On Monday, CSI: Miami presented the following episode: FamilyScreenScene.com
A woman swallowed whole and killed by a gigantic snake. This I could not buy. Yes, it was a purty big ole snake, but actually swallow a human being, and according to the storyline, regurgitate it? I’m not … biting.
I looked at a CalTech herpatology site and found this information:
Well, maybe poor owners, but this source makes it sound at least possible. Is it? Any snakie experts who know?
I know that snakes do tend to swallow things whole, as they have difficulty with a knife and fork.
My father was swallowed by a snake. But he took a knife and cut himself out…or so he told us when we were kids. Hmmm, that reminds me, I have a few questions for dear ol’ dad.
As for the CSI episode, that snake could not have swallowed that woman. A GIGANTIC snake migh be able to swallow a smaller man, but for the most part a snake’s jaws have trouble distending around the shoulders.
Giant Anacondas can swallow a human; it helps if it is a small and/or slender human, but I’m pretty sure there have been genuine reported cases of it happening (as well as a larger number of popular hoaxes).
Being swallowed by a snake is a little more plausible than some of the junk they come up with. In one epk, there’s a psychic who’s trying to warn stokes of a bad guy because he (the psychic) keeps having visions. In others, they have enlarged reflections from a person’s eye to obtain evidence–one of the photos from a surveillance camera! :dubious:
I’ve always disliked that Snopes entry. All it really says is that the first two pictures aren’t related to the third (ok, big deal) and then goes on to dismiss the third as “simply [looking like] a bad fake.” Well, guys, it doesn’t look like a “bad fake” to my amateur eyes. How 'bout doing some research and/or investigation rather than just dismissing it? If it’s fake, tell us how you know.
It looks like a bad fake to me, but then I took a year of Photoshop at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Hint: the blurry edge where the man’s torso goes into the body of the snake.
To me, that just looks like where the sun and/or flash is hitting. And it’s mostly blurred above where the body enters. I’m not saying it’s real, I just don’t see anything as of now that shows it as being fake and I certain don’t believe it is or warrants the term “bad fake”.
There was a case of an snake in Africa swallowing whole a new born baby. But an adult woman?
Okay, for what it’s worth I’m going to share something I once saw with y’all.
Maybe 15 yrs ago I was travelling through SE Asia, I was in Indonesia, Java to be specific, in a city called Yogjakarta. A really lovely city, one of the few remaining sultanates, for centuries a centre for arts and culture. Still today a centre for arts and crafts. The city is filled with many wonderous things to enchant a visitor, ancient water gardens, sultan’s palaces, bird markets, and temples in abundance.
We so enjoyed our stay there, anyhoo, we’d become fast friends with a baycek driver (sort of bicycle driven transport, both charming and risky) who took us, day after day from spot to spot to see the wonders of his lovely city. We ended up staying on and the day came when we’d been to all the high spots and we were clearly running out of choices. Our driver, Muday, suggestion a museum not listed in the guidebooks.
Well, of course, we were all over this idea. In no time we were standing outside a dilapidated colonial monstrosity of a building crawling with school children mostly lower form students, all in uniform and pretty much running wildly about all of the few rooms that made up the collection.
And the collection itself consisted of mostly specimens of all manner of bugs and creatures preserved in mason jars, fetus’s of animals with deformities, bones and skeletons and the skins of yet more strange creatures. Snakes, jungle cats and bad taxidermy as far as the eye could see. All of it a jumble, most not labelled.
I’ve been in a lot of museums, but I’ll never forget this one. The collection was absolutely captivating in it’s oddness, and the masses of noisy school children running about in the wide aisles were just as entertaining. We were actually there for quite some time.
Anyhoo, amongst the collection was some old photos and documents with little or no attribution. And there was a series of old photos and accompanying cuttings from newspapers, and the three photos were of a python, a massive python.
It had a very large bulge in it’s belly in the first photo, and second showed it cut open and the body of a (granted both small and slight) Indonesian young man. He was dead.
He had been swallowed by the snake. They had found the snake (who could, no doubt, hardly move), sliced it open and there was the person that had gone missing from the local village. However, it was never determined if he had died from a fall and then the snake came upon the body.
Of course, I cannot produce these photos for you, so sorry. I can only tell you what I saw and in what circumstances. Hoping you enjoyed this journey down memory lane as much as I did.
As for the tv show, I saw it and, I think, if you go back and look again,you’ll see she was crushed by the snake, drawn to her by the heat of her sunburn, it (y’know, supposedly) snuggles up around her, crushes her, then attempts, unsuccessfully, to consume her.
Which explained why she was covered with bite marks and covered in slime.
As Snopes says, it’s obvious that the snake in the first two photos is different from that in the last one. It’s much larger and is different in color. Also it is obvious that the prey item in the first snake is not shaped like a human being.
The second photo looks like a fake to my eyes, not in the sense of the photo itself having been altered, but in the sense of purporting to depict something that did not occur. It seems to me that it was probably created by killing a real snake and splitting it open, and then arranging it so that it looks like the human had been inside it. The snake simply appears much too small to have accomodated the body that appears in the photo, in particular the part of the snake that’s been supposedly split open to reveal the body.
Bizzare Magazine published a photo maybe 6-7 years ago of a snake which was found while attempting to swallow a man. I guess it was taking too long for it, and somebody found and shot it. The guy was probly halfway in, head first, and very dead. IANA photoshop expert, but it looked pretty authentic.
I think I’ve seen that photo, too. On a site called Consumption Junction (that I certainly can’t link to! 
)
FWIW, there seems to be very little argument about whether a snake could eat an adult human - and I certainly don’t see any reason that it’s not possible. Nor has much effort gone into finding out whether one has been documented doing so. Can we ignore photos and go after, ummmm, some facts?
(Also FWIW - I presume that once a snake had crushed the shoulders, pelvis and ribs of a human, and given a good squeeze, it’d be well under a one-foot diameter throughout? Sounds little problem to a large python.)
So we don’t really know. Seems possible, might be possible, lots of fakes.
I did enjoy your story elbows. But, I don’t agree with what you say about the show, that the snake unsuccessfully tries to consume her. As I recall, they said that the snake DID consume her, and then regurgitates her after the drug vials are crushed, releasing the drug and presumably making the snake ill enough to throw her up.
Which I find unlikely as well! It would be difficult enough for the snake to swallow a person. Would it throw her up easily? And right back on the chair where she was lying, too?
Grr. I think I’m turning against CSI.
While very strong, even the largest constrictors aren’t powerful enough to break large bones. They kill their prey by suffocation: they compress the rib cage to keep the prey from breathing. After being killed by a snake, a human body will still have basically the same dimensions. As others have mentioned, the problem with swallowing a human is not just its size but its dimensions. Snakes normally start swallowing from the head end, and human shoulders are generally too wide to fit.
I was watching a show awhile back - and this could’ve been typical Discovery Channel glurge - but they brought up a very good point that I’ve always wondered about. They said that constrictor prey usually dies much faster than if it was simply deprived of oxygen, and hypothosized that they actually kill by squeezing so tight that the heart is unable to beat. They also did some impromptu tests that showed the snakes squeezing harder than previously thought.
Take with salt.
I was sent these photo’s a few years ago and I was told that the man was a worker from the company I was then working for (an oilfield service company, hi TAPIOCA and EL). I didn’t believe it then and I still don’t.
Unclviny
