Plunge Plunge

Did you ever wonder what a Plunge Protection Team could be? Look this term up with your favourite search engine! But the very idea of a group of US officials ensuring the stability of the financial markets and the stock market "behind the curtains" sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me. Sort of a modernist version of Adam Smith´s Invisible Hand? And have those masters of stability been on holiday in 2001 or did they "only" prevent worse things? Or what kind of crash - e.g. a big one rolling in via a major meltdown in Asia - could outdo their counteractions? Could something go terribly wrong if more and more people believed there was a kind of foolproof protection waiting, therefor investing in an increasingly gambling way?