IN times of great fear and uncertainty, people will grab at different things to steady themselves. Some feel compelled to make practical arrangements to try to safeguard their families. They are now searching York army surplus shops to buy gas masks.

This quest is prompted by a genuine dread that terrorists will hijack a crop sprayer, fill it with nerve gas and loop-the-loop over Clifford's Tower. Such seemingly abstract anxiety is validated when eminent Leeds University toxicologist Alastair Hay is willing to be photographed by the press in mask, protective suit and gloves. Yesterday he loomed out of the paper and into children's nightmares.

But then, Prof Hay only chose to dress up as doomsday after the esteemed World Health Organisation chose to scare the world's socks off with its alarmist warnings about chemical and biological warfare.

Others are seeking protection not from a gas mask but from a higher power. York Minster was packed for its service of remembrance. Even non-believers have been groping for faith these last two weeks: on Friday, we published an email from an Acomb woman revealing she had said her first prayer on September 11: "I didn't know what else to do."

Yet more, finding no comfort in God, have turned to another figure with a devoted following. Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies has become the most-ordered volume at Internet bookshop Amazon. Net search engine Google reports a spectacular increase in requests for information on the 16th century astrologer.

This sudden interest is based on a false rumour: that Nostradamus predicted the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. Soon after the outrage, someone forwarded this claim to me by email, with the headline: "This is very scary!" His message explained that Nostradamus wrote the following in 1654: "In the City of York there will be a great collapse/Two twin brothers torn apart by Chaos/while the fortress falls. The great leader will succumb/The third big war will begin when the big city is burning."

Astonishingly, this nonsense was reproduced in some national newspapers as a real story. It has since been noted how even the powers of this "great diviner" were not enough to allow him to still be scribbling 88 years after his death in 1566.

The prophecy was actually created five years ago by a Canadian academic in a paper arguing that if you made up enough vague Nostradamus-like predictions, one was bound to come true eventually. Unfortunately the only one he wrote actually did come true. Which gives Neil Marshall, of Brock University, Ontario, a far better success rate than the big N.

Meanwhile, people have managed to spot heaven and hell making personal appearances at the World Trade Centre attack. The same source who sent me the Nostradamus "quote" followed it up with a picture of the skyscrapers moments after the planes had hit. This showed a pattern of smoke that might, if you took off your glasses and squinted a bit, look a little like a human face. He asked: "The face of God?"

It turns out that a photograph of the same scene from a different angle has resulted in dozens of American newspaper readers suggesting that the smoke had formed "a satanic face".

We Westerners like to think ourselves superior to the rest of the world's people and their quaint belief systems. But when terrified, we are as superstitious and wild-minded as anyone.

The American devastation was caused by man and man alone. Not by the devil; not by that fraudster Nostradamus. And the dangers it has brought will not be resolved by God or Nostradamus; but by man, and man alone.