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Jan. 20, 2015 - Skeptoid
16:23
Skeptoid #450: Robert Ripley: Believe Him... or Not?

We examine Believe it or Not! and determine if we can believe this stuff. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Believe It Or Not Origins 00:01:41
With his Believe It or Not comic strip, Robert Ripley challenged the limits of what millions of people would accept throughout the middle of the 20th century.
One thing you shouldn't believe, though, is that Ripley came up with all of these amazing items by himself.
No, that credit is due to one of the very greatest unsung writers and researchers who got every last item from the New York Public Library.
Ripley's Believe It or Not is coming up next on Skeptoid.
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The Truth Behind Shrunken Heads 00:06:07
Robert Ripley.
Believe him or not.
Robert Ripley has come to the American consciousness once again, some 65 years after his death.
A book by Neil Thompson and a PBS special tell the tale of a gangly kid with a talent for cartooning who made it big with a little help from Randolph Hearst.
But the basic question remains, can we actually believe it or not?
Ripley got his start as a cartoonist reporting on sports.
He'd picked one event from the night's contest and recreate it in a single cartoon panel.
One day when he couldn't find anything to focus on, he wrote a panel called Champs and Chumps that featured several small illustrations, each with a few words explaining something about them.
They seem tame by today's standards.
R.P. Williams made a running high kick of 10 feet 2 inches, New London, Connecticut, 1905.
Ed Lamey broad jumped on ice 25 feet 7 inches, Saranac Lake, 1913.
Jay Darby of England jumped backwards 12 feet 11 inches with weights.
And so on.
And from there, an empire was born.
But it's important to note this origin for one specific reason.
Ripley was drawing about things that actually happened, at least if the newswire was to be believed.
From the very start, Ripley was focusing on facts.
The Champs and Chumps piece was the most popular thing he'd done, and as time went on, he did more pieces like that and started including non-sports items.
When some doubt was thrown his way as to whether things were true, he decided to call the strip, Believe It or Not.
One of his most provocative pieces celebrated Charles Lindbergh as the 67th man to cross the Atlantic by air without any stops.
The 67th?
His office received a blizzard of protests that Ripley was besmirching the image of the man who many viewed as a hero.
But was he right?
As it turns out, yes, he was.
Lindbergh's accomplishment wasn't crossing the Atlantic, it was crossing the Atlantic by himself.
66 other people had crossed the Atlantic before him, all but two of those aboard Dirigibles.
Ripley used this incident to simply prove to his growing readership that everything he published was the truth.
He once said in an interview, I think mine is the only business in which the customer is never right.
Being called untruthful to me is a compliment.
As long as I continue to receive the lion's share of this odd form of flattery, I don't worry about a wolf being at my door.
Later, Ripley would adopt as a tagline the provocative phrase, I dare you to prove me wrong.
Beneath some of his cartoons were the words, full proof and details on request.
And yet it's estimated that Ripley's office received an average of 3,000 letters a month.
It's hard to imagine that every letter could be answered, let alone proof provided.
There is some evidence that Ripley did lie about things on occasion, at least about his personal life.
He reported his birth date as 1891, 1892, and 1893 when it was actually 1890.
He boasted of his extensive education, which would have to have been self-taught since he dropped out of high school and never graduated.
But for his oddities, he always had at least a nugget of truth.
Whenever possible, Ripley would collect items, not only for his personal edification, but also to say, see, I told you this was real.
His home was a veritable museum, and starting at the 1933 Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago, Ripley had his first auditorium, where many of his objects were displayed.
Visitors were hustled inside show style and marveled at items like shrunken heads, foreign art, and deformed animals.
A bed was provided for those who fainted at the experience of seeing such real things.
But it's one thing to show a shrunken head, and it's another to explain how it came to be.
While we know today that there was head shrinking in South America as recent as the 19th century, Ripley wouldn't bother with any details other than the simple one-sentence description that also accompanied his drawings.
His model seemed to be state the fact and leave the details to someone else.
This, of course, gave him a great defense.
He didn't have to prove anything other than the fact that such a thing existed.
In a recent trip to Ecuador, I was able to speak with a museum attendant who explained that shrunken heads were not common until European tourists wanted to collect them.
Such a fact would not have made it into Ripley's pages.
Much of Ripley's content came from readers who would send a photo of themselves with a 12-foot mustache or tap-dancing on the back of a cow.
I made those up, but you get the idea.
For these, Ripley's proof was simply the fact that someone had said they had done or witnessed these things.
We have no record of what actual research was done to verify these claims, but Ripley was insulated by the fact that they weren't actually his claims, but those of the readers.
Ripley's claim of truth also had a secret weapon in the form of a polyglottal Jewish man who spent most of his life at the New York Public Library.
Fluent in 11 languages, Norbert Perlroth's job was to provide Ripley with dozens of curiosities each week.
