Over the years, certain online photos of bizarre
but allegedly real entities have surfaced and resurfaced with monotonous regularity,
in spite of repeated discrediting as hoaxes or misidentifications by cryptozoological
researchers. I recently exposed ten of the most persistent offenders (click here), but at least most such photos are at worst tedious
and at best somewhat amusing. However, there are certain others that are
anything but amusing – on the contrary, they are both tragic and disturbing on
account of what they truly depict, and are therefore in particular need of
serious investigation and exposure. The photograph that is the subject of this
present ShukerNature blog post is, I believe, a prime example of that latter
category, which is why I feel it necessary to assess its credentials and
credibility herewith.
As far as I have been able to
discover, the photograph
first began to attract serious online attention during November 2011,
when it
was circulated widely on Facebook and other social networking sites. The
story
accompanying it was that the depicted entity originated in Haiti
(situated on
the Caribbean island of Hispaniola), and that people there were actually
fleeing their homes in terror because it apparently resembled a malign
supernatural Haitian being known as a buck. Moreover, suggested/claimed
identities by
posters to the sites presenting it ranged wildly - from an aborted human
foetus
with developmental abnormalities, some form of grotesque mutation, or a
photo-manipulated creation, to such
bizarre notions as an alien baby, the aforementioned demonic buck, or a
human-rabbit hybrid of either natural or
artificial propagation.
(Worth noting, incidentally, is that in 2003 a team
of Chinese scientists in Shanghai did succeed in creating human-rabbit chimaera
cells in the laboratory by fusing human skin cells (contributing human nuclear
DNA) with the egg cells of rabbits (contributing rabbit mitochondrial DNA), but
these chimaeras were killed a few days later in order to retrieve embryonic
stem cells, though it is not believed that viable foetuses would have resulted
anyway, as humans and rabbits are far too distantly related taxonomically.)
After a few months, interest died down, then in
November 2012 the photograph resurfaced and was recirculated widely online, but
this time with a new back-story and an entirely different supposed provenance. It
was even featured in serious, highly-respected media, such as Australia's Daily Telegraph, which reproduced the
photo in an article released on 19 November 2012 (click here
to access it). According to this source,
the entity had been photographed not in Haiti but in the southwest African country of Namibia. Moreover, according to the story, a shooting
party had encountered it foraging for food in dense jungle, and one of the party
had shot but only wounded it, causing it to flee away into thick brush.
However, the party succeeded in tracking it back to its nearby lair, where they
found three other beings of the same kind. The wounded entity then attempted to
attack the party, who shot it dead, but the other three beings escaped into the
brush. The corpse of the dead entity was then taken back to the party's camp,
and police took it away for a full forensic investigation. Needless to say, no
follow-up reports revealing what this supposed investigation had discovered
have been made public (at least not to my knowledge).
In February 2013 and also in October/November 2013,
the photograph resurfaced yet again online, in sites such as Reddit and Triggspot,
but now the provenance of its depicted entity had switched back to Haiti, though stories concerning it incorporated
variations upon the Namibian plotline as well as the earlier lines of speculation
from posters re human-rabbit hybrids or aliens.
And earlier this month (February 2014), a friend
informed me that he had recently seen the photo being reported online with a
third provenance - New Guinea.
So what is the truth about this contentious photograph
and, most of all, what precisely does it portray? If we ignore for the time
being the entity's bizarre head, and concentrate upon the rest of its body and
what we can see of the person holding it, I think it most plausible that what
we are looking at is either a newborn male human infant (possibly delivered by caesarean)
or an extremely late aborted male human infant. The streaks of blood on its
body would be normal and expected in either case, and the white waxy substance
also present on its body would thus be vernix caseosa – a substance composed
primarily of sebum, which begins to form upon the human foetus from around the eighteenth
week of pregnancy. The infant's umbilical cord is readily visible hanging down
the left side of its body (and thus seen on the right side in the photo, in
which we are viewing the infant from the front), and using the size of the hand
of the person holding it as a scale, the infant is the correct size for a
newborn or late abort. In addition, the blue attire of the person holding the infant
corresponds with hospital attire, as does the blue surgical glove worn by the
person's hand.
