Believe It--Or Not

On this day in 1493, Chris Columbus, who had sailed the ocean blue the year before, was on yet another voyage when he saw what he had heard sailors tell stories of and his imagination apparently had embellished.

This is what he thought he was seeing.

He thought he saw the legendary mermaids of naval lore. But the reality was quite different than the stories had led him to believe and what his imagination had envisioned. He described the "mermaids"--those half-fish-half-female beauties--as "not half as beautiful as they are painted."

No wonder he reached that conclusion. What he really saw was manatees. Yep, those big, ugly cows of the warm Southern waters.

This is what he actually was seeing.

People have been confusing myth and reality for eons, apparently from the early days in the Garden of Eden. I think we're all enamored of the odd, the unusual, the fantastic, the too-good-to-be-true things. Perhaps that's why P.T. Barnum was so successful and why the newspaper feature created by Robert Ripley was so popular.

P. T. Barnum

Barnum reputedly said, "There's a sucker born every minute." (I wonder if that had any connection to his having been elected as a Republican to two terms in the Connecticut state legislature.)

A master of hoaxes, his first hoax was his display (for a price, of course) of the "Fiji Mermaid," which was really the body of a monkey attached to the tail of a fish. He netted a handsome fortune from that and his many other promotional schemes.

Barnum's Fiji "mermaid"

Robert Ripley at his drawing board

Robert Ripley capitalized on the same phenomenon of human curiosity. His single-frame newspaper feature titled "Ripley's Believe It or Not" appeared in the New York Globe on December 19, 1918. It showcased "bizarre facts and oddities"; "unbelievable stories, unusual people, and strange phenomena"; and "astonishing facts, unusual human feats, odd animals, and cultural curiosities."

Ripley's feature had started out as a sports-themed item titled "Champs and Chumps." (I don't know whether the chumps were the people he included in his strip or the people who swallowed--hook, line, and sinker--everything he published.)

He later expanded his feature from sports to literally everything imaginable and changed the title to "Believe It or Not." It was syndicated by King Features and began appearing in newspapers all across the country. It later expanded into radio, film, TV, and museums, which were called "odditoriums.'

Politics has also appropriated a similar technique. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda master, is credited with saying, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." The Communists also became experts at doubletalk, even naming their flagship newspaper Pravda, "truth," while it spewed forth blatant falsehoods. And then there's our own American media. "Believe it or not" has quickly become "I'll believe it when I see it," but we might not be able to believe it even then.

We shouldn't be surprised by any of this deception, whether billed as entertainment, news, or outright admitted propaganda, because the Bible warns us of it.

Second Corinthians 11:14 says that Satan himself is "transformed into an angel of light."

The apostle Paul said that people would be deceived by "strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."

And Jesus Himself warned that "there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets ... that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect" (Matt. 24:24).

Many realities in life are not what we're led to believe. For example, the ads for alcoholic beverages always show young, beautiful/handsome, physically fit people enjoying themselves and having fun. But they never show the down-and-out and homeless alcoholic lying in his own vomit in the gutter. They never show the broken homes, the battered and abused women and children, victims of an out-of-control drinker. They never show the innocent families devastated by a drunk driver. Those scenes, not the ads, are the reality.

And what a Pandora's box will AI open to us? Only time will tell.

In this age when it's getting harder and harder to distinguish reality from imagination, truth from fiction, and news reports from political agenda, the warning caveat emptor, "let the buyer beware," is even more important for us to remember. Often we, like Columbus, will find reality to be less fulfilling and attractive than the deceptive news reports and advertisements planted before our eyes.

Believe it or not.

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