Was the corpse in Elvis’s coffin a wax dummy?
• Some theorists believe that Elvis’s coffin weighed more than it was supposed to. Brewer-Giorgio reports receiving a letter from an Elvis fan who claimed to have personally known the man who made the King’s coffin. The coffin maker revealed that the casket was a rush order—and that there was no way the coffin could have weighed 900 pounds, as the press reported—even with the King in it. So what was in the coffin with Elvis that made it so heavy?
• According to Brewer-Giorgio, the discrepancy between the coffin’s actual weight with Elvis in it and its weight at the funeral is about 250 to 275 pounds, “the weight of a small air-conditioner.” “Was there an air-conditioner in the coffin?” Brewer-Giorgio asks, “Wax dummy? Something cool to keep the wax from beading up?”
• To many witnesses, Elvis’s corpse appeared to be “sweating” at the funeral. Brewer-Giorgio says she asked Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager, about TV reports that there were “beads of sweat” on Elvis’s body. “He said that was true, that everyone was sweating because the air-conditioner had broken down. Except that dead bodies do not sweat.” But wax melts.
Why were the mourners acting so strange at the funeral?
• Parker wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap to Elvis’s funeral and never once approached the casket to say farewell to the King. Elvis’s fans argue that if Elvis were really dead, Parker would probably have shown a little more respect.
• Elvis’s hairdresser claims that he saw Esposito remove Elvis’s TCB (Takin’ Care of Business) ring from the corpse’s finger during the funeral services. Why would he remove one of Elvis’s favorite pieces of jewelry? Elvis would surely have wanted to have been buried with it—unless the corpse being buried wasn’t the King’s?
Is Elvis in the Federal Witness Protection Program?
• In 1970 Presley—a law enforcement buff—was made an honorary agent-at-large of the Drug Enforcement Administration by President Nixon, after a visit to the White House. According to some theorists, Presley became more than just an honorary agent—he actually got involved in undercover narcotics work.
• In addition to his DEA work, Elvis may have been an FBI agent. During the same trip to Washington, D.C., Elvis also wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, volunteering his confidential services to the FBI. Hoover wrote back thanking Elvis for his offer, but there is no record of him ever taking it up. Still, Brewer-Giorgio and other theorists argue that the government may have been keeping the King’s government service a secret.
• According to Brewer-Giorgio, Elvis was also “a bonded deputy with the Memphis Police and was known to don disguises and go out on narc busts.”
• Elvis took his law enforcement role seriously. More than one biography details the time that the King ran out onto the runway of the Las Vegas airport, flagged down a taxiing commercial airliner, and searched it for a man whom he believed had stolen something from him. Elvis looked around, realized his quarry wasn’t aboard, and gave the pilot permission to take off.
• Some theorists believe that Elvis’s extensive work in law enforcement made him a target for drug dealers and the Mob—and that he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program out of fear for his life. According to Brewer-Giorgio, when Elvis supplied the information that sent a major drug dealer to prison, the King and his family received death threats.
Could Elvis Be in Hiding?
Hundreds of Elvis’s loyal fans think they have spotted the King since his “death.” He’s been sighted at a Rolling Stones concert, working at a Burger King in Kalamazoo, buying gas in Tennessee, and shopping for old Monkees records in Michigan. One woman even claims that Elvis gave her a bologna sandwich and a bag of Cheetos during a 1987 visit to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Could so many people be lying or mistaken?
OTHER MYSTERIES COLLECTED BY ELVIS FANS
• Vernon Presley never went to the hospital the night Elvis “died.” If Elvis were really dead, he probably would have.
• According to some reports, within hours of Presley’s death, souvenir shops near Graceland began selling commemorative T-shirts of his death. How could they have made so many T-shirts in so little time—unless Graceland had let them know about the “death” in advance?
• Elvis’s middle name, Aron, is misspelled “Aaron” on his tombstone. If he’s really dead, why don’t his relatives correct the mistake?