So far, so straight forward. When
examining the
infant's head, however, matters become rather more complex. The infant's
face
is very distorted and/or mis-shaped, leading to two possibilities. This
is either
the result of photo-manipulation, i.e. a deliberate attempt to create a
monstrous visage by computer-generated trickery; or, tragically, the
infant's
face is truly deformed, with maldeveloped eyes, nose, and mouth (fellow
Fortean researcher Bob Skinner has opined that its mouth may be
exhibiting a bilateral hare-lip condition, and I agree with him). One of
its
ears is also clearly visible, but apart from seeming a little large,
this
appears quite normal – in stark contrast to the grotesque length of what
seems
to be fleshy tissue emerging just above it and hanging downwards in a
gross
parody of a rabbit's ear. It is of course this grotesque structure that
is
responsible for the 'human-rabbit hybrid' claims – made by persons who
evidently hadn’t noticed the infant's real, normal human ear!
What could this long fleshy expanse
of tissue be? It
is possible that it is not actually part of the infant's head at all,
but is
merely a section of the detached placenta that subsequently became
attached to
the infant's head during its delivery/abortion. Alternatively, it may be
a
portion of the infant's cranial tissue or even a portion of its brain if
the
cranium has been damaged during embryonic development and/or the brain
has not
developed correctly. There is a condition known as anencephaly, in which
a sizeable
portion of the brain, cranium, and skull cap do not develop, due to the
rostral (anterior) neuropore - the temporary opening at the embryonic
forebrain's extreme cephalic (rostral) pole - not closing during early
embryogenesis (at approximately Day 25 in humans). Consequently, the
portion of
the brain that does develop is exposed and thus can theoretically emerge
from
the open, unprotected top of the skull, together with associated nervous
tissue. However, the amount of flesh visible in
the photograph seems more than might be expected if this were the case.
Conversely,
it is of course conceivable that part or all of this flesh is merely the
product of photo-manipulation, to yield something reminiscent of a
rabbit ear.
Finally, but most tragic of all: the
positions of
the infant's limbs (its right hand, incidentally, seems to have
malformed digits), and also the expression on its face (if not added by
photo-manipulation),
are highly suggestive of the prospect that it was alive when the
photograph was taken. This in
turn makes the extremely rough, callous way in which it is being held
even more
heart-breaking.
Still requiring assessment is the location
portrayed in the photograph. Might the latter have been snapped at a makeshift,
impromptu field hospital in some remote tropical zone, which could also explain
the presence of the bottle on the ground in the foreground? If not, then what
else but photo-manipulation can plausibly reconcile the apparent presence of a correctly-attired
hospital worker holding a newborn/late aborted infant in the middle of a
jungle? (In the latter scenario, the bottle could have also been added via some
deft, digital manipulation.) In any event, the stories of encountering this and
similar entities in the jungle are obviously complete, nonsensical inventions
that have been supplied to the media by person(s) unknown, as indeed has the
photograph itself. I have been unsuccessful in tracing this controversial photograph's
origin, and also in tracing any photos online that contain either the precise
jungle scene in this photograph or the person standing behind the infant in it.
So if, as seems most likely, these aspects of the photograph have indeed been
incorporated into it from other sources, their origins currently remain unknown
too.
However, I do feel it likely that the identity
offered here by me for the entity is the correct one – a probably deformed
newborn/aborted male human infant, alive when delivered but likely to have died
from its condition shortly afterwards. I have no idea who could possibly have
thought it novel or amusing to have created such a disturbing image, but I wholeheartedly
believe it high time that this photograph be seen by all for what it truly is -
a terrible indictment of humanity's inhumanity.
Consequently, I pray that this too-long-perused
image's tragic little subject will now be left in peace, spared from any
further attention of the freak-show variety, and granted the dignity in death
that it was denied during its sad and all-too-brief span of life.
