Swallowing Spiders and UFOs

You’re probably wondering what swallowing spiders in your sleep has to do with UFOs and the answer, simply, is “Nothing.”

A really ugly spider, much to big to swallow.

It is the research behind attempting to learn where this “fact” originated that is of importance here. Tyler Adkisson of Newsy, decided to learn where this idea originated because, apparently, he found it improbable that people swallow spiders in their sleep. He noted that there were only a few ways that it could happen, such as the spider using its silk to parachute into a sleeping person’s mouth, but a biochemist in Australia thought that you’d have to be really unlucky for that to happen. You can read Adkisson’s article here:

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/09/23/do-sleeping-humans-really-swallow-8-spiders-a-year/23220507/  

So, unhappy with the theory, Adkisson wondered where the idea came from. The most often cited source for the tale was Snopes (which describes itself as the definitive fact-checking website for, well, basically, checking facts, urban legends, myths and folklore). Adkisson reported, “It [Snopes] claims in 1993, a writer named Lisa Holst wrote an article for PC Professional about misnomers circulated via email. To prove her point, in the article she included the eating-spiders myth. Ironically, that became ‘one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation ... on the Internet.’”

The fact was supposed to have come from a book, Insect Fact and Folklore that was published in 1954. The book has no section on spiders (which, by the way, aren’t insects… I mention this so you all know that I was paying attention), and the sleeping human eating spiders fact is not in there.

Further chasing of the footnote (sorry, but this is, in essence, what chasing footnotes is all about), someone asked about the magazine, PC Professional. The Library of Congress could find no reference to it… and, in fact, no one could find the writer, Lisa Birgit Holst either.

Adkission’s conclusion is that we don’t have to worry about eating spiders in our sleep but mine is that we take too much information we read as accurate without question. In the world today, with the Internet available, we can all check out the dubious facts we read about or hear about. The information is there and often we can attempt to trace it to its source… and if the source is not credible then neither is the information. And if the source is found to be nonexistent, then that would be the real clue that the information is bogus… but the point is that we all now have the capability to attempt to verify what we read or hear, if we only take the time.  

Ironically, this was all that I had intended to post and had even found a picture of a frightening spider to accompany it, but then, as I was proofreading it, I was struck by the fact that I hadn’t, well, fact checked it myself. I accepted the information from Adkission and Snopes without seeing what I might find out, using the Internet as I had suggested others do.

First, I attempted to find that PC Professional magazine. I found one called PC Pro, which is a publication in the United Kingdom. It was created in 1994 and looking at their website, it doesn’t seem that an article about sleeping humans and spiders would fit into their publishing philosophy. But then, the original article, as described by Snopes, seemed to be about debunking Internet rumors rather than actually making the claim that sleeping people swallowed spiders. That might fit into their magazine, but I wasn’t going to subscribe to find out. Besides, according to the available information, the original article was published before the creation of PC Pro, which rules it out.

While it seems that there is no American magazine named PC Professional, there are two in Europe… or possibly only one. PC Professionell is listed in some locations as a German magazine and in others as Dutch. It probably is the same magazine. Anyway, at The Mclovin Times found at:

http://parisianmclovin.blogspot.com/2013/05/let-me-get-my-detective-hat.html

there was this comment, which is relevant to our discussion:

The closest anyone seems to have come to finding this mysterious PC Professional is a German magazine called PC Professionell . However, commenter Zagrobelny said:

"I placed an interlibrary loan request for the article with the Snopes information from the German magazine PC Professionell. I work in an American library, so only two German libraries were available as lenders through OCLC. (Why? I have no idea.) Those two libraries both reported that the Holst article was "not found as cited", meaning it's not in that issue of PC Professionell. Does it mean that it does not exist or does it mean Snopes has some part of their citation wrong? I don't know, but now I'm more inclined to think this is mistake or copyright trap by Snopes or whoever wrote that particular entry."

There is more information available on all of this. For those who wish to follow more of the trail, you can find that addition information here:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-writer-named-lisa-holst-responsible-for-the-belief-that-everyone-eats-eight

and here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVmnLaTXylc

It seems that all this research has taken me back to the original source, which is the Snopes article but I can’t find anything else. There are hints in the various forums about other sources, but no one else has found them either. While there are magazines around the world with names similar to PC Professional, none of them have an employee, writer or editor with the name of Lisa Birgit Holst and none of them have ever published an article about people swallowing spiders in their sleep.

I believe the final nail in the coffin is that Lisa Brigit Holst is an anagram for “This is a big troll.” That is just too much of a coincidence. That, I believe, is the stake in the heart of this story. It goes back to Snopes and no further and some have suggested that Snopes invented the tale so that they could debunk it. Or to see who was stealing their stuff without proper credit.

Remember that commercial when the women said, “They can’t put anything on the Internet that isn’t true.”? Well, this proves that statement to be false in a rather left-handed way. Snopes did put something on the Internet that was true, that is, the myth that people swallowed spiders was untrue and that morphed into the idea that people do swallow spiders. Others then put the false story on the Internet.

My point is that we have followed this as far as we can, we have looked at cited sources and found them wanting, have looked for the writer and not found her, and we have found nothing that we can confirm that predates Snopes article. We did learn that people don’t swallow spiders and that the Internet did help us resolve the problem.