Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 272
May 23, 2019
May 22, 2019
The U.S. Navy’s Secret Sea Mammal Operatives
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
While canines may be the most well-known animal soldier used by the military today, sea mammals have been employed by the armed forces for nearly sixty years. Recently, a beluga whale employed by Russia as a spy defected to Norway, but the Kremlin isn’t the only military using cetaceans. To this day, the U.S. Navy keeps a contingent of dolphins and sea lions trained to facilitate military operations.
In 1960, American engineers captured a Pacific white-sided dolphin in hopes of studying the animal and improving their torpedo designs. The dolphin never helped make torpedoes any better, but researchers were impressed with the animal’s intelligence and trainability. In the following years, training facilities were set up in conjunction with the construction of SEALAB II, an underwater habitat used for testing by the U.S. Navy. A bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy was trained to deliver tools and messages from the surface to the underwater research station.
Tuffy
By 1967, the program—now known as the Navy Marine Mammal Program—was classified, and its budget was hidden as a black ops program. Not much is known about the program in the ensuing decades, but training bases were set up in San Diego and Hawaii. After pushes for transparency in the 1990s, some details about the program’s activities were revealed. By this time, a reported 140 animals were enrolled in the program.
Mostly made up of bottlenose dolphins and sea lions, five marine mammal teams can be deployed at a moment’s notice anywhere around the world. Within 72 hours the animals and their handlers can be launched from ships, aircraft, or land vehicles. Most recently, Navy marine mammals have served as mine hunters. Even with 60 years of advancement in sonar and radar, dolphins’ natural sonar proves to be much more sensitive to searching for objects in the open ocean. Likewise, sea lions have excellent low-light vision underwater and are more maneuverable than even the most experienced divers.
A Navy seal placing a recovery line on a test object.
Marine mammals are also used to patrol ports and act as lookouts for ships. With their keen senses, they can spot enemies and even be trained to attach recovery lines, tracking devices, and even explosives as needed. Dolphin and sea lion sentries were first deployed during the Vietnam War, and then later in Bahrain during the 1980s.
In addition to all of that, dolphins are often used to assist human divers who become lost. The Navy has also trained them to recover bodies from sunken planes and lost munitions when the threat to human divers is too high.
Cleromancy, Scrying Bones, And Witch Initiation
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
For millennia, society has turned to witches, prophets, and shamans to perceive the future and offer guidance. The seer subculture has long fascinated western culture, from the soothsayer warning about the Ides of March in Shakespeare’s Caesar to the Red Woman—Melisandre—in Game of Thrones, fortune telling has left its mark in the dark channels of real history just as much as the world of fiction it has inspired.
Though there are countless rituals for divining the future across factions of mystics across the world, cleromancy is perhaps one of the most iconic. Cleromancy rituals rely on an assortment of objects being randomly thrown out of a vessel—often referred to as an oracle—to be interpreted. The randomness of scattering beads, shells, or bones is thought to channel the mystic forces of chaos to reveal an unadulterated omen from on high. A nearly universal form of divination, consulting random lots is referenced in the second millennium B.C. in China, in ancient Rome, numerous times in the Christian Bible, by Germanic tribes in the first century, and by West African religions.
As Christianity washed over Europe, many of these traditional scrying rituals became outlawed in favor of church-controlled direction. It wasn’t until the rise of occult factions in the 1800s that scrying vessels like the one below emerged.
Bearing occult imagery most associated with Temple of the Golden Dawn, the oracle, in this case, serves as a legend for interpreting the human bones within. Hand-inscribed and flanked by turquoise beads and flowers, records indicate it was used in initiation rituals of some kind.
While consulting bones and shells may seem foolish by today’s standards, many divination rituals provided the cultures they served with some sort of benefit. In the case of Batak rituals, shamans sought to determine the best time for planting by carefully observing the monsoon season, serving much the same role as a modern-day meteorologist. Cleromancy perhaps allowed a mystic to share their guidance from a non-biased point of view, or from a place of heightened authority. Today, one modern woman even uses what she calls “asparamancy,” to give public commentary.
