All My Contacts Got Deleted...

Before you bash me for not searching... I did search, but nothing I found seemed to pertain to me. All the "Deleted Contacts" threads I found (well, most at least) involved MobileMe. I don't have MobileMe. Nor do I have any contacts associated with any email address. All the contacts I added had been done with the "+" sign on the contacts page.

So this is what happened. I got on a plane this morning and shut my phone off. All my contacts were there. I got off the plane later and turned my phone on. I noticed that all the names in my text messages were just phone numbers. No big deal, I've seen it take a while for the whole system to boot up and show names. Well, quite a while went by and the names weren't showing up. I finally opened up my contacts and nothing was there. "No Contacts" was all it said. I pressed the "Favorites" button and the names were there for half a second, then reverted back to plain ol' numbers.

What would make all my contacts spontaneously disappear like that? I'm afraid to connect the phone to iTunes because if my contacts are backed up, I don't want the two to sync and do something like "oh, there's no contacts on this iPhone, so I'll delete all the contacts in the backup file."

Any suggestions? I mean, I didn't delete the contacts, so they still should be somewhere on the phone, right? Hopefully this is just a fixable OS glitch...

Thanks in advance.