Not a great leap forward, but I notice the truck whose front is visible in the first photo (which doesn’t really look like a Land Cruiser - I can’t recall what Daihatsus look like) has rectangular headlights. IIRC, 1972 would have been too early for such.
You know, this is a perfect example of a phenomenon i’ve been noticing lately. urban legends for some have seem to become a sort of religion.
I too have come to mistrust snopes. They and others seem to be all too eager to brand just about ANYTHING an urban legend. Personally, I just judge everything that comes my way by the evidence.
How SNOPES can label this “false” based on the evidence presented is beyond me. We have 3 pictures, the third which depicts a supposed picture of a cut-open snake with a small human’s legs protruding.
SNOPES and others are fixated on different colorations between the snake skin, etc. I’m with earlier posters who mentioned that the first two pictures have no bearing on whether the third is genuine or not. As I see it, either someone faked a photo of a kid swallowed by a snake, or they didn’t.
Ocham’s razor applies here. Which is more reasonable? Someone cut open a big-ass snake, paid some kid to crawl into its belly, after a make-up artist mucked up his legs and applied the appropriate slime to his shorts. For what reason someone would do this is beyond me…
Or…
People live in close proximity to big-ass snakes in a few parts of the world. Big-ass snakes feed on just about anything they can get their hands on (well they don’t have hands… but you know what i mean)… Why is it so unreasonable to believe that they wouldn’t view a small human the same as they’d view just about any other similiarly-sized animal?
I view the evidence as inconclusive, but strongly supporting the snake ate a small-human scenario. It just seems like a lot of trouble to go through to fake it, especially considering that snakes swallowing medium-large sized mammals is not unheard of.
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- And as far as I know, snakes eat stuff head-first. -Except egg-eating snakes, I suppose. - MC
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How about the (obvious possibility) that this is a retouched photograph, either digitally or the old-fashioned way? That’s what seems the most likely to me.
I think the first two pictures are totally unrelated to the third. If you look at the first two pictures, the object within the snake looks too cylindrical to be a human. A Boar or pig possably. And the third photo is oviously a totally different snake. My thought is that the first two photos are of a snake which has consumed a farm animal–and then was captured, and thus killed to prevent a reoccurence of the incedent. I dunno about the third photo–looks authentic though. I can say that the first two photos are somewhat recent (within the past 10 years), while it is possible the third photo could go back to 1972. The focus should be on the third photo.
In Frank Buck’s book “Bring 'em Back Alive,” he shows a photo of a python who got into the pig pen, ate the pig, and was thus unable to escape. (You could clearly see that the snake had eaten something.
Buck was quite a showman and self promoter, however, and I’ve always wondered if that weren’t staged. That is, maybe he put a hungry python in the same cage with the pig.
OK, I think that everyone agrees now that the first two pics are unrelated to the third. The reason that they’re relevant is this: Supposing that the third picture is genuine, why are the first two included at all? If I had a genuine picture of a snake that ate a kid, and wanted to distribute it, I would distribute it either alone or with other pictures depicting the same incident. I would not place it together with a couple of pictures depicting a vaguely related incident where a completely different snake swallowed some completely different animal.
Meanwhile, can anybody tell me why the cut portion of the snake and the insides of its guts are all white? Don’t snakes have red blood like mammals? Either they did a lot of cleanup before taking that picture, but didn’t remove the body, or that wasn’t a recently cut open snake.
beatle wrote:
Sorry about the delay in getting it, here it is:
http://www.unmuseum.org/bigsnake.htm
I garbled one detail: the claimed snake-eats-boy incident happened in Burma, not Borneo - a good illustration of how urban legends mutate.
As I said, I wouldn’t want to rely solely on the claims of the site. It certainly has a Ripley’s Believe It or Not feel.
One thought on the two snake theory: animal markings tend to be unique. The diamond pattern on the snake seemed to be consistent between photos #1-2 and #3 to my eye. Does anyone know if markings of pythons or anacondas are unique to individuals?
Andrew Warinner