OH, NUTS
Then in 2009, after “cello scrotum” was mentioned in yet another British Medical Journal article, Dr. Elaine Murphy, a former medical school professor serving in the British House of Lords, came forward and admitted that the ailment was a hoax. Dr. Murphy and her husband, John M. Murphy—the J. M. Murphy who signed the original letter—had gotten such a laugh out of Dr. P. Curtis’s original “guitar nipple” letter in 1974 that they decided to try and top it. “Somewhat to our astonishment, our letter was published,” she wrote. “Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realize the physical impossibility of our claim.”
That clears up “cello scrotum”…but what about “guitar nipple”? After all, it’s been written up in many prestigious publications, including the British Medical Journal (and Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader). So, if you play the guitar, should you still be on guard against it? Probably not—Dr. Murphy says she and her husband had suspected back in 1974 that it, too, was a hoax. “The following Christmas we sent a card to Dr. Curtis of ‘guitar nipple’ fame, only to discover that he knew nothing about it,” Dr. Murphy wrote. “Another joke, we suspect.”
LIFE IMITATES ART
Typically, fiction is based on real-life events. But some things first appear in fiction���only to be repeated later in reality.
ON THE SCREEN: In the 1984 “mockumentary” film
This Is Spinal Tap, the fictitious band orders their prop maker to build them a 12-foot-tall statue of Stonehenge. But there’s a miscommunication. Result: When the statue is lowered to the stage during a live performance, it’s only 12 inches tall.
IN REAL LIFE: Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, told this story to London’s The Times: “Back in 1999, we were supposed to be using a giant gong on stage that was about five feet high, and I would slam it dramatically. But at one show in Barcelona, someone screwed up: The gong was more like one of those pathetic little dinner gongs that a Chinese restaurant would use to tell everyone dessert was being served. I don’t know how much closer to Spinal Tap you could get.”
ON THE SCREEN: In 1929 German film director Fritz Lang made one of the first science fiction movies, Frau im Mond (The Lady in the Moon). In the scene where the rocket launches, Lang wanted to add more dramatic tension. So instead of using the standard method of counting up to a predetermined number (1-2-3-launch), Lang used a countdown: 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.
IN REAL LIFE: Three decades later when NASA began sending rockets into space, it adopted the countdown popularized by Lang.
ON THE SCREEN: In Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho (and in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film that starred Anthony Perkins), innkeeper Norman Bates impersonates his dead mother and blames “her” for the crimes he commits.
IN REAL LIFE: In 2003 Thomas Parkin of New York City pretended to be his deceased mother so he could collect her Social Security and benefits. He even wore a wig, sunglasses, and painted nails when he went to the DMV to renew “her” license. In 2009 when police arrested Parkin, he said, “I held my mother when she was dying and breathed in her last breath, so I am my mother.”
ON THE SCREEN: On a February 2009 episode of the comedy show Flight of the Conchords, the prime minister of New Zealand attempts to arrange a meeting with America’s new president, Barack Obama. He’s denied, though, because the U.S. “doesn’t recognize New Zealand as a country.”
IN REAL LIFE: A few weeks later, New Zealand’s real prime minister, John Key, attempted to arrange a meeting with Obama, but was denied. “I’m a bit of the view that he’s got so many things to deal with and, on a relative basis, we are a pretty small country,” said Key.
ON THE SCREEN: In the Friday the 13th movies, a deranged man named Jason dons a hockey mask and attacks his victims with an axe. Some of his victims fight back.
IN REAL LIFE: At a party for the premiere of 2009’s Friday the 13th remake, an actor who played Jason in a previous movie jumped onto the stage with the trademark axe and hockey mask. A nearby woman must have thought it was real, because she wrestled the axe away from him, severely slashing his hand. “It was straight out of a horror movie,” said a witness, “Lingerie-clad models were screaming, as a blood-soaked Jason ran off the runway to get to a hospital.”
ON THE SCREEN: In the 1988 movie Naked Gun, Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) leaves a press conference to go to the restroom…forgetting that his lapel microphone is still on. Outside, everyone can hear him peeing while he sings to himself.
IN REAL LIFE: In 2006 CNN was covering President Bush’s speech on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. But in addition to the president’s plans to rebuild New Orleans, viewers heard CNN anchor Kyra Phillips go to the restroom, where she complained to a coworker about how hard it is to find a compassionate man. Then a loud zip was heard. (That’s when CNN finally turned off her microphone.)
MORE REAL LIFE: In 2009 the cast of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother was doing a Q&A session with fans when Neil Patrick Harris got up to go to the bathroom…with his mic still on. His publicist could hear the shuffling sounds and ran in to tell Harris to turn it off, but not before everyone in the room heard the actor unzip and say to himself, “Wake up!”