May 21, 2019
May 20, 2019
The Medical Mystery Of Tarrare, A Cannibalistic French Spy
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The walking manifestation of one of the seven deadly sins prowled the cobbled streets of 18th-century Paris, seeking only to indulge his endless hunger. Earlier in life, his dietary needs started out robustly, but were otherwise innocuous. However, things would soon take a sinister turn so far as this overzealous diner was concerned. According to contemporary accounts and existent medical records, his quenchless appetite continued growing to the point that his legendarily gluttonous gorging caused this ravenous Frenchman to ingest live animals and maraud morgues for sustenance. He was once even suspected of kidnapping and devouring a toddler.
The crack team at Ripleys.com was able to speak with a doctor who specializes in science-based nutrition in search of a possible diagnosis, but first, let’s chew the fat on the life of this legendary cannibal and his strange circumstances of existence. Be warned, this is not for the weak of heart—but if you think you can stomach it, then strap in!
The Sad, Voraciously Unquenchable Existence of Tarrare
Paris, Circa 1788
With a large, lip-less mouth stretched wide beyond human regularity and filled with stained teeth, he ate corks, stones, entire baskets of apples—one at a time in quick succession—and live animals (his favorite was snake) for the morbid amusement of repulsed onlookers that were challenged to satiate his seemingly interminable appetite.
Like most modern competitive binge-eaters, Tarrare was diminutive in stature, weighing no more than one hundred pounds—prior to eating, at least. Despite all of his daily intake, he never seemed to keep any of the weight on. When empty, his stomach was loosely distended to the point that he could wrap it around his waist as if it were a belt made of his own, still-attached flesh. When full, it was inflated like a balloon—not unlike a pregnant woman in her final trimester. His hair was fair and soft, while his cheeks, when not engaged at capacity—allegedly able to hold so much as a dozen eggs—were wrinkled and hung slack to create premature jowls.
Prior to life as a successful street performer, the individual is known only by his stage name, Tarrare, lived in destitution as part of a traveling caravan of criminal misfits. Born in the rural countryside surrounding the epicenter of the booming silk-weaving trade in Lyon, France in approximately 1772, his rapacious appetite was readily apparent from an early age. As the legend goes, a young Tarrare was capable of eating his own bodyweight in cow meat within a 24-hour period. Sadly, this boundless craving forced him out of his family’s home as a teenager, as they could no longer afford to feed him.
After several years of touring the country as a vagabond begging for food, for a time Tarrare became the opener for a snake-oil peddling mountebank before taking off to Paris to perform as a solo act. With success came risk. Tarrare once collapsed mid-performance with what was later discovered to be an intestinal obstruction, requiring his audience to carry him to the nearby Hôtel-Dieu hospital. After being treated with laxatives, a grateful Tarrare offered to demonstrate his talents by eating the surgeon’s pocket watch. The surgeon agreed, but only under the condition that he be allowed to cut Tarrare open to retrieve it. Wisely, Tarrare declined.
“Let a person imagine all that domestic or wild animals, the most filthy and ravenous, are capable of devouring, and they may form some idea of the appetite, as well as the wants of Tarrare.”—Dr. Pierre-François Percy, Mémoire sur la polyphagie.
Soultz-Haut-Rhin, Circa 1792
It was during the French War of the First Coalition when respected military surgeon Dr. Pierre-François Percy first made the acquaintance of the inexplicable Tarrare, now a soldier for the French Revolutionary Army. Barely twenty years old, this peculiar patient proved to be quite extraordinary. Unable to subsist off of military rations alone, Tarrare began doing odd jobs around the base for other soldiers in exchange for their rations and, when that proved to be insufficient, foraged for food scraps in dunghills. Despite all of his scrounging, Tarrare succumbed to exhaustion and was admitted to a military hospital under the care of Dr. Percy.
There, even being granted quadruple rations failed to satiate his hunger. Tarrare began to eat out of the garbage, steal the food of other patients, and even chow down on the hospital’s bandage supply. Psychological testing found Tarrare to be apathetic, but otherwise sane.
Percy’s report described Tarrare as having bloodshot eyes and constantly being overheated and sweating, with a body odor so rancid that he could be smelled from twenty feet away—and that’s by 18th-century French military surgeon standards. Woof. The smell only got worse after eating. Percy described it as being so bad he literally had visible stink lines.
After eating, Tarrare would succumb to the itis and pass out. Percy observed this after preparing a meal made for fifteen to test Tarrare’s limits, which he predictably porked down. Percy continued this experiment by feeding Tarrare live animals: a cat—which he drank the blood of and after consuming, like an owl, he only regurgitated its fur—lizards, snakes, puppies, and an entire eel.
