuit has actually been filed or what it would be about, though Petruna told Schlussel, the right-wing columnist, that he was mulling a defamation suit.
“The whole e-mail went out accidentally; it was not supposed to go nationwide,” Petruna told TPMmuckraker. “It was supposed to go out to family and friends, and the next thing I know it’s a firestorm.”
Yeah, I’m sure it was an accident. He accidentally didn’t want to get caught by the whole world lying. He just wanted to look like a hero to his credulous friends.