You example is subjects believing a false story given to them. That's different than someone reporting something that they believed they saw with no prompting from anyone else.
We don't know whether that happened in this case. Maybe journalist (who was there hours later) asked the eye witnesses "did you see smoke or hear strange sounds?" - if so, all bets are off.
Just because the specific story highlights one failing of eyewitness accounts doesn't mean there aren't many, many other ways they are spectacularly inaccurate.
