Pangboche and the Yeti Hand
The monastery at Pangboche in the Khumbu kept a hand for centuries that the monks called a yeti's. In 1959 the expedition member Peter Byrne swapped several bones for human ones and smuggled the originals out — in the luggage of the actor James Stewart, by the usual telling. Tests over the years contradicted one another until 2011, when the University of Edinburgh sequenced what survived: human bone. The relic itself was stolen from the monastery in the nineties, and what remains of it is an ordinary human hand with somebody else's fingers attached.
Petit-Rechain and the Belgian Triangle
The photographic centrepiece of the Belgian wave of 1989–90: a black triangle with a light at each corner and one in the middle, taken at Petit-Rechain near Verviers in April 1990. It went round the world, was analysed at the University of Mons and the Royal Military Academy, and produced expert talk of plasma and of an image impossible to fake. In July 2011 Patrick Maréchal went on RTL-TVI and showed how he had done it: a piece of polystyrene painted black, four spotlights and a long exposure. He had kept it to himself for twenty-one years because the joke had got away from him.
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