WARNING - the link below contains graphic pictures, purportedly of a child devoured by a snake. Not for the squeamish.
What’s the consensus on these pix? Maybe this has been circuating for a while (if so, sorry), but it’s new to me. I know nothing about the dietary proclivities of snakes. I know they can consume prey that on the surface appears to big for them, but I find this difficult to believe.
Shaky “Having trouble swallowing it” Jake
Hey Shaky. I found these pics a couple weeks ago on several different sites. Rotten.com said they didn’t know precisely where they were from but apparently had been getting multiple copies of them from the sites devotees. When I sent their link to a friend of mine, she said they were “old news,” so I gather they have indeed made the rounds, though I don’t know for how long.
That said, it does look like a real body but I bet you could fake something like that. I’m always a little hesitant to believe stuff like this, though as you pointed out snakes can eat things that might appear too big.
To me, the photo with the kid ‘inside’ doesn’t seem quite right, the shape looks odd, not like a body is in the snake. They do look like authentic photographs though.
I’m not sure. The photos do look genuine, but like Android, I’m not sure that the two “boy inside snake” photos look right. Then again, I’m not some kind of expert on human predation, and it might be naive of me to expect a perfect child-shaped silhouette.
Snopes says that the pictures are false, but I’m not sure I trust their judgement anymore. They’ve become overly skeptical IMHO, and they declare things false based on quite flimsy evidence and reasoning. Kind of a “nocebo effect,” but with Urban Legend evaluation, not medicine.
I’d say the pictures are “unknown.”
Forgive my hijack but I couldn’t help but think of a Simpsons episode where Mrs. Krabappel tells Bart that among other things the school has no liability if a child is eaten by the school snake. Next scene is a snake with a bulge in the shape of Mihouse’s silhouette. “Cool, there’s a rabbit in here.”
The Snopes link
If the pictures posted on the Snopes site are the same ones that folks are talking about, there’s no way that they’re being over-skeptical on this one. At the very best (worst), what they have is two photos of a snake that’s eaten something big, and a photo of a completely different snake that ate a boy-- The snakes in the pictures are different colors, and the bulge in the first two pics isn’t the right shape or size to be the boy. Given that the pictures are mismatched, and that the third picture is of rather low quality, I’d say that it’s not too big a leap to say that it’s a hoax.
Snopes has the same pictures, and says the story is reported in different parts of the world.
The most convincing reason for me to declare the photos as fake is this. My understanding is that after a constrictor snake swallows prey, they squeeze it so hard (and start digesting it) that if the snake were to be cut open what emerges looks more like a sausage than the original animal. If you look at the last photo with the lags poking it, you can see that the supposedly snake-swallowed boys legs are still in “perfect” shape.
Chronos wrote:
As others have pointed out, the first two pictures are irrelevant. The authenticity of the snake eats boy claim rests on the third picture alone, so snopes’s claim that the first two pictures have circulated independently of the third is not a conclusive evidence against the authenticity of the third.
The third picture is not of the same quality as the first two but I don’t see this as casting conclusive doubt on it either. If the three pictures are all related, then at least two photographers were present. They might have been using different different speed film and, given the change in location, been photographed under different lighting conditions. In my non-expert opinion, the poor quality of the third picture looks like what you get when snapping pictures in lower light with fast film.
A close examination of the third picture doesn’t reveal an evidence of digital manipulation. The pixels don’t appear to smoothed around the areas where one would expect a composited image to have been pasted in.
Finally, it’s not inherently implausible that a large snake could consume a small child, since there is plenty of evidence to attest that they can. In discussion of the photographs with some friends, someone discovered a web site that claimed a snake ate a small child in Borneo in 1972. That could account for no news reports being found. I’m not prepared to vouch the veracity of the web site without further research.
Frankly, I don’t see any conclusive evidence either way.
Andrew Warinner
FYI: one of the photos shows another photographer in the background, so there were at least two shutterbugs present at the time one of the photos was taken.
Now that you mention it, the third snake does look a different one than the first one. But there’s still nothing about that pic that makes me think it’s fake. Besides, there are plenty of verified reports of large snakes eating dogs, goats, and a few people. Snakes can and do eat things that look impossably large at first glace. And those “perfect legs” that Arnold mentions are hardly in very good shape. IMO they look like they are slightly acid burned, presumably from digestive juices. My interpretation is that someone threw together three pictures from two different sources, and all are probably real pictures.
The URL for said website would be helpful;
Can anyone identify the year model (or range thereof) of the vehicle (possibly a Toyota Land Cruiser) visible in one of the first two pics?
For what locale(s) does the (hard to make out) apparent license plate # W775941 make sense?
