Who is the strange “monkey from Mars” and what part did he play in a 1953 UFO hoax? Only the mini museum of The Georgia Bureau of Investigation knows the answer. Read on, if you dare.
On display in a glass cylinder in the lobby of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in Decatur, Georgia, sits a shaved, preserved monkey. According to
news sources, the little creature was part of a 1953 UFO hoax committed by three pranksters in rural Cobb County that drew worldwide headlines. The bureau’s state crime lab lobby has other displays as well, including an illegal moonshine still and the microscopic fibers that solved the terrible Atlanta child murders back in the early 1980s.
During the height of America’s UFO hysteria, two young barbers and a butcher took a dead monkey, lopped off its tail and applied a liberal dose of hair remover and some green coloring to the carcass. They left the poor little creature on an isolated road north of Atlanta in the pre-dawn hours of July 8, 1953 after burning a circle into the pavement with a blow-torch. Coincidentally, policemen just happened upon the scene, and they were told the tallest tale possible about a red saucer-shaped object the men had seen in the road that night. They claimed to have witnessed the landing and to have hit one of the “aliens” with their pickup truck. According to them, the saucer quickly departed, scorching the highway.
A police officer, Sherely Brown, took down the strange account and filed a report at police headquarters before going home. He said of the incident:
“Soon the phone started ringing off the hook. They had the Air Force and everybody else trying to find out about it.”
But within hours the monkey business unraveled. Dr. Herman D. Jones, the founder and director of the GBI lab and considered the man who introduced forensic medicine to the state of Georgia, and Dr. Marion Hines, an anatomy professor at Emory University, examined the creature and proclaimed it to be a hoax. Hines told the Associated Press:
"If it came from Mars, they have monkeys on Mars.”
It would seem that the concept of monkeys from Mars is strictly for the birds as the crow flies (or something like that).
A New Kind of Monkey Business: This One’s From Mars!
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