I was raised by wild monkeys!

Piper Weiss, Shine (Yahoo! "Women Who Shine"); Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

Cute monkeys are savages with base appetites -- but they also exhibit compassion and other emotions. Here they are seen in Bali molesting another mammal (odditieszone.com).

  

TRUE STORY: When Vanessa James was a little girl, her mother would tell her bedtime stories of growing up like Tarzan in the jungle raised by a colony of monkeys.

  

As James got older, she learned those accounts were not fantasy but part of her mother's unbelievable history.
 
Between the ages of four and ten, Marina Chapman's family consisted of 20 or so Capuchin monkeys, native to the jungles of South America. Her memory of how it all started is hazy: She remembers sorting peas in her village when in an instant a hand covered her mouth and she awoke in the jungle.
 
"All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth," James, told London's Sunday Times this past week. "It's assumed that the kidnap went wrong,"

Two days after fending for herself, she was approached by a colony of monkeys who taught her by example to forage, feed, and survive as one of their own [thereby saving the life of a fellow mammal].

  

"Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and, little by little, learned to fend for herself," according to a press release for the Marina's memoir, The Girl With No Name, to be released in 2013 by Pegasus Books.

• Buddhist Global Relief: compassion in action
• Why some people adopt monkeys, dolls as children
• What monkeys can teach us about our babies

As Chapman adapted to jungle life, she lost any language she had learned in her early years and instead developed an inhuman ability to scale trees and to communicate with creatures native to the forest. 

  

Marina Chapman (thesundaytimes.co.uk)

After more than five years, she was discovered by hunters who sold her into slavery in exchange for a parrot. (Help victims of child sex trafficking; here's how.)
 
A year later she escaped, narrowly avoiding a life of prostitution. She then lived off the streets in Colombia, relying on her stealth knowledge gleaned, in part, from her education in the jungle.

   

In her 20's while working as a household staff for a Colombian family, she was brought on a trip to Bradford, England. There she met her future husband at a church, a bacteriologist named John Chapman, and she never left. [Karma works in mysterious ways, unimaginable to our logic-bound, linear minds.]

   

Together they raised two children. She worked as a cook and later in social services she helped at-risk youth.

  

Over the past five years, her daughter Vanessa, now a 23-year-old film composer, has been devoted to transcribing her mother's memory -- matching the nuts and berries and wildlife in Chapman's jungle recollections with those native to the area she was abandoned in.

  

Recently, mother and daughter traveled back to Colombia to find Chapman's long-lost family, reconnecting with some surrogates who took her in in her teens. She even tried re-entering the jungle before being stopped by military officials.

 

After Vanessa was convinced she'd pieced together her mother's journey, the next challenge was convincing a co-writer, literary agent, and publisher that Marina's unbelievable accounts were true.
 

Humans return the favor (imprint.printmag.com)

Lynne Barrett-Lee came on board as the ghostwriter after poring over Vanessa's mounds of research and meeting face-to-face with Marina, whom she immediately understood to be a woman with no ordinary past. Publishers at Pegasus Books, too, claim to have gone through an exhaustive verification process before claiming the title.

There have only been a handful of modern-day accounts of feral children surviving this unique upbringing and ultimately assimilating back into human life. In 1999, a young boy was rescued in the Uganda jungle after being raised by monkeys. It took him eight years to learn to speak again. More

• Monkey-woman Marina Chapman's memoir, The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys, compiled with her daughter, ghostwritten by Lynne Barrett-Lee, will be released in April 2013 (Pegasus Books)
• Me Tarzana, Queen of the Jungle (Sunday Times)

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How to get your Zombie to kill

Making Manchurian Candidates?

 Phil Stewart (Reuters, "Drug Turns Crime Victims Into Zombies"); Wisdom Quarterly

What does a Manchurian Candidate look like? (indybay.org)

   

There's nothing to fear but fear (and zombies).

Halloween and the Day of the Dead are coming soon, so here's a true-life scary story.
   
BOGOTA, Colombia - The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. 

   

Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.

   

Fernandez is just one of hundreds of victims every month who, according to Colombian hospitals, are temporarily turned into zombies by a home-grown drug called scopolamine,  which has been embraced by thieves and rapists.

[Expect to see scop' on the dance floor as soon as pushers manage to get ayahuasca, iboga, and the dreaded GLINT into tablet form.]

   

"When I woke up in the hospital, I asked for my baby and nobody said anything. They just looked at me," Fernandez said, weeping. Police believe her son Diego was taken by a gang which traffics in infants.
  

WATCH: To be cool in school Jerri Blank had to stoop to glint (Strangers With Candy)

 

Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, scopolamine is slipped into drinks and sprinkled onto food. Victims become so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their homes and empty their bank accounts. Women have been drugged repeatedly over days