I was working in Akron, Ohio last night, so perhaps that’s why this news story caught my eye.
The International Women’s Air and Space Museum (IWASM), which is located in Cleveland — or ‘Land of Cleve,’ as I like to say — has for 20 years been home to a wad of hair from the head of famed female aviator Amelia Earhart.
Or so they thought.
Recent DNA testing by the Institute for Aviation History, a non-profit group that continues to search for the pilot’s remains, discovered that the clump was really…thread.
Oopsy daisy.
And it’s not like the alleged hair was pulled from a random shower drain. IWASM received the false fringe from the Smithsonian Museum…which got the whacky weave via donation from a man in Pennsylvania.
Now, it doesn’t really surprise me that someone might try to pass off a tangle of thread as the legendary flier’s locks. There’s a shyster born every minute (to balance out all the suckers, of course). It is shocking, though, that it got by the Smithsonian. I don’t think hair and thread necessarily look that much alike, even to the human eye.
But most surprising of all? Get this — now that the fraud has been exposed, IWASM has decided to keep the thread in the exhibit.
Huh??
What on earth are the museum curators thinking? We know it’s fake, guys. You announced it to the press, and since the movie ‘Amelia’ opens soon, they actually wrote a story about it. We know it’s not her hair…it’s thread.
It was already kinda creepy. Now it’s just stupid.
