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When the story detailed below about a would-be gasoline thief who tried to siphon from the wrong tank on an recreational vehicle (RV) appeared in the [Scottish] Daily Record in May 2004, it sounded awfully familiar: The very same story had made the news back in 1991: And even back in 1991 that story sounded familiar, because folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand had described it as a well-known example of the 'hilarious accident' genre of urban legend in a book published ten years earlier: Is this story true? In a technical sense it's an urban legend whether or not the event described ever actually happened in real life, because what makes a tale an urban legend is not its underlying truth or falsity, but that the same story is told over and over with differing details of time, place, and person. Note that although the three examples we quote here supposedly relate three different occurrences of similar incidents taking place over a span of more than twenty years, they all tell the same story in the very same way: The would-be gasoline thief is never caught in the act — his attempts are always discovered after the fact, his actions are always inferred from visual evidence, and the visual evidence is always the same (siphoning equipment and a pool of vomit). Moreover, the putative explanation seems rather improbable for a number of reasons: On the other hand, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no one ever lost money underestimating the stupidity of common crooks, especially those who might be operating under the additionally handicapping effects of alcohol or drugs. Whatever the underlying truth, the gas-siphoning thief story is a classic urban legend: a tale just plausible enough to maybe have played out in real life, but one too improbable to have occurred as many times (and always in the same fashion) as commonly reported.
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