Oberlin police Lt. Mike McCloskey said that authorities did find a pedestrian wrapped in a blanket. He said police interviewed another witness later in the day and that person also saw a female walking with a blanket.

Oddly enough, the other is the leftist Guardian of London, which noted:

Lt Mike McCloskey of Oberlin police told the Guardian on Monday that officers were still following up the KKK sighting, but suggested that the only witness may have been mistaken.

In other words, KKK is the new UFO.

After the 1950s, the press slowly figured out that it shouldn”€™t get too worked-up over flying-saucer sightings. But Klansmen on the campus of what is perhaps the most frenetically liberal college in America? How couldn’t it be true?

Seeing racists under the bed is the latest manifestation of the adolescent hysteria that triggered the Salem witch trials in 1692.

But nobody much cares whether this horrifying hate crime went through the formality of taking place. This non-event has received enormous publicity (here’s Matt Lauer talking it up on Tuesday’s Today Show), just like all the other campus hate hoaxes and hysterias, because so many people want it to be true.  

The racial atmosphere in America is starting to resemble that bizarre 1980s-1990s frenzy over Satan worshippers purportedly molesting preschoolers. We live in an era in which hate-porn movies such as Django Unchained and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo win Oscars.

There is such a hunger in 2013 to sniff out racists and punish them that the actual shortage of racists is leading people to imagine that a girl in a blanket is a lone lynch mob.

It’s typical for the kind of incidents that create media furors to turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by minorities. For example, Oberlin already had one of these tumults, complete with an official Two Minutes Hate rally, back in the 1990s. The coed who wrote an anti-Chinese slur on an Oberlin monument turned out to be Chinese.

Every so often, perpetrators of these hoaxes annoy the cops enough to get sent to jail, such as Claremont McKenna professor Kerri Dunn, who tried to frame her white male students after she painted anti-Semitic slogans on her own car.

But is anybody in the press ever held accountable for hyping the hysteria?