And now for a brief philosophical excursion. If someone is making an effort to bring information to the Internet, why be cagey or ambiguous about it? Ambiguous, but provocative, information comes to us, I think, primarily from those that seek to either: a.) titillate us into seeking further info via a commercial enterprise, or b.) want us to validate their urge to believe in strange and outrageous stuff by joining them in their wonderment. Sometimes those two mix. Running, unfortunately, a distant third are c.) those who’ve stumbled upon some weird stuff and are just asking (as per the OP) if this jives with documentable reality.
So, who first posted those photos on the 'net?
The distended part of the snake appears to be uniformly distended in the first two pictures, as if by a cylinder, not as if by a boy with big head, narrow neck, wide shoulders (with arms), fairly wide thorax and abdomen, and tapering legs.
In the second picture, the ratio of the diameter to length of the distended portion of the snake is about 1:3 which is, I think, more consistent with something like a pig, boar, or tapir than a boy.
The quality of the third picture is poor and it seems to have been shot with different lighting and different film from the first two so that I can’t tell whether it is the same snake or not.
I think the vehicle is a fairly late model Daihatsu.
I think the license plate might be DO2259AX. I don’t think it is an Indonesian plate but I can’t tell you if it could be from Malaysia or Brunei.
One thing a bout snopes I disagree about. They claim the snake is an anaconda, therefore false. I disagree, it looks more like a reticulated python to me, which does live in Borneo.
One thought on the third photograph. Wouldn’t you imagine that upon discovering what appeared to be a human body inside a snake that upon opening up the snake, you’d open it all the way to take a look at the face of the deceased? Or is that too obvious?
I owned a boa constrictor for a few years. Upon swallowing, the devoured animal doesn’t look too much different from normal, only slightly deader. Sometimes my snake would regurgitate it’s food after a day or so (incredibly disgusting!) and in that case the animal would still look normal, but would be soaked and thus appear more thin and stretched-out. There was no observable dissolution of it in those first two days (perhaps the digestive system wasn’t working right though).
I don’t know about the veracity of these pictures, although it seems to me that there are no obvious signs of fakery. The thing is, it is certainly possible for a snake to kill and eat a small child or very small adult, so I don’t know why there hasn’t been much in terms of hard evidence or proof that this has happened recently.
When I said that the legs in the third photo appeared “perfect”, I meant that they didn’t appear crushed or broken in any way, which I would expect if a boa had swallowed him.
I was trying to remember “where did I read that boa constrictors crush animals before they swallow them?” And then it hit me: in one of my favourite childhood books, “The Swiss Family Robinson”. Perhaps not a very reliable source I’m afraid? :o Though of course it was written by a swiss professor of philosophy, putting down in writing the bedtime stories told to him by his father (a rector in the protestant church in Bern), so you would think he wouldn’t lie. Note: the author, Johann Wyss, also wrote the words to the swiss national anthem.
Here is an extract from the book where the family’s poor ass gets swallowed by a boa:
Surely there is some truth to this horrifying description that has made countless swiss children shiver with fear. 
From what I observed and knew of boas (other snakes - your mileage may vary) any broken bones were accidental as part of the suffocation process. When the boa attacks, it strikes rapidly, gripping the vitim with its mouth while it throws about 3-4 loops of coil around it’s body. The victim (mouse, rat, hamster, whatever) can be seen to breathe for a few seconds after being wrapped, during which you can see the coils move as they tighten about the victim. Finally, the animal struggles violently and does not appear to be able to breath, and expires.
A couple times the snake would make a bad grip, or not get the coils right around the animal, and the animal would not die. Then, the snake would release it after about 10 minutes or so, and go away and ignore it. The rat or mouse would appear completely unharmed afterwards. If you put the same animal in the cage the next day, often the snake would not strike at it, and you would have to exchange it for another before it would try again. Don’t know why.
Y’know, a while back (pre-computers… You know, the stone age), there was a story of a little girl who had photographic evidence of the existence of fairies. There was much skepticism, of course, but several photography experts concluded that the photographs couldn’t possibly have been retouched. Many concluded that the pictures were, in fact, genuine, and that fairies did, in fact, exist, until the no-longer-so-little girl produced the little paper cutouts of fairies that she had posed for the pictures. “Not digitally altered” does not necessarily mean genuine.
I think what gets me the most suspiscious, is that there’s only the one shot of the cut-open snake. I think that any photographer with a subject that… interesting… would have taken pictures from several points of view (witness the first two shots: Not even as interesting as the third, but two angles are shown, for greater detail.), at various stages in the cutting-open process, unless, of course, there was only one angle that remotely resembled a boy inside a snake, and they only had the legs mocked up, so they couldn’t show the rest.
Fascinating photos, in any case.
I spent a few serious minutes studying them and have two observations about the last shot.
I mean, think about it… you cut open some big-ass snake and bribe some poor kid to crawl in, or you get some hapless cadaver and stuff him in… so now the kid/body is half-in, half-out… that should be enough to make your point, right? But no, somebody must’ve said, Wait, if this kid really was in the snake his foot would still be part-way in there. You gotta admit, it’s a nice touch if it isn’t real.