Mike meet everyone, everyone meet Mike. No, no, don’t wave. He can’t see, you’re just making this awkward.
Also known as Miracle Mike, Mike the Headless Chicken was a plump, five-year-old cockerel when he was unceremoniously beheaded on 10 September 1945. Farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita in Colorado did the deed because his wife Clara was having her mother over for dinner that night, and Olsen knew she'd always enjoyed a bit of roast chicken neck. With that in mind, Olsen tried to save most of Mike's neck as he lopped his head off, but in doing so, his axe accidentally missed Mike’s jugular vein, plus one ear and most of his brain stem, and to his surprise, Mike didn’t die.
In fact, he stuck around for a good 18 months without his head. And but for a tragic accident, Mike may have lived as long as any chicken on earth can hope for.
Immediately after it happened, Mike reeled around like any headless chicken would, but soon settled down. He even started pecking at the ground for food with his newly minted stump, and made preening motions. His crows had become throaty gurglings. Olsen, bewildered, left him to it. The next morning, when Olsen found Mike asleep in the barn, having attempted to tuck his head under his wing as he always had, the farmer took it upon himself to figure out how to feed this unwitting monstrosity. Mike had earned that much.
All Olsen had to do was deposit food and water into Mike’s exposed oesophagus via a little eyedropper. He even got small grains of corn sometimes as a treat.
Mike’s unlikely survival has everything to do with how his skeleton was shaped, according to Wayne J. Kuenzel, a poultry physiologist and neurobiologist at the University of Arkansas. Because a chicken’s skull includes two huge holes for holding its eyes in place, its brain fits snuggly into the remaining space at a 45-degree angle. This means you could slice the head off while still leaving a good portion of the cerebellum and the brain stem - behind. “You still have the functional part that’s so critical for survival intact.”
Mike on day three....just chillin
Mike was so unfazed by the whole experience that farmer Olsen decided to hit the road and take his miracle fowl on a national tour. He was featured in Time Magazine and Life, got his name in the Guinness Book of Records, and had his own sideshows, giving the American public the chance to meet ‘Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken’. Mike even had his own manager, who must have done a good job, because he made Olsen an absolute fortune, as John Lloyd and John Mitchinson wrote in The Book of General Ignorance,
"At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4,500 a month, and was valued at $10,000. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the unfortunate victims lived for more than a day or two."
It’s almost a given that with all this fame and all this fortune, something tragic was going to happen in a nondescript motel room to turn all dreams into dust. The national tour had taken Mike and farmer Olsen to Phoenix, and as they were hanging out in their motel room, Mike was snacking on some corn bits. But then, he began to choke. "Lloyd Olsen, to his horror, realized he’d left the eyedropper at the previous day’s show,” write Lloyd and Mitchinson. "Unable to clear his airways, Mike choked to death.”
Even headless chickens have no business flying that close to the Sun, it would seem.
Not that he had a terrible life in his beheadedness. According to the official Mike the Headless Chicken website, in the 18 months that he spent without his head, he grew from a mere 2.5 pounds to almost 8 pounds. In an interview after his death, Olsen said Mike was a "robust chicken - a fine specimen of a chicken except for not having a head”.
They still love Mike in Colorado. Every third weekend of May, locals will hold an annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival, where they can enjoy music, contests, and food. Which is what he would have wanted. Mike just seemed like that kind of guy.
THE GREAT KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER OF1876
One of the preserved meat specimens from the Arthur Byrd Cabinet at Transylvania University.
YUCK! Why would they still have a sample hanging around??
On 3 March 1876, the sky just opened up and large hunks of flesh fell all over Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky.According to a New York Times article published the following week, the phenomenon occurred near the house of one Allen Crouch, whose wife was outside making soap when it happened. “The meat, which looked like beef, fell all around her. The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it fell like large snowflakes.”
If this was a documentary, the words "MEAT SHOWER" would appear on screen right now, with trickles of little red meat flakes falling behind. A few select flakes would fall in front of the words for effect.
Back at the Crouch residence, a Mr Harrison Gill - whose veracity was described by the The New York Times as "unquestionable" - visited the day after the alleged flesh storm and noted the presence of meat sticking out of the fences and scattered across the ground. At least one of the hunks measured 10 centimeters square, but most were about 5 x 5 cm. They were apparently fresh when they fell, but having been left out all night, they were now spoiled and dry.
Two unidentified gentlemen turned up to taste the meat-rain and declared that it had the flavor of either venison or mutton.
"WTF was even going on here?" The New York Times did not offer an explanation.
The first explanation came three months later, when someone called Leopold Brandeis received and analyzed some of the specimens that had been preserved in glycerin. He announced that the ‘meat’ was not actually meat at all. "At last we have a proper explanation of this much talked of phenomenon,” it was reported in Scientific American that year. "It has been comparatively easy to identify the substance and to fix its status. The Kentucky 'wonder' is no more or less than nostoc."
A type of cyanobacteria that forms colonies surrounded by a protective gelatinous envelope, nostoc is known to swell up into a translucent jelly-like mass whenever it rains. Because it’s so inconspicuous when dry, for many years, people believed nostoc to float on the breeze until it rained, which caused it to fall from the sky like hail. Colourful nicknames such as "star jelly", "witch's butter", and "star-slubber" were thrown around.
Brandeis identified the Kentucky nostoc as belonging to the species Nostoc craneum, which he described as "flesh-coloured”. But really, it honestly just looks like the color of seaweed. It tastes like frog or spring chicken legs, he said, and had ballooned and fallen upon the Crouch residence when it rained.
But wait a minute, what rain? Didn't the Crouches report it to be a perfectly clear night?
Fortunately, Brandeis didn't play a completely useless role in the investigation, because he had given a couple of mystery meat samples to experienced histologist and president of the Newark Scientific Association, Dr. A. Mead Edwards, who said it was likely the lung tissue of a human infant or a horse. Another histologist, Dr. J.W.S. Arnold, studied the specimens and agreed, concluding in The American Journal of Microscopy and Popular Science that they consisted of some kind of animal cartilage and lung tissue.
Eventually, seven samples were examined by several scientists, who confirmed two to be lung tissue, three to be muscular tissue, and two were said to be made of cartilage. So how did they come to be involved in the Infamous Kentucky Shower of Flesh?
Enter the man with the best explanation for the "shower of quivering flesh” that we’re probably ever going to get - Dr L. D Kastenbine, who wrote in a 1876 edition of the Louisville Medical News that it was, quite literally, a coordinated bout of projectile vulture vomit scattered by the wind.
What can we say?? There must have been an enormous flock of invisible vultures that day.
No other explanation has ever been offered. Sometimes natural science is weirder than science fiction.
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