Monkey from Mars: US crime lab's museum oddity

Other museums might have more or flashier items to display. But only the mini-museum of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation can boast of possessing such an other-world oddity as the monkey from Mars.

The bureau's state crime lab lobby has its requisite displays on forensic science, including an illegal moonshine still and the microscopic fibers that solved the 1981-82 Atlanta child murders. But tucked away in a glass cylinder are the preserved remains of a monkey that three pranksters passed off as an alien 55 years ago in a UFO hoax that drew headlines worldwide.

At the height of UFO hysteria then sweeping America, two young barbers and a butcher took a dead monkey in 1953, lopped off its tail and applied a liberal dose of hair remover and some green coloring to the carcass.