ENGLAND’S ROSWELL
Most Americans are familiar with the legend of the UFO landing near Roswell,
New Mexico in 1947. But what about the “Incident at Rendlesham” that took
place near Ipswich, England, the day after Christmas in 1980? It’s been cited
by UFO buffs as one of the most credible sightings of the 20th century.
NOT-SO-SILENT NIGHT
Just before 3:00 a.m. on the morning of December 26, 1980, a bright light was seen racing across the night sky over Rendlesham Forest, which separates two Royal Air Force bases: RAF Bentwaters to the north, and RAF Woodbridge, which juts out of the forest’s western edge. The strange light made no noise, but the sight was so startling that the airmen who saw the light thought that an aircraft might have crashed in the forest. They asked for permission to investigate.
Three U.S. Air Force airmen who were patrolling Woodbridge —Staff-Sergeant Jim Penniston, Airman Edward Cabansag, and Airman First Class John Burroughs—were dispatched into the forest to take a look. Nearly 30 years later, they still can’t agree on what they saw among the trees—except for one thing: They all saw a lot of lights. Big lights. Little lights. Colored lights. “Blue, red, white, and yellow,” Cabansag wrote in a report several days later.
(SOMEWHAT) CLOSE ENCOUNTER
In his report, Penniston stated that he thought they had come within 50 yards of the source of the flashing lights. “It was definitely mechanical in nature. This is the closest point that I was near the object at any point. We then proceeded after it.” They moved closer to where they thought the object was, but they never seemed to get any closer to it—it appeared to move farther away as they approached. “It moved in a zig-zagging manner back through the wood and then [we] lost sight of it,” he wrote.
Even creepier than the unexplained lights were the noises. “Strange noises,” Burroughs wrote in his statement, “like a woman screaming. Also the woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises, and there was a lot of movement in the woods.”
The airmen were in the forest for about an hour before it became clear that whatever they were seeing and hearing, it wasn’t the result of an airplane crash. They were ordered back to base.
At 4:11 a.m., an airman named Chris Armold called the local police, the Suffolk Constabulary, and asked if they’d received any reports of a downed aircraft. They hadn’t, but they sent two officers out to examine the scene anyway. The officers saw nothing unusual. A short time later, Armold accompanied Burroughs on a second trip into the forest. “We could see lights in the distance, and it appeared unusual as it was a sweeping light,” Armold recalled in a 1997 interview. “We also saw some strange colored lights in the distance but were unable to see what the
y were.”
MAKING AN IMPRESSION
Then after daybreak, more airmen went into the same part of the forest. They found three small indentations in the ground, each one roughly 1½” deep and 7” in diameter, laid out on the ground in a triangular pattern. Were they made by the landing gear of a UFO? The airmen also noticed some strange marks in the surrounding trees: The bark had been removed and the sap had crystallized in the wound. Were they burn or scrape marks made when the UFO lifted off?
A second call to the Suffolk Constabulary brought another officer to the scene…but he didn’t note anything particularly unusual about the marks on the ground or in the trees.
DÉJÀ VIEW
That might have been the end of the “Incident at Rendlesham” were it not for the fact that on the following night (December 27), airmen on guard duty at the back gate of RAF Woodbridge, which faced Rendlesham Forest, again saw strange lights coming from the forest. When word of the sighting reached the deputy base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, he organized another team of airmen and sometime after midnight led them into the forest to investigate. This time the party brought a Geiger counter and a tape recorder, into which Halt recorded nearly 18 minutes of live observations as the group examined the site over the next four hours.
Halt’s tape recording makes for compelling listening: He and the search team examined the impressions in the ground and the marks on the trees, carefully taking radiation readings as they went. The strongest reading was from one of the indentations, which gave a reading of 0.07 millirems per hour. The men also noticed small branches that had been freshly broken off nearby trees about 15’ to 20’ off the ground, and reported hearing strange animal noises just like the first team had the night before.
WITH THEIR OWN EYES
Then, around 13 minutes into the 18-minute tape, Halt and the men suddenly saw a strange, flashing yellowish-red light in the forest. “It’s coming this way. It’s definitely coming this way! Pieces of it are shooting off,” Halt says into the tape recorder. “There is no doubt about it. This is weird!”
Halt and his team followed the strange light out of the forest, through a field, and past a farmer’s house into another field. “Now we have multiple sightings of up to five lights with a similar shape and all,” he says on the tape, “but they seem to be steady now rather than a pulsating or glow with a red flash.”
They crossed a creek as they pursued the lights, which were now considerably farther away. “Made sighting again about 110°,” Halt says. “This looks like it’s clear off to the coast. It’s right on the horizon. Moves about a bit, and flashes from time to time. Still steady or red in color.” The men saw strobe-light flashes, and then two “strange objects…with colored lights on ’em” to the north, and a similar object to the south, about 10 degrees off the horizon. “Hey, here he comes from the south, he’s coming toward us now,” Halt says. “Now we’re observing what appears to be a beam coming down to the ground. This is unreal!”