• Elvis is not buried next to his mother as he requested. Says Brewer-Giorgio: “‘Elvis loved his mother very much and always said he would be buried beside her,’ many fans have noted. ‘So why is he buried between his father and grandmother?’ they ask.”
• On a number of occasions after the King’s death, Priscilla Presley referred to Elvis as a living legend—strange words for a woman who believes that Elvis is dead.
• Before he died, Elvis took out a multimillion-dollar life insurance policy. To date, no one in his family has tried to claim it. If Elvis is really dead, why haven’t they cashed in the policy?
THE MOURNERS
• The people who were in Elvis’s home when he died insist that he really did die. Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager for 17 years, was one of the first people to see the body. “Believe me, the man that I tried to revive was Elvis.”
• Elvis may even have committed suicide. According to his step-brother David Stanley, “Elvis was too intelligent to overdose [accidentally]. He knew the Physician’s Desk Reference inside and out.” Why would Elvis take his own life? He was getting old, and the strain of his stagnating career may have become too much to bear. The pressure showed: in the last years of his life, Elvis’s weight ballooned to more than 250 pounds, and his addiction to prescription drugs had gotten out of control.
• The impending publication of a book chronicling the King’s vices may have been the final straw. In August 1977, the month of his death, two of his former aides were about to publish a book revealing much of his bizarre personal life to the public for the first time. He was already depressed, and the imminent public exposure of his drug habit may have pushed him over the edge.
REDUNDANCIES
hoist up
free of charge
recur again
enclosed herewith
excessive overharvesting
swivel around
new recruits
fellow colleagues
first priority
invited guest
completely satisfied
sink down
Myths About Mars
You’ve learned everything you know about Mars from old science fiction books, half-heard reports on CNN, and those Warner Bros. cartoons starring Marvin the Martian. Well, as it turns out, most of what you know about Mars is probably a little off base. We’re here to provide you with the real facts behind the myths.
MARS MYTH #1: Mars is the closest planet to Earth.
MARS REALITY #1: Sometimes it is, but on average, Venus is the closest planet to Earth. Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of 67.2 million miles (108.1 million km), while the Earth is parked at 93 million miles (149 million km) and Mars is out there at 141 million miles (226 million km). Pull out your handy calculator, and you’ll see that at its closest approach, Venus is about 25 million miles (40 million km) from Earth, while Mars’s closest approach is something like 48 million miles (77 million km). (Mars can actually get closer, thanks to its highly eccentric orbit, but never as close as Venus.) When Mars is on the far side of its orbit from Earth, it’s so far away that two planets are actually closer to us: Venus and tiny Mercury, which orbits the Sun at a distance of a mere 36 million miles (58 million km).
MARS MYTH #2: Mars is the planet most like Earth.
MARS REALITY #2: This depends on what you mean by “most like Earth.” It’s most like Earth in its surface features and weather, in its annual temperature range, its axial tilt, and its length of day (which is about 24 1/2 hours long). In terms of actual s
ize, Venus is closer to Earth’s size than Mars. With a radius of 7,500 miles (12,070 km), Venus is just 400 miles (644 km) smaller in diameter than Earth; Mars has a diameter of a mere 4,200 miles (6,759 km). Venus is also closer in terms of gravitational pull—on Venus you’d weigh 91 percent of what you do on Earth, while on Mars you’d weigh just 38 percent as much. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune also have similar gravitational pulls to Earth. In terms of water, the planet that is most like Earth is Jupiter’s moon Europa, which scientists think may have an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath a massive covering of ice. So while Mars is like Earth in some ways, in many other ways it’s not.
MARS MYTH #3: Mars is habitable by humans.
