Filling its pages are tales of surgeons removing their own appendixes, nuclear physicists preoccupied with blowing up the moon, and a man who couldn’t stomach food any longer—so he ate glass. And steel ball bearings. And gold. And when he was in the mood for a treat, well, cotton (soaked in orange juice of course).

Too bad it isn’t science fiction.

Boese is a collector of the absurd. He’s curator to the Museum of Hoaxes, a website which reveals the truth behind popular urban myths. It was this collection, he writes, that led to his discovery of strange scientific experiments.

Looking at this site, you’ll find seven stories relating to one of the scientists from Electrified Sheep. And Post readers should recognize this scientist too. To give you a hint, Boese reveals he never actually held a kite in a lightning storm, and he was the first person documented to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation…on a turkey.

This book is not Boese’s first dip into weird science. Five years earlier he wrote Elephants on Acid along the same premise: “Just how far would they [scientists] be willing to go … to get the answers they want?”

Like Elephants, each story is threaded to the next by a scientific theme: electricity, nuclear power, primatology, psychology, and finally, “do-it-yourselfers” (scientists that experiment on their own bodies). But this time around, Boese promises to go into more detail.

The inclusion of the psychoneurotic goats in Operation Crossroads—the name for the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapon testing at Bikini Atoll—gives Boese an opportunity to delve deeper. Fact-driven and unsentimental, he briefly mentions the Bikini residents. “They were given a vague promise that they’d be able to return once the US government was finished. (They’re still waiting.)”

His focus then turns to goats. Oddly enough, he found information in an article published in The Saturday Evening Post in January of 1950, written by Richard Gerstell. A small paragraph in the article, “How You Can Survive an A-Bomb Blast,” provided the reason behind the presence of the goats in the Bikini tests.

While many of the experiments mentioned in Electrified Sheep are common knowledge, Boese’s fascination with obscure details makes the book frightfully interesting. It’s packed with enough material to challenge any would-be science-fiction writer, and proves truth in a lab coat is stranger than fiction.

Electrified Sheep is available from Amazon at a list price of $27.50.

Book Review: Electrified Sheep The Saturday Evening Post

Read “It’s Great to be Back!” by Robert A. Heinlein. [PDF]

If you liked this look forward to next week’s short story, A Friend of Her Parents by Alice Duer Miller.

“It’s Great to Be Back!” The Saturday Evening Post

Bradbury is a wizard with words. Dandelion Wine was a magical evocation of childhood. Something Wicked This Way Comes offered chills that outdid the Brothers Grimm. The Martian Chronicles took us to other worlds of imagination. The Illustrated Man was a paean to storytelling. Fahrenheit 451 was a love affair with books.

“Back when I was 12 years old, I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time,” recalls Bradbury. “Simultaneously, I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, ‘What a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.’ In many ways, that is exactly what I did.”

His first published book was a collection of short stories called Dark Carnival, which set the tone.

Bradbury collaborated with Charles Addams on the creation of that macabre family that eventually took Addams’ name. Bradbury originally called them the Elliotts. His first story about them was “Homecoming,” published in the October issue of Mademoiselle magazine in 1946, replete with Addams’ illustrations.

However, despite being a fantasy writer, his ideas are often grounded in reality. When we asked him about “Juggernaut,” the original short fiction in this issue of the Post, he had this to say:

“The story ‘Juggernaut’ came to be because I happened to grow up among several different people who had physically moved their houses from one location to another. This always fascinated me and made me want to write a story about it.

“I was especially inspired about 60 years ago, in downtown Los Angeles, when I saw a house being moved down a big hill. Someone had painted some Indian symbols on the wheels, which I found fascinating, and I knew I must write something about this.”

In addition to a wall filled with awards and accolades, even a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, Bradbury received, in 2007, a special citation from the Pulitzer board for his “distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

He likes to tell the story of his childhood meeting with a carnival performer billed as Mr. Electrico, a man who changed his life by tapping him with an electrified sword, saying, “Live forever!”

“I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?” he reflected at the time.

We know. Through his wondrous books and stories, he will live on with readers forever.

One-on-One with the Author: Ray Bradbury The Saturday Evening Post