I told myself, "don't be a racist, don't be paranoid," but I could not figure this guy out. On a jumpy anniversary, in a jumpy airport, he made me jumpy, and as we got closer to take off time, his behavior became more erratic, shaky, nervous. Was he a man with Middle-Eastern features that was nervous about flying and getting subtle signals of encouragment from a friend/relative who insisted on staying a dozen yards away? Or was he a twitchy shahid contemplating the end of the line? I tried to shake it off as ridiculous, racist paranoia, but I couldn't. It didn't smell right. I finally convinced myself to do something, just to make sure that my fears actually were the paranoid mental rambling of a crazy profiler. I got up and moved next to the now-seated gentleman, who was nervously flipping, tapping and clenching his driver's license. I checked out the ID from the corner of my eye, and was able to distinguish a distinctly anglo-American name, "John Anderson," or something to that effect. I figured that I'd talk to him and allay my irrational fears ...

Me: "Hey, how's it going?"

Him: (Silence, furtive look)

Me: "You nervous about flying?"

Him: (Forceful, with a heavy, accent of indistinguishable origin) "No."

Me: "Oh, I just thought that you seemed nervous. I get nervous flying all the time, I can't stand it."

Him: (Looks at me, and says in a hostile voice) "I do not get nervous."

Me: "Oh, ok."

It didn't go so well. His second response seemed like a thick Arabic accent, which didn't jive with the Anglo name, and I was unsettled by his hostility towards my friendly overture. I let it go, but his behavior continued its erratic pattern up until I walked by his first class seat during boarding.

Waiting for take-off, I once again told myself to chill out, told myself that I was being an idiot. But after thinking a bit more, I also decided that I would kick myself if something happened and I hadn't at least said something to the crew. I wasn't afraid that one man could take over the plane, but an oft-overlooked hole in airline security (at the time - now all check-in bags are screened) was the prospect of a man checking in a bag filled with explosives, that could then be detonated in flight by a simple call from a cellphone (something that the man had attached to his belt).

I briefly spoke to one of the flight attendants, voicing my concern and describing the man's increasingly strange behavior in the terminal. After take-off, the attendant came back to my seat and whispered that the terminal employees and crew had also voiced suspicions about the man, that they had completed a thorough check of his flight history, and that everything "seemed ok." (whatever that meant)

The plane failed to explode, the flight passed without incident, the pretzels were stale, I was overly paranoid, and the attendant told me on the way out, "I couldn't tell you this during the flight, but we had an air marshall on board, so everything would have been ok!" Sure ... tell that to a cellphone detonator.

So, how does this story relate to the piece floating around the net? In some ways, my experience (though FAR more benign), sounds similar: Suspicious behavior, concerned passenger talks to someone, gets an uncomfortable response. But, let me tell you, if I witnessed the behavior that Ms. Jacobsen describes, I would have had more than a brief, polite conversation with one of the gentlemen; I would have demanded an explantion from one or more of them, asking what exactly they were doing. At the very least, the crew should have said something. I find it very hard to believe that no passengers had the guts or powers of observation to more forcefully address the suspected terrorists and tell them to sit the fuck down.

Don't get me wrong, I may have been overly worried on my flight, but in the end, I'd say that I felt pretty comfortable with my actions - better safe than sorry. An alert public is the primary line of defense from terrorism. And if a dozen seriously suspicious men were acting like such weirdos on a plane, I can't imagine why that many people would choose to simply tremble in fear for the duration of a four-hour flight.

Err on the side of caution; if you're wrong, you're wrong. If you're right, you're definitely dead if you don't do something.