Halt and his men watched the strange lights for another 15 minutes, until 3:30 a.m., then headed back to base. At 4:00 a.m., Halt ends the tape by reporting, “One object still hovering over Woodbridge base at about 5 to 10 degrees off the horizon, still moving erratic and similar lights and beaming down as earlier.”
ON PAPER
In the days that followed, Halt had several of the witnesses to the events of December 26 submit written statements describing what they saw and experienced. He used these statements, along with his own recollections from the night of December 27, to write a one-page official memo titled “Unexplained Lights.” In it he describes the object that some witnesses claimed to have seen as “a strange glowing object…metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high.”
EXTRAORDINARY
Two separate sightings in the same place two days apart, each witnessed by numerous credible witnesses. Written statements describing what was seen, backed by police logs that confirm the dates and times. An official Air Force memo written by the deputy commander of the military base where the events took place. Physical evidence, in the form of indentations in the ground and marks on nearby trees. An actual tape recording of the second encounter as it unfolds. That’s a lot of evidence. Rarely—if ever—has a reported UFO encounter been documented as thoroughly as the Incident at Rendlesham.
So what really happened in the woods those two nights? Part II of the story is on page 499.
NOW THAT’S A CLOSE ENCOUNTER
“Alleged victims of UFO abductions occasionally claim to have had sexual relationships with the occupants of extraterrestrial spaceships. Such an incident is referred to by some writers as a Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV), although others use the term to denote only an abduction in which no sexual activity has occurred. Mating between earthlings and extraterrestrials is a theme encountered in the arguments of supporters of the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis. Many of them believe that the human race was actually the result of the interbreeding of extraterrestrials and some advanced species of animal on Earth, such as Bigfoot.”
—The UFO Encyclopedia
PRIMETIME PROVERBS
Some “wisdom” from the flickering oracle in your living room.
ON TRUTH
“The truth ain’t like puppies, a bunch of them running around, you pick your favorite. There’s one truth, and it has come a knockin’.”
—Emerson, Pushing Daisies
“Lies are like children—they’re hard work, but it’s worth it because the future depends on them.”
—Dr. House, House, M.D.
ON ADVERTISING
“What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
—Don Draper, Mad Men
ON CHURCH
“I love it here, man. You can sing as loud as you want. That dude wails away on the organ. That dude up there tells stories. It’s almost a religious experience!”
—Leo, That ’70s Show
ON DISAPPOINTMENT
“I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.”
—Bart, The Simpsons
ON PAIN
“I’m no VIP, I’m not even an IP; I’m just a lonely little P sitting out here in the gutter.”
—Robin, How I Met Your Mother
“Maybe we like the pain. Because without it, maybe we just wouldn’t feel real. What’s that saying: ‘Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.’ ”
—Meredith, Gray’s Anatomy
ON BEING YOURSELF
Jack: I don’t believe in destiny.
Locke: Yes you do; you just don’t know it yet.
—Lost
Frank: I tried nice once. Didn’t care for it.
Marie: Is that what happened to smart?
—Everybody Loves Raymond
ON ART
“Sometimes for an artist, the only difference between insanity and genius is success.”
—Reid, Criminal Minds
ON INTELLIGENCE
Sanders: I’m like a sponge: I just absorb information.
Grissom: I thought that was my line.
Sanders: Yes, and I absorbed it.
—CSI
“I learned a valuable lesson that night. If you’re going to try to fly a bicycle, you’d better make sure E.T. is sittin’ in your basket instead of a twelve-pack of beer.”
—Earl, My Name Is Earl
Dan: You’re 19 feet tall! Why are you wearing heels?
Sally: Are you feeling diminutive?
Dan: No, but now I have to go look up that word.
—Sports Night
ON TELEVISION
“I do not like television. Notice how I didn’t say ‘TV,’ for ‘TV’ is a nickname, and nicknames are reserved for friends, and television is no friend of mine.”
—David, Mr. Show with Bob & David
ON G
OING TO WORK
“When I tell people that I work at Dunder Mifflin, they think that we sell mufflers or muffins or mittens…and frankly, all of those sound better than paper so I let it slide.”
—Jim, The Office
ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE
“Criminals are the vomit of society, and we cops are the sawdust.”
—Deputy Garcia, Reno 911
ON EGO
“The only person more self-centered than me is Carlos; he’s so self-centered, he doesn’t even know how self-centered I am.”
—Gabrielle, Desperate Housewives
ON BELIEF
“I believe that the moon does not exist. I believe that vampires are the world’s greatest golfers but their curse is they never get a chance to prove it. I believe that there are 31 letters in the white alphabet. Wait…what was the question?”
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader Page 44