ABSTRACT
In 1981, Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest American producers of mass-consumption articles, received several thousand phone calls every month from worried consumers wanting to know whether the company had dealings with Satan, as rumor had it. In January 1973, a rumor ran rife in both majority and opposition political circles. Georges Pompidou, the president of France, was said to be seriously ill, his life being imperiled; he would thus be unable to complete his seven year term. Towards the end of 1966 in Rouen, a good-sized town in the northwest of France, rumor accused a well-known dress shop of being a front for white slave trading. On November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated while the presidential cortege paraded through Dallas. All four of the above rumors were widely known. In each and every case, the same process took place. Rumors, far from being mysterious, comply with a strict logic whose mechanisms can be demonstrated.
