I’ve heard that in survey a considerable percentage of people believed that the faces on Mount Rushmore were totally natural (not sculpted). Is it true that people actually believe this? Anybody ever heard of this survey?
I apologize for contributing nothing to the question or answer, but I just have to say that this made me literally laugh out loud. Someone find this survery, stat!
Errr… survey.
That made me laugh out loud too. Sure this wasn’t on The Onion? If it wasn’t, it should be. That’s pretty damn funny!
That is an old joke from the MTM show. Ted Baxter thought they were natural.
But surely Mount Rushmore is a natural formation-- just one with a monument on it.
(Somebody’s got to defend poor Ted.)
Now, now - Ted’s not the only one to make that assumption. On one episode of “Laugh-In”, just after the summer hiatus, Dan asked Dick what he did for summer. Dick goes into a long explanation of a road-trip he took with his family, and how they found this most amazing natural formation, etc.
My college buddy had his girfriend convinced that, in addition to their faces on the “front” side of Mt. Rushmore, that carvings of the presidents’ crouched and huddled back-sides were visible from the other side, but it the other side of the mountain was a restricted military base with no visitors allowed.
Joy, thanks for all the laughs, even if they were mostly at your expense.
~Wolfrick
There was a Don Martin cartoon in MAD magazine to that effect (but without the military base). I wonder if she was “inspired” by it?
Ya know, I opened this thread hoping it wasn’t somebody actually asking if the faces on Mt. Rushmore were natural.
I feel better now.
You were aware that these dialogues cast Dick as “the stupid guy”, right?
Of course, the real story, told to me by a guy who has a cousin who worked with somebody who processed paperwork from a guy who has been there, is that all of Mount Rushmore was hollowed out and is a super-secret installation from which FDR-ites secretly still run the USA and do things like engineer the Kennedy assassination and make up fraudulent news stories against honorable men like Nixon who get too close to the truth. The sculpture was just done to explain away all the work.
As I recall, this story was run in a Roswell, NM newspaper back in 1947. There was another story in that issue about something or other, but I don’t remember exactly what it was.
Yes, but there is a fifth face on Mt. Rushmore and most of it is natural.
Can you find it? 
I had a social studies book way back in 5th or 6th grade that said the Stone Mountain monument in Georgia was a natural formation. Must have been reading the same book…
i would have said Dick was the “enfant naïf”, myself.
Just for the heckuvit: Straight Dope Staff Report: Why is Teddy Roosevelt commemorated on Mt. Rushmore?
The Golden Gate Bridge is a natural phenomenon, too.