Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (67 page)

One day, when Damocles was speaking in his flattering way, Dionysius said, “Well now, Damocles, what are you saying? Would you like to be king in my place?”

Damocles was frightened. He didn’t want the king to think he was plotting to seize the throne. Quickly he replied, “Oh no, great king. I was only thinking how wonderful it would be to enjoy your riches for even one day.”

“It shall be as you desire,” said King Dionysius. “For one day, you shall enjoy the position and power and luxury of a king. You shall know exactly what it feels like to be in my place.”

The next day the astonished Damocles was led into the king’s chamber. He was dressed in royal robes and told that he could do whatever he wished.

Suddenly, as he leaned back among his silken cushions, he gasped with horror. Just above his head was an enormous sword hanging by a slender thread! If the thread broke, the sword would instantly fall and kill him. He sat, pale and trembling. Pointing to the sword in terror, he whispered, “That sword! That sword! Why is that sword hanging above me? Hanging by so slender a thread?”

“I promised you,” answered Dionysius, “that you should know exactly how it feels to live like a king, and now you know! Did you expect that you might enjoy all of a king’s riches for nothing? Do you not know that I always live with a sword hanging over my head? I must be on my guard every moment lest I be slain.”

Then Damocles answered, “O king, take back your wealth and your power! I would not have it for another moment. I would rather be a poor peasant living in a mountain hut than live in fear and trembling all the days of my life!”

Never again did Damocles envy the king.

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READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Here’s another newspaper hoax.

Nuclear War: It’s Hell!

(The
San Francisco Chronicle
, 1960)

The Story:
In 1960 the
San Francisco Chronicle
posed this question: If there were a nuclear war, “could an average city dweller exist in the wilderness tomorrow with little more than his bare hands?” The paper answered its own question by assigning outdoor columnist Harvey Boyd, his wife and their three children to spend the next six weeks living in a mountain wilderness area near San Francisco. The
Chronicle
called the series “The Last Man on Earth.”

Reaction:
In his articles, Boyd described the experience as “the most brutish, hellish, most miserable days of our lives.” But after several days of struggle, his son learned to capture frogs and Boyd himself learned how to trap a deer. After ten days, Boyd reported, he was feeling “ahead of the game at last.”

The Truth:
Editors at the rival
San Francisco Examiner
decided to check up on The Last Man on Earth…and found a campsite filled with modern conveniences and store-bought foods, including “matches, canned spaghetti, fresh eggs, watermelon, and the current
Reader’s Digest
.” The only thing missing: the Boyds themselves. The Last Man on Earth and his family had already gone home.

The “Incident at Roswell” is probably the biggest UFO story in history. Was it a military balbon…or an alien spacecraft? You be the judge, as the story continues. (Part I starts on
Page 251
.)

D
EJA VU

The Roswell story would probably have stayed dead if Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist, hadn’t lost his job during the 1970s. UFOs were Friedman’s hobby…until he got laid off; then it became his career. “In the 1970s, when the bottom fell out of the nuclear physics business,” he explains, “I went full time as a lecturer.” His favorite topic: “Flying Saucers ARE Real,” a talk that he gave at more than 600 different college campuses and other venues around the country.

In his years on the lecture circuit, Friedman developed a nation-wide reputation as a UFO expert, and people who’d seen UFOs began seeking him out. In 1978 he made contact with Jesse Marcel, the Army Intelligence Officer (now retired) who’d retrieved the wreckage from Mac Brazel’s ranch 31 years earlier.

At Friedman’s urging, Marcel gave an interview to the
National Enquirer.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Marcel told the supermarket tabloid, “I didn’t know what we were picking up. I still believe it was nothing that came from Earth. It came to Earth, but not
from
Earth.”

BACK IN THE HEADLINES

The
Enquirer
interview couldn’t have come at a more opportune time: it was 1979, and Steven Spielberg’s film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
which had premiered several months earlier, had stoked the public’s appetite for UFO stories. After lying dormant more than 30 years, the Roswell story blew wide open all over again.

From there the story just kept growing. Dozens of new “witnesses” to the Roswell UFO began seeking out Friedman at his public appearances to tell him their stories. Soon, the Roswell “cover-up” included humanoid alien beings. “Over the years,” Joe Nickell writes in the
Skeptical Enquirer
, “numerous rumors, urban legends, and outright hoaxes have claimed that saucer wreckage and the remains of its humanoid occupants were stored at a secret facility—the (nonexistent) ‘Hangar 18’ at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. People swear that the small corpses were autopsied at that or another site.”

• For the record, neither Mac Brazel nor Jesse Marcel ever claimed to have seen aliens among the wreckage. No one went public with those claims until more than 30 years after the fact.

WHY BELIEVE IN ROSWELL?

• Why are UFO conspiracy theories so popular? Anthropologists who study the “Roswell Myth” point to two psychological factors that help it endure:

1) It appeals to a cynical public that lived through the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam and other government crises, and who believe in the government’s proclivity for covering things up. As
Time
magazine reported on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident,

      
A state of mind develops which easily believes in cover-up. The fact that the military is known for ‘Covert’ activities with foreign governments having to do with weapons which could wipe out humanity makes the idea of secret interactions with aliens seem possible. Once this state of mind is in place, anything which might prove the crash was terrestrial becomes a lie.