MARS REALITY #3: If you want to know what living on Mars is like, move to Antarctica, because that’s how cold it is on Mars: the average temperature is a nastily cold –85°F (–65°C). Now, once you’ve moved to Antarctica, remove 99 percent of the air from the atmosphere because Mars’s atmospheric pressure at the surface is just 1 percent of what Earth’s is. Not that you could use it anyway, since about 95 percent of Mars’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which you can’t breathe. Elton John got it right when he said, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” He should know; he’s the Rocket Man.
MARS MYTH #4: They’ve discovered water on Mars.
MARS REALITY #4: Not exactly. In 2002, NASA scientists discovered what they called a “whopping large” hydrogen signal underneath and surrounding the southern pole of Mars—a hydrogen signal that almost certainly means that there is water on Mars, trapped in the martian soil. This discovery is a good thing: Water is an important ingredient in life as we know it, boosting the chances for life on Mars, and it would make it easier for us to visit and even colonize one day. But it’s not clear whether any of that water is liquid; given Mars’s frigid temperatures, it’s more likely that any underground martian water is frozen.
In June 2000, NASA announced that they had found evidence that water might have once flowed on the martian surface—evidence in the form of gullies that looked a great deal like water-formed gullies on Earth. However, a year later, scientists from the University of Arizona noted that these gullies could have also been created by frozen carbon dioxide—carbon dioxide being the main ingredient of the atmosphere, and frozen carbon dioxide also being present in Mars’s ice caps.
MARS MYTH #5: Mars’s surface is covered with canals.
MARS REALITY #5: Nope. The idea of martian canals got its start with American astronomer Percival Lowell, who in the late 19th century mistranslated comments from an Italian astronomer about the possibility of huge canali, or “channels,” on the surface of Mars. Lowell thought canali meant “canals”—artificial structures made by advanced, intelligent creatures—rather than naturally occurring channels, which was the original idea. The existence of the canals was hotly debated for decades, until a visit from a Mariner spacecraft in the 1960s proved without a doubt that no canals (or channels, for that matter), existed at all—and there was no other sign of intelligent life on Mars. So that was that.
However, the canals still pop up from time to time. They’re featured in popular science fiction books by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein (both wrote many of their books before the question was settled). They were even a minor plot point in the 1996 movie Mars Attacks! By 1996 the filmmakers should have known better, but then it was a movie about martians attacking Earth, so you can’t beat on them for not being factually correct.
MARS MYTH #6: NASA spacecraft spotted a face on Mars.
MARS REALITY #6: The famous “face on Mars” was discovered in 1976 when NASA spacecraft Viking I snapped a picture of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars. The mesa looked disturbingly like an actual human face—a human face two miles (3 km) long, that is. Since then, “the face” has been a popular pop culture icon and was even featured in the really terrible 2000 flick Mission to Mars (in which it really was a face left there by old, dead martians).
In 2001 the Mars Global Surveyor took a finely detailed picture of the “face”—and this time it looked like . . . a big pile of rocks, which is exactly what it is. The “face” on the mesa is really nothing more than a combination of shadows and the poor imaging resolution of the camera attached to the Viking I spacecraft. There’s also a crater called Galle on Mars that looks like a “happy face.”
MARS MYTH #7: Scientists found microbes from Mars on Earth.
MARS REALITY #7: The martian microbes may or may not be real. What we’ve got here is a meteor named ALH 84001, found in Antarctica in 1984 and originally from Mars, in which scientists discovered some interesting things: little squiggles that looked similar to fossilized Earth bacteria, carbon (a primary ingredient of life), and some organic molecules. It was enough for NASA to announce in 1996 that there was a possibility of life once existing on Mars. Then the skeptics weighed in: The “squiggles” were too small to have been bacteria, the “fossils” could have been created by chemical processes without the need for living things, and the organic materials in the rock could have come from Antarctica, where the rock has been, after all, for about 13,000 years—plenty of time for contamination. The current status of the “microbes”? Well, they could be life. Or they might not be.
MARS MYTH #8: The martians sabotaged our spacecrafts so we wouldn’t find out about them.
