Philadelphia and the Kangaroo with Bronze Wings
For a week in January 1909 southern New Jersey and Philadelphia lived in a panic: thousands reported tracks in the snow and a flying creature, schools closed, factories sent workers home. In the middle of it Norman Jefferies, publicity agent for Philadelphia's Arcade Museum, announced that the Jersey Devil had been captured. In the case sat a kangaroo he had bought, with bronze wings fastened to its back, and a man poking the cage to keep it moving. Jefferies admitted it himself years later — along with the fact that some of that week's eyewitness reports had also been his work.
The Acámbaro Figures
In 1945 the German dealer Waldemar Julsrud began buying clay figures at Acámbaro in Mexico, dug up on the Bujares hill by a local farmer, Odilón Tinajero. Some thirty-three thousand accumulated over the years, dinosaurs among them, standing beside people. The archaeologist Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation excavated the site and found the figures lying in disturbed ground with no patina of age and fresh unoxidised breaks, some still carrying file marks. In 1969 thermoluminescence testing at the Pennsylvania museum returned modern dates, and the laboratory formally withdrew its earlier results, which had been taken without allowing for the firing.
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