TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Terror Acts Fuel Rumors, Public Fears : Psychology: With lack of information, panic takes over, researchers say. People are inclined to build on any random bits of truth or partial truths.

Terrible acts terrify people. But even more, they spread fear far from the scene, fueled by rumors that themselves often are spread widely by news reports that prove to be inaccurate.

For two days, the nation was gripped by fear as a result of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City.

In Denver, it caused a day-care center to be shut down. In Boston, said Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, “we’ve closed everything in sight” as a result of telephoned bomb threats.

Yet the ultimate death toll, as horrible as it is, may turn out to be no greater than that in a terrible commercial air crash, and well under, say, the number of people killed each year in domestic violence.

So why has the Oklahoma City news produced the kind of reaction that has not been evident in equally horrific tragedies?

What is happening, say those who have studied public reaction to terrorist acts as well as to natural disasters that shock the nation, is that, in the absence of conclusive details that explain why a particular tragedy has occurred, people grasp at theories and rumors, often unfounded--but occasionally found out to be true.

For two days, questions were thrown about, offered more as affirmative statements with the answer implied, than as genuine questions. Each theory got its moment in the sun, and the nation seemed willing to accept any and all.

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“There’s such a lack of information that panic takes over,” said Clifford Karchmer, associate director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a research organization made up of the nation’s largest police jurisdictions. “When there’s no claim of responsibility, it looks like an intentional strike at the heartland, which is what this country is all about. So people think it’s aimed at them. They have no idea who did it and hence, your panic.”

On Friday, several hours before it was announced that two men had been arrested in connection with the bombing, President Clinton urged caution, telling reporters: “I would just ask that you and the American people not rush to any conclusions unsupported by known evidence and that we give the investigators the space they need to do their job.”

But for the two days leading up to that point, such advice was not heeded by the public or the news media.

“Whenever you have a crisis situation, people’s coping skills become extremely simplistic,” said Ron Weiner, professor of criminology and psychology at American University in Washington. “The ability to process, to be able to use the cognitive and analytical powers, takes secondary importance and what takes over are the simplistic, quickest, most routine explanations to get back to closure and some steady state.”

So people grasped at each rumor, comforting or not. The important thing was that each new twist masqueraded as solid information, though it may have contained no truth at all or partial truth. For example:

* There were breathless accounts of a second bomb.

* There were reports that three men with Middle Eastern-sounding names had been taken into custody.

* Iraqi President Saddam Hussein finally had gotten back at the United States for depriving him of Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, some postulated.

* Islamic extremists were said to be seeking angry revenge for a host of recent U.S. successes against their brethren.

* The Cali drug cartel was striking back for Drug Enforcement Administration pressure on Colombian drug gangs, others projected. New York Newsday reported Friday that authorities knew the names of the two men who were being hunted in connection with the bombing and that the police “have linked both to narcotics investigations.”

* And even Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma said on national television that about 50 additional bodies had been found in one section of the destroyed building, a statement that was quickly retracted after federal emergency officials said the governor was wrong.

* With the blast occurring on the second anniversary of the fiery raid on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Tex., the cult’s remnants were targeting a prominent symbol of the U.S. government, went one theory.

* And finally: Right-wing skinheads were striking at who knows what, for reasons unclear.

Regardless of the rumors and reality that surround such events, “if you’re a terrorism scholar, you know one of the great mysteries is why an act of terrorism captures the imagination of a country the way it does,” Heymann said.

The answer, he said he believes, is the act’s “random violence, its purposeful targeting of noncombatants.”

“It’s an attack on the social structure, and that has great drama to it,” he said. “The secret of it is there is a magic in a terrorist act. There is immense public concern. . . . Somehow terrorism frightens us in a way that is far greater than other catastrophes.”

When that fright takes hold, said Albert Vogel, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and vice commander of the state’s disaster medical assistance team, people seize at explanations--correct or not--because “the idea of the unknown danger that might strike anywhere is anxiety-provoking for everybody.”

“So everyone jumps to conclusions. The mechanism is self-protecting to relieve the anxiety that ‘it might happen to me,’ ” he said. “It is a way of trying to assess the degree of risk.

“Unfortunately,” he said, it is often based on “no information.”

Times staff writers Robin Wright and Marlene Cimons contributed to this story.

Global Coverage

Newspapers around the world gave front-page coverage to the Oklahoma City bombing. In cities where terrorism is a grim fact of existence, headlines took on an even greater urgency.