When Neil Godfrey, a United passenger out of Philly, went throught airport security, they searched his bag and found a novel about environmental revolutionaries, and detained him, but eventually allowed him on the flight. Later, a United Flight Attendant informed him that he’d been barred from flying. Yes, that was just about the stupidest, most outrageous thing I’d ever heard of, but then:

Godfrey scurried back to the airport, leaving the Abbey novel at home. He exchanged it for a seemingly benign novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

When Godfrey arrived at the airport around 1:15 p.m., his luggage was again searched. But as Godfrey passed through the metal detector, a police officer recognized him from the commotion just a few hours earlier. The cop pulled Godfrey aside and made a few phone calls. Ultimately, he declared that everything checked out fine. But a National Guardsman standing nearby vetoed that decision.

“This time, they took my Harry Potter book and about four people studied it for 20 minutes,” Godfrey says.

Again, United refused to allow him to fly.

When I went through Soviet customs in 1984, they took a look at the cover of the novel I was carrying, Larry Niven’s The Patchwork Girl and spent some time considering whether to allow me into the country with it, but eventually decided that it was just a novel, what the hell. Amazing to think that the National Guard is more censorious of popular literature than machinegun-toting Stalinist soldiers on the Finnish border were. Link Discuss (Thanks, fom!)