He'd spend his days poring through books and periodicals trying to find items suitable for Ripley's cartoons.
Not only did he find the items, he was also responsible for finding the interest in some of the pieces, such as the fact that there are 21 different ways to spell the syllable sin in French.
If someone were to dispute one of Ripley's oddities, all he'd have to do is point back to Perlroth and say, this man researched it and here's the evidence.
Should Perlroth have proven unworthy, he could have been sacked, thus proving Ripley's commitment to the truth.
But in fact, Perlroth labored for Ripley about 60 hours a week for 52 years, half of those after Ripley's own death.
Eclipse Ship Mystery Solved 00:04:03
As a side note, I feel it's important to point out that the bulk of Ripley's content came from Pearl Roth, and he never received a single credit save one in the 50th anniversary book.
He was let go in 1976 without a pension, bonus, or even a mention.
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Let's take a closer look at one amazing story found in the annals of Believe It or Not, as published on January 12th, 1941.
There's an image of a ship about to be struck by a fireball.
The text reads as follows.
Strangest annal of the sea, the sailing ship Eclipse was struck by a meteor in the mid-Pacific.
The masts were carried away and the vessel abandoned with the loss of three lives.
This is one of the more famous, Believe It or Nots, and it's even found in the Believe It or Not Pinball Machine of all places.
But is it true?
First, you'll note that there's not much to go on.
We have a ship named Eclipse, of which there have been a great many, no date, and a location of Mid-Pacific.
Also, we have three dead men, and that's enough to possibly identify the incident.
As reported in the Marlborough Express on April 29th, 1908, a sailing ship named Eclipse was on its way from Newcastle to San Francisco when it encountered a storm and three lives were lost.
Okay, that covers the ship name, the Mid-Pacific, and the dead men.
What of the meteor?
Here are the paragraphs verbatim.
The sailing ship Eclipse, 1,469 tons, was on a voyage from Newcastle to San Francisco.
She had been at sea for 85 days when she was overtaken by a terrible hurricane.
Lightning, followed by deafening peals of thunder, lit up the sky.
Suddenly, a meteor struck her foretopmast, which fell in splinters to the deck.
The meteor crashed right through the deck and tearing a large hole in the hull, fell into the sea.
Okay, we'll forgive the use of the word meteor.
The proper term is meteorite, as meteor refers only to the light in the sky.
But consider what we've just been told.
A crew of men trying to save their ship in a hurricane beneath a sky filled with lightning saw a meteorite streak through their ship smashed into the top of one of the masts and through the deck.
Impossible?
No.
Unlikely?
Magic vs Meteor Reality 00:04:27
Yes.
Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that lightning hit the mast and it is actually what fell and crashed through the hull?
Also, the report mentions that the three deaths weren't due to the meteorite strike directly, but rather from exposure and starvation afterwards.
You may have noticed a similarity between the writing in the article and Ripley's own writing.
Journalism at the time was about selling papers, as it always has been.
1908 was a time when newspapers weren't afraid of some embellishment, and the narrative tone suggests that the reporter was trying to tell a story rather than report an event.
Is the news report accurate?
Fortunately, we don't have to solve this mystery.
We're just trying to examine one of Ripley's stories.
It's unlikely that he gave this any thought at all, as he had a newspaper article reporting the incident, and that's all he needed to treat the incident as fact.
Ripley's job was to entertain his audiences, not provide them with critical thinking skills.
That job falls upon us, people who actually care about the truth.
We don't have to completely dismiss Believe It or Not, but it should be treated as a starting point at best.
If you want to know what's really going on, you'll have some work to do.
Though it's easily argued that the publishing industry, if not Ripley himself, was unfair to Mr. Perlroth, who did most of the research, it should be noted that it would be also unfair to deny the credit for the phenomenon, that is, Believe It or Not, to anyone but Ripley.
Though he had support in the form of corporate backing, researchers, contributors, and a very handsome salary at a time when many people were starving in the streets, Ripley was the awkward and curious showman that made it all happen.
After his death, his empire continued with dozens of museums and at least two TV series bearing his name.
Sadly, the current incarnations do not distinguish between magic tricks and real phenomena.
An episode of the most recent TV show hosted by Dean Kane featured a man who could use his chi to light paper on fire.
In reality, this is a well-known magic trick that requires very little skill to perform.
Believe it or not, museums feature video of a man swallowing razor blades and regurgitating them.
And while that's impressive, it's also a magic trick, though not one I'm eager to try.
In fact, one of Ripley's most famous performers was a man who could swallow live mice and regurgitate them.
It's unknown if Ripley was aware that this too was a magic trick, but if he was, he sure didn't let on to his audiences.
Believe it or not is akin to Hollywood biopics.
There's some truth there, but it's never the complete truth, and it's been presented in the way that promotes the most entertainment, not truth.
Believe it or not remains an amusing diversion, but it is only the start of the journey for the truly curious.
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