Dog Swallows Knife and Alien Found (then lost) Inside a Duck

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February 4, 2009

Dog Swallows Knife and Alien Found (then lost) Inside a Duck

Dog Swallows Knife

Yesterday, one of my dogs got into a stash of chocolate (sigh), which had me up at 2am doing the dreaded hydrogen peroxide trick, since chocolate is toxic to dogs. When I complained about my night a friend sent me this link (!!) saying, Just be glad your dog didn’t eat a kitchen knife (which is always something to be glad about). The x-ray image in that story (left) reminded me that it was high time I posted this rom the Culture Dish archives:

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Alien inside duck.jpg

I’ve always had a thing for animal x-rays. I had a huge collection from my days as a veterinary technician: An x-ray of a dog who swallowed a dozen fish hooks; another who’d swallowed pounds of stones; a cat that swallowed a snake whole — it curled up in the cat’s stomach so it looked like the cat was actually pregnant with a snake. But like a moron, I lent my beloved x-ray collection to an artist for a project, then she ran off with them (the evil artist: Her name was Linda Sasso — if you run into her, tell her I want my x-rays back).

All of this is to say, I was quite pleased to hear that a group in California recently x-rayed a duck and found nothing less than the head of an alien in the duck’s stomach. The San Francisco Chronicle covered the finding well:

“As if crop circles weren’t proof enough that extraterrestrials are among us, an alien has now been found in the stomach of a duck. That, at least, is the conclusion reached by workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia (Solano County) when they viewed an X-ray image they took of a sick mallard. Right there, in the duck’s ventriculus, or gizzard, is the shocking image of a grimacing, bald-headed being. How it got there, nobody knows, but when an autopsy was performed after the bird died of unrelated causes, the alien had mysteriously disappeared.”

Here, in case you missed it in the big x-ray, is a close-up of said alien. It doen’t look particularly mean. The executive director of the bird rescue center said, “We’re a 35-year-old organization, and we’ve seen a lot of things — bullets, fish hooks — but this is the first time anything like this has shown up. I don’t know my aliens well, but it looks like one of those with the big eyes and the long fingers.”

I’ve seen this sort of things many times … in my x-ray collection, I actually had several images of aliens inside of animals. Like this duck, in the end, they’re not really aliens (surprise!) — it’s food mixed with air (artistic indigestion, that’s what we used to call it). But you’ve gotta love the images, and the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle covered it …

7 Responses to “Dog Swallows Knife and Alien Found (then lost) Inside a Duck”

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Greg Laden says:

February 7, 2009 at 10:43 pm

I wonder how many times the dog eats the kitchen knife and we don’t even know about it.
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Coturnix says:

February 4, 2009 at 11:48 pm

Those are much cooler x-rays than ones of my dog, but I love seeing them on blogs nonetheless.
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Miss Cellania says:

February 4, 2009 at 8:07 pm

I really meant this one:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/18071
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Miss Cellania says:

February 4, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Here are some more:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/8082
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Arikia says:

February 4, 2009 at 7:45 pm

Oh no puppy! I hope he is OK!
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Badger3k says:

February 4, 2009 at 11:51 am

I’ve always said (ok, not always) that UFOs and the like was a bunch of horse-puckey, but now I guess I have to call it “Duck Droppings” or something. Cool image, though.
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Tracey says:

February 4, 2009 at 9:52 am

Nice! I think that would have been worth an X-files episode, back in the day.
When I worked as a vet tech we had this little fluffy white dog come in. His owner said he had eaten some of that spanish moss stuff that they put around the bottoms of fake potted plants. When we x-rayed him, all we could see was a solid mass in his abdominal cavity, so we operated. We removed a staggering amount of the stuff from his tummy…it had been crammed in tight. Once it was out it expanded to four times the volume of the entire dog!
PS: The dog was fine, he seemed to not even notice…