Months of experimentation passed before the military discovered a way to put Tarrare’s unique ability to use: Tarrare was commissioned as a spy for the French Army of the Rhine. His first mission was to secretly courier a document across enemy lines in a place that it could not easily be detected if caught: his digestive tract. After being paid with a wheelbarrow full of thirty pounds of raw bull viscera—which he ate immediately upon presentation directly in front of what we can only imagine to be the incredibly revolted generals and other commanding officers—Tarrare swallowed a wooden box containing a document that could pass through his system completely in-tact and be delivered to a high-ranking prisoner of war in Prussia.
As one might expect, an individual who smells like a foot and compulsively eats from the garbage would likely attract attention—not exactly the ideal, hallmark makings of a spy.
Compound this with the fact that Tarrare did not speak any German and he was quickly caught, beaten, imprisoned, and forced to undergo the psychological torment of a mock execution before being returned to France.
Again under the care of Dr. Percy, the trauma Tarrare endured left him incapable of continuing his military service and desperate to find a cure for his condition. Laudanum opiates, wine vinegar, tobacco pills, and a diet of soft-boiled eggs were all employed, but Tarrare was still forced to walk the streets fighting stray dogs for discarded slaughterhouse cuisine, drink the blood of patients who were being treated with bloodletting, and was even caught consuming cadavers from the hospital morgue multiple times. Eventually, a toddler went missing from the hospital and Tarrare, the suspected culprit, was chased from the premises before disappearing into the city.
Francisco Goya’s Saturn Eating Cronus
Versailles, Circa 1798
“His body, as soon as he was dead, became a prey to a horrible corruption.”— The London Medical and Physical Journal.
Dr. Percy is contacted by a physician of Versailles hospital at the behest of a patient on their deathbed. Sure enough, it was Tarrare, now brought to death’s door by what he professed to be a golden fork he had swallowed two years previously and was now lodged inside of him. It had been four years since Percy had last seen Tarrare, who hoped he could save his life by removing the fork. Unfortunately for Tarrare, it was not a fork that was killing him, but end-stage tuberculosis. Within a month, he passed.
A curious colleague intended to inspect Tarrare’s corpse. However, fellow surgeons refused to partake and it quickly became a race against the clock as the body began to rot rapidly. Findings from the autopsy revealed that Tarrare possessed a shockingly-wide esophagus which allowed spectators to look directly from his open mouth into his stomach, which was unfathomably large and lined with ulcers. His body was full of pus, his liver and gallbladder abnormally large, and the fork was never recovered.
Discovering the Diagnosis Behind This Bizarre Medical Mystery
So, what was the cause of Tarrare’s insatiable hunger? In short, we don’t know for sure. When contemporary medical procedures of the time included drinking raw mercury to clear out head demons (probably), should it come as a surprise that Tarrare received no suitable diagnosis or treatment in his own lifetime?
However, some interesting theories have been suggested over the years. Ripleys.com was able to speak to Dr. Don Moore, a chiropractor certified in science-based nutrition and owner and operator of Synergy Pro Wellness, to get his take on things.
“Memoir of a Polyphage,” written by Dr. Percy
Now, granted, there is a possibility that Dr. Percy’s personal documentation in the years following Tarrare’s death were exaggerated or falsified, but they were considered credible enough at the time of their publication to be featured in reputable medical texts such as The Study of Medicine, Popular Physiology, and London Medical and Physical Journal. Plus, Dr. Percy is considered the father of military surgeons, was Chief Surgeon to the French Army, a university professor, inventor of important battlefield medical implements, and is considered an all-around highly reputable guy. So, given we accept the above tale as an accurate representation of Tarrare’s symptoms, what does Dr. Moore have to say about it?
“It can be broken down by category: He didn’t suffer from psychosis, so he was completely aware and cognitive. But that doesn’t rule out hyperactivity of hormones and dysfunction of components of the brain. His sensor that would let him know he was full was damaged. If he underwent a brain study, he would have probably been identified as having had an enlarged hypothalamus.”
The hypothalamus regulates the body’s temperature and is responsible for causing the sensation of hunger. Given Tarrare was constantly overheated and in dire search of food, it’s a perfect fit. Dr. Moore also suspects a possible case of pica, which causes the eating of non-edible objects.
