The Navajo's message to the moon

By Jack Brummet, Folklore and Urban Legend Editor

When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which his son translated. "What are the guys in the big suits doing?"


A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused.


The NASA guys brought the tape to the reservation, where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder's message to the moon.


Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said, "Watch out for these guys; they've come to steal your land."

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Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. . .unless they are nudged along by Walt Disney

The notion that Lemmings commit mass suicide became a full-blown urban legend in 1958, following a Disney documentary “White Wilderness,” that contains a lot of faked footage.

Instead of filming an actual migration, the movie team transported a few dozen lemmings to a riverbank in Alberta, Canada (not far from Vancouver, where I am writing this), which is not even coastal, and therefore not even part of the lemmings' range.

The Disney filmmakers then tossed the rodents off a cliff into the river. In the documentary, the river becomes "the sea." The cameras rolled as the lemmings drowned, and thus was born the longstanding urban legend. See a YouTube clip from the movie here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZlr5Gf9yY

Despite faking the documentary, Disney won the Oscar that year for Best Documentary. Do they have to give it back?



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Richard Gere, The Gerbil Story, and Sylvester Stallone

We've all heard the Richard Gere gerbil story. Here is an interesting tale from http://sujet.co.uk about the origins of that story. And it's almost as hard to believe as the gerbil story it purports to debunk.

"According to Stallone, Gere thinks he started the famous gerbil rumor because of a fight they had on the set of “The Lords of Flatbush in 1974 over a greasy chicken:

“I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper,? said Stallone. “I said, ‘That thing is going to drip all over the place.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘If it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.’ He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay.

So a guy spills mustard on your pants and you come up with a gerbil story that follows him the rest of his life? Boy, that tells you one thing. . .don't ever f*** with Sly Stallone!
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