Pepsi Case Was Quick to Tamper With Public Mind : Products: Surreal and illogical, it spread faster and farther than other scares. ‘Bizarre,’ one official says.

Even in a world where pins and needles have contaminated Girl Scout cookies and deadly cyanide has tainted Tylenol capsules, the Pepsi-Cola mystery is unusual in its oddity and scope.

Every year, hundreds of real and imagined product-tampering incidents are reported throughout the United States. But the Pepsi syringe scare has elements of the surreal and inexplicable, carried across the county this week by some strange contagion.

“I can’t think of anything we’ve handled that is more bizarre than this,” said Betsy Adams, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “ Bizarre is the word that I have used quite a bit in describing this. The entire circumstance is, well, bizarre.”

It all began nine days ago with a report from an 82-year-old man in Tacoma, Wash. Another report surfaced in that state two days later.

Then, propelled by mysterious overtones and powerful imagery, word of the case spread rapidly from coast to coast. By Monday, claims began pouring in from Bakersfield to New York, and by Wednesday, Pepsi drinkers in at least 23 states reported finding needles and syringes in their Pepsi cans.

PepsiCo spokesman Andrew Giangola called the public’s fascination and the media attention a “feeding frenzy,” the likes of which industrial executives have never seen.

“Perhaps the reason is that Pepsi is so ubiquitous and the reports are so graphic, and there is such an aura of mystery about it,” he said.

The mental pictures evoked by the combination of a can of Pepsi and a hypodermic syringe are especially disturbing and incongruous. The needle is a frightening symbol, particularly in this age of AIDS, while the familiar red, white and blue Pepsi can is a universal symbol of consumerism in a world where brand names are as recognizable as family names.

The case also has captured the public’s imagination because of its puzzling circumstances. It does not follow the typical pattern of products either accidentally contaminated in manufacturing or intentionally altered. The contaminant was not the usual sliver of glass, scrap of metal or rat dropping, but a large syringe.

And there seems to be no logical way that syringes could get into so many pressurized, sealed soft drink cans, in widely scattered locations, because Pepsi has 400 automated, high-speed assembly plants. Just as unlikely is someone tampering with and then resealing cans on grocery store shelves.

“If you look at past experience, what we’ve seen is people buying products in the store, taking it home, tampering with them and then carrying them back into the store and putting them on the shelf,” said Jeff Nedelman of the Grocery Manufacturers of America.

“That’s why this is so bizarre. To insert into a pressurized, pop-top soda can, you need to have canning equipment someplace. It just doesn’t make any sense. It would lead one to assume that we are dealing with a large number of hoaxes, or people who think they can get rich with extortion.”

By midweek, many of the reports were pronounced hoaxes. At least six people have been arrested for making phony claims and at least six others have recanted. Saying that the reports of tampering are unconfirmed and seem to have been generated by a “vicious cycle” of copycat claims, FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler on Thursday vowed to prosecute false claims.

The epidemic of syringe sightings comes at a time when reports of product tampering have been on the decline.

Last year, the FDA investigated 230 alleged instances of tampering and determined that only 48 could be verified. In 1986, 1,714 complaints were lodged, with 166 verified, and in 1983, 137 out of 874 complaints were verified.

“We get complaints fairly often,” Adams said, “but the vast majority . . . turn out to be no problem after all, or a manufacturing problem that damages a seal or something else. Cases of actual tampering are unusual but not unheard of.”

The most famous tampering incidents involved Tylenol in 1982 and Sudafed in 1991. Unlike the Pepsi cases, there were confirmed product poisonings, resulting in deaths. But as in the Pepsi case, the nation was swept up with copycat claims, some of which were unfounded.

The seven deaths in the Chicago area linked to poisoned Tylenol were never solved. In the Sudafed case, a man in the Seattle area was convicted this year of killing two strangers in a ploy to poison his wife, who nearly died.

Perhaps the incidents with the most similarity to the ongoing Pepsi mystery occurred in the mid-1980s with Girl Scout cookies and Gerber baby food.

In 1984, someone in St. Louis reported finding staples and needles in a box of Girl Scout cookies. Within weeks, that one incident spawned about 500 copycat cookie claims, including many in Southern California.

“None of them ever checked out,” said Adams. “I don’t believe anyone ever got to the bottom of it.”

Then, in 1986, consumers in 30 states reported finding glass fragments in more than 250 Gerber baby food jars. After inspecting 40,000 sealed jars, the FDA found nothing larger than glass specks the size of grains of sand in nine of them.

FDA and manufacturing officials say it is at least believable that pins and glass fragments could find their way into food products. But how does anyone explain syringes in pressure-packed cans of Pepsi?

“Just the size of the foreign object, the needle and the syringe--to find that in soda cans is just inconceivable,” said Nedelman of the grocery manufacturers group. “And if you look at the aluminum soft drink can, this is perhaps the most tamper-resistant package that we can conceive.”

If the reports about Pepsi are to be believed, the syringes--some with needles, some without--have somehow turned up inside sealed Pepsi cans that were canned and purchased miles and months apart in two dozen states.

No one who understands the company’s automated canning process can venture a credible guess as to how that could happen, because the cans are turned upside down and then uprighted for less than a second before they are filled and sealed.

PepsiCo officials say they are virtually certain that the syringes could not have gotten into the product at their plants. During their investigation, inspectors for the FDA and Pepsi have not found a syringe or needle in any can they have opened, the officials said.

“The needles are allegedly showing up in cans that are produced in some cases six months apart,” said PepsiCo spokesman Giangola. “It defies intellectual logic and physical probability.” He urged consumers to “look at this rationally and soberly” and “understand the facts.”

If none of the reports is true, it means PepsiCo is the victim of a hoax that swept the nation.

The FDA must investigate every report, no matter how far-fetched. For that purpose, the agency last year created a special criminal division of about 60 investigators. Many of the specially trained detectives have law enforcement backgrounds, some with other federal agencies such as the FBI and Secret Service.