2) UFO theories project a sense of order onto the chaos of the universe…and they can even serve as an ego boost to true-believers, because they suggest that we are interesting enough that aliens with vastly superior intelligence actually bother to visit us. Believing in aliens, the argument goes, is much more satisfying than believing that aliens are out there but would never want to visit us.

WAS THERE A CONSPIRACY?

So is our government hiding evidence of an alien crash-landing on earth?
In 1993 Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked the U.S. Government’s General Accounting Office to look into whether the U.S. government had ever been involved in a space-alien cover-up, either in Roswell, New Mexico, or anyplace else. The GAO
spent 18 months searching government archives dating back to the 1940s, including even the highly classified minutes of the National Security Council. Their research prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch its own investigation. It released its findings in September 1994; the GAO’s report followed in November 1995; then a second Air Force report was released in 1997.

PROJECT MOGUL

All three reports arrived at the same conclusion: what the conspiracy theorists believe were UFO crashes were actually top secret research programs run by the U.S. military during the Cold War.

Take Roswell: according to the reports, the object that crashed on Mac Brazel’s farm
was
a balloon, but no ordinary weather balloon: it was part of Project Mogul, a defense program as top secret as the Manhattan Project itself. Unlike the Manhattan Project, however, Project Mogul wasn’t geared toward
creating
nuclear weapons, it was geared toward
detecting
them if the Soviets exploded them.

In the late 1940s, the U.S. had neither spy satellites nor high-altitude spy planes that it could send over the Soviet Union to see if Stalin’s crash program to build nuclear weapons was succeeding. Instead, government scientists figured, “trains” of weather balloons fitted with special sensing equipment, if launched high enough into the atmosphere, might be able to detect the shock waves given off by nuclear explosions thousands of miles away.

Up, Up, and Away

Project Mogul was just such a program, the reports explained, and the object that crashed on Mac Brazel’s field in 1947 was “Flight R-4,” a Mogul balloon train that had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field—near the Roswell Base—in June 1947. The train of 20 balloons was tracked to within 17 miles of Mac Brazel’s ranch; shortly afterwards, radar contact was lost and the balloons were never recovered…at least not by the folks at Alamogordo. The Roswell intelligence officers who recovered the wreckage didn’t have high enough security clearance to know about Project Mogul, and thus they didn’t know to inform Alamogordo of the discovery.

On the whole, the program was successful—Project Mogul
apparently did detect the first Soviet nuclear blasts. Even so, the project was discontinued when scientists discovered that such blasts could also be detected on the ground, making the balloon-borne sensors unnecessary. The project was discontinued in the early 1950s.

OTHER PROJECTS

The Air Force’s 1997 report suggested that a number of other military projects that took place in the 1940s and 1950s became part of the Roswell Myth:

• In the 1950s the Air Force launched balloons as high as 19 miles into the atmosphere and dropped human dummies to test parachutes for pilots of the X-15 rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane. The dummies, the Air Force says, were sometimes mistaken for aliens…and because it didn’t want the real purpose of the tests to be revealed, it did not debunk the alien theories.

• Some balloons also dropped mock interplanetary probes, which looked like flying saucers.

• In one 1959 balloon crash, a serviceman crashed a test balloon 10 miles northwest of Roswell and suffered an injury that caused his head to swell considerably. The man, Captain Dan D. Fulgham, was transferred to Wright Patterson in Ohio for treatment. The incident, the Air Force says, helped inspired the notion that aliens have large heads and that aliens or alien corpses are being held at Wright Patterson for study.

NEVER SURRENDER

Do the GAO and Air Force reports satisfy people who previously believed the object was a UFO? Not a chance. “It’s a bunch of pap,” says Walter G. Haut, who worked at the Roswell base and after World War II, distributed the famous “flying saucer” news release in 1947, and is now president of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. “All they’ve done is given us a different kind of balloon. Then it was weather, and now it’s Mogul. Basically, I don’t think anything has changed. Excuse my cynicism, but let’s quit playing games.”

In modern society, an “old wives’ tale” is a common misconception. But in ancient times, it was essential wisdom. Makes you wonder how the things we believe will look in centuries to come.

I
n primitive times, people believed disease and death were caused by the invasion of demons. To protect themselves, they devised complex magical rites and ceremonies. Every group had a healer who had been chosen to learn and pass on the tribe’s medical “knowledge” and wisdom.

During the Middle Ages, these healers were “old wives” (
wife
simply meant “woman”) or “quack-salvers” (from the words
quack-en,
meaning “one who brags about their expertise,” and
salve,
meaning a type of cure.) Obviously, this is where the term “quack” comes from. But originally it didn’t imply fakery; “old wives” were respected members of society.

The following are some old wives’ cures which have been used for centuries. Some are strange and some, as it turns out, not so strange.

To reduce fever:
Drink boiled onions or carry a key in the palm of your hand.

To treat gout:
Walk barefoot in dewy grass.

For a headache:
Rub an onion over your forehead. (Another suggestion, popular in the 17th century, was to drive a nail into the skull.)

To get rid of corns:
Take brown paper, soak it in vinegar, and place it in a saucer under your bed. Dab the corn with saliva each day before breakfast.