Ask the pilot: The laser-wielding terrorists are coming! Not since the Dread Syrian Wedding Musicians went to the bathroom has such idiotic hysteria g

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. Here he examines the current hysteria about laser attacks on airliners.

Two weeks ago, in what was intended to be a preemptive snuff of a burgeoning spark of hysteria, I discussed the implausibility of terrorists using laser beams to down a commercial airliner. Unfortunately, lasers are back in the news again, now getting the full attention of the major press and television networks.

In the past week, no fewer than eight aircraft are said to have been targeted. These include a Cessna executive jet preparing to land at Teterboro, N.J.; a SkyWest commuter plane approaching Medford, Ore.; and a jetliner at 8,500 feet above Cleveland. On New Year's Eve, a beam was aimed at a police helicopter over Trenton, N.J.

Back in mid-December, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security passed along a memo stating that terrorists had explored the viability of deploying high-intensity lasers as weapons. The alert came after several earlier incidents of rogue beams penetrating flight deck windows. In the most serious case, last September, the first officer of a Delta Air Lines jet suffered a burned retina after being struck in the face during approach into Salt Lake City.

While these events are perplexing, and at least potentially dangerous, a presumed link to terrorist activity is, even if impossible to discount, still premature and wrongheaded. Alas that's a bit like whispering into a hurricane here in 2005 America, where the T-word has been spliced into the very DNA of our collective societal psyche. Thanks to one day's events more than three years ago, we've come to exist in a full-on reversion mode in which every anomaly that's at once potentially harmful and not instantly solvable takes automatic cover beneath the dark cloak of "terrorism" -- a paranoid pathology that shows no sign of relenting. We've concocted an upside-down religion, choosing to invest our faith in the cunning of an invisible adversary while disparaging our own voices of reason and good sense. At heart it's an old story, fear of the unknown, taken to new and self-destructive heights in a politically charged climate.