There's been an interesting news story out of Guilderland, up near Albany.
A man found an object poking out of the plow snowbank at the edge of his yard. It looked to him like one of those fake hands people will hang out of the trunk of the car for fun. He didn't want his little kids to find it, so he threw it into the field behind his house. (Which of course bugged me - he throws garbage in his neighbor's field?)
He got to thinking about it overnight, something about it bothered him, so the next day he retrieved it. It wasn't plastic at all. It was a real severed hand, bruised and bloody, in a surgical latex glove. He freaked, and called the cops.
Next scene: Cops sifting through the rest of the snowbank, state police strung out searching the field, backhoe digging up his front yard, helicopter hovering over the field looking for disturbed areas, and (to quote "Albany Eye", link below, who borrowed it from Arlo) presumably, eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. Practically every town, county, and state cop within 50 miles searching, talking to reporters, or milling around in the driveway. The hand was sent to the state police lab for analysis. One theory was that the body was somewhere near, and that the hand had been found and transported by a dog or other beasty. (My personal theory was that it had been tossed out a car window.)
It was the lead story on every local newscast, a few days of morbid speculation.
Finally, the report came back from the lab. It was a bear paw, skinned and declawed, and placed in the latex glove to look like a human hand. I saw it on TV. It really did look like a human hand - long fingers, thumb, and all. (Yes, lots of animals have thumbs - it's only the degree of opposability that makes the human thumb special.)
There was a brief panic when the lab had determined that it was not a human hand but had not yet identified it as specifically a bear paw, so the spokesman said that the police lab had determined that it was "an alien hand". I'll bet that frightened more folks than a human hand would have. (By "alien", they mean only "not human", but lots of folks didn't know that.)
Again my theory: Bear season was a few months ago. Some joker made up a paw to look like a hand, and had it in his car to scare and entertain his friends. We've recently had a warm stretch, and it started to smell bad, so somebody threw it out the car window.
The other thing that annoyed me was that on all four channels, every newscast, probably ten or more newsreaders, they all referred to it as "a bear claw". It was a PAW you idiots, not a CLAW! Do they really not know the difference? Or are they confusing it with a pastry?
(No word about whether the guy who found the object was cited for littering his neighbor's field.)
======================================================
Links: http://albanyeye.blogspot.com/ , entry for February 19, 2005
Photo of the "hand" - warning, very yucky! http://wrgb.com/news/local/local_news.asp?selection=article_29016
Note that the print story has the man throwing it into the woods, but the tv said a field, and the cops were shown searching a field. Also, print has him calling the police and they retrieved it from the woods, TV had him retrieve it from the field and then call the police. Other print stories have other versions. Sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment