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

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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 ...