MARS REALITY #8: The spacecrafts in question would be 1999’s ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander spacecrafts, both of which bit the big one after arriving at Mars. As interesting as it would be to say that these spacecrafts were knocked out of the sky by Marvin the Martian and his pals taking a little target practice, the fact is that both missions failed because of screwups back on Earth. The former spacecraft burned up in Mars’s atmosphere; the latter went plummeting to the surface.
REMEMBER THE 80s?
1985
Coca-Cola reintroduced “classic” Coke
Reagan met Gorbachev in first U.S./Soviet summit
Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 base hits
#1 movie: Back to the Future
Calvin and Hobbes comic strip premiered
1986
Space shuttle Challenger exploded
Martin Luther King Day became U.S. holiday
Soviet nuclear plant Chernobyl had major meltdown
Album of the Year: Paul Simon’s Graceland
On TV: Miami Vice, Cheers, Family Ties
The Rest of the United States
Here are some of the smaller, uninhabited islands owned by the United States. (Well, they may have a few inhabitants, but no natives.)
WAKE ISLAND
LOCATION: North Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands
SIZE: Two and a half square miles
POPULATION: 300
BACKGROUND: Wake Island is an atoll made up of three islets around a shallow lagoon. It was discovered in 1796 by British sea captain William Wake. The United States annexed it in 1899 for a telegraph cable station. An airstrip and naval base were built in late 1940, but in December 1941 the island was captured by the Japanese and held until the end of World War II. Today the facilities are under the administration of the Federal Aviation Agency.
KINGMAN REEF
LOCATION: North Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and American Samoa
SIZE: Less than one-half square mile
POPULATION: Uninhabited
BACKGROUND: The United States annexed this reef in 1922. There’s no plant life on the reef (which is frequently under water) but it does support abundant and diverse marine life. In 2001 the waters surrounding the reef were designated a National Wildlife Refuge.
MIDWAY ISLANDS
LOCATION: North Pacific Ocean, north of Hawaii
SIZE: Less than two and a half square miles
POPULATION: 150 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel
BACKGROUND: Part of the Hawaiian island chain, Midway was first discovered by a Hawaiian sea captain in 1859. At th
e urging of the North Pacific Mail and Steamship Company, which was looking for a coal depot for its Asian mail run, the U.S. Navy claimed the atoll for the United States in 1867. Midway is best known as the site of a U.S. naval victory over the Japanese fleet in 1942, one of the turning points of World War II. The naval station closed in 1993. Today the island is a wildlife refuge open to ecotourists.
GUANO ISLANDS
What is guano? Bird droppings. Fish-eating birds have been dropping their poop in the same spots for thousands of years. The result: huge deposits of guano, rich in nitrogen and phosphorous and highly valued as an agricultural fertilizer.
The Guano Act was enacted by the U.S. government in 1856. It authorized Americans to take “peaceable possession” of any uninhabited, unclaimed islands for the purpose of mining the guano. Nearly 100 islands were claimed for the United States under the act, mostly in the South Pacific. The United States still owns a half dozen—the others were abandoned or given up to other countries that claimed them. They’re not really anybody’s idea of paradise, so don’t expect to see any postcards from these tiny islands. But some of these poop-covered rocks have interesting histories.
NAVASSA ISLAND
LOCATION: Caribbean Sea, between Haiti and Jamaica
SIZE: Less than two and a half square miles
POPULATION: No permanent residents
BACKGROUND: The Baltimore-based Navassa Phosphate Company began mining guano in 1865, using convicts at first, then former slaves. In deplorable living conditions, the ex-slaves were forced to mine one and a half tons of guano per day for a daily wage of 50¢. In 1889 they revolted, killing 15 white overseers. Forty workers were taken to Baltimore for trial. Acknowledging the basis for the uprising, the court sentenced only one worker to death—the rest were given life imprisonment. The Navassa Phosphate Company continued to mine guano until 1898.
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