As for why Tarrare never weighed more than one hundred pounds, Dr. Moore adroitly theorizes, based on his habitually eating raw meat: “He most likely had a parasite as well. The fact that he was of normal size means something else is being nourished, and the fact that he was constantly hungry leans towards him feeding a secondary organism. A parasite like a hookworm or roundworm, perhaps.”
Hookworms are intestinal parasites that feed off their hosts.
There exist other equally plausible theories as well: hyperthyroidism, which can cause an excessive appetite and sweating, as well as fine hair; Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition which causes constant hunger, even for non-edible items; extreme iron deficiency, which causes cravings for the same; a damaged amygdala is also a possibility, as it can cause polyphagia, the medical term for extreme overeating.
Interestingly, a case similar—albeit less extreme—to Tarrare’s was reported at the exact same time and in the exact same area, that of Charles Domery, which may point to a common environmental cause. Given that all of this occurred concurrently with the French Revolution, which was built on a foundation of famine, a shared nutritional deficiency may be at fault. Any of or a combination of the aforementioned could be what caused Tarrare to be an anthropophaginian, or, in other words, induced his cannibalistic tendencies. We’ll never know for sure.
In all, this tale sounds more like something from the mythos of Stephen King than it does an unresolved mystery from the pages of medical history. Whatever the cause, it may be easy to ridicule Tarrare and label him a monster, but it would be more accurate to categorize his case as a tragedy. Tarrare did not ask for his deleteriously high metabolism and there is no telling how he personally felt about the grotesque actions it pushed him to commit. Imagine a hunger so agonizing that it pushes you to eat anything—anything—to sate it. Nevertheless, all that we can do now is be thankful for the advances in medical technology that have prevented more cases like this from occurring and, until next time, Believe It or Not!
By Kris Levin, contributor for Ripleys.com
Kris Levin is a traveling storyteller, professional wrestling referee, and everybody’s favorite nephew. He can be seen internationally on IMPACT Wrestling as their most junior official, #KidRef, and on social media at @RefKrisLevin .
Source: The Medical Mystery Of Tarrare, A Cannibalistic French Spy
When An Or Not Becomes A Believe It: Cartoonist John Graziano
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
John Graziano grew up on the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, where he discovered his passion for creativity and aptitude for art.
As a teenager, Graziano visited the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium in St. Augustine, Florida, and was intrigued at how Robert Ripley made a living by telling strange and unbelievable stories in cartoon form. At the age of 15, he submitted samples of his work to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and received an encouraging reply to pursue his education and to reach out again in the future.
Most would be deterred, but Graziano appreciated the advice and acted on it.
He majored in Illustration at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art in New Jersey. Following graduation, he started working for a T-shirt company as an illustrator. After 11 years, he contacted Ripley’s again inquiring about a cartoonist position.
Believe It or Not! Ripley’s was looking for a fresh hand to draw the strip and Jersey boy John Graziano got the gig. He has been illustrating the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” cartoon ever since!
Believe It!
Fast forward 15 years, and Graziano is still doing what he loves, hand drawing the cartoon every day for Believe It or Not! fans, just as he enjoyed when he was a kid.
“When you get up in the morning, and you’re doing what you love to do, you feel like you’re not working.” – John Graziano, Cartoonist, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
It’s this dedication that led Graziano to the 73rd Annual NCS Reuben Awards. As only the seventh artist to take up the pen since Robert Ripley, Graziano was a 2018 NCS Divisional Award nominee at the Awards held on May 18th, 2019 in Huntington Beach, CA. The only other Ripley’s cartoonist to achieve (and win) such an honor was Paul Frehm in 1976 from the National Cartoonist Society.
Graziano was nominated in the category of Variety Entertainment, a new category this year to showcase the unique illustrations of newspaper, magazine, and online comic features that contain puzzles, games, activities, trivia, history, or instruction.
Steeped in History
Robert Ripley’s first “Believe It or Not!” cartoon appeared in the New York Globe on December 19, 1918–over 100 years ago, launching an adventurous career of curating stories of oddities from around the world. The hand-drawn cartoon has continued over time and is the longest-running syndicated cartoon in history.
Congratulations John Graziano on your nomination! You’ve truly given illustration to the unbelievable and have proven that even the wildest childhood dream can come true. Believe It or Not!
Source: When An Or Not Becomes A Believe It: Cartoonist John Graziano
May 19, 2019
May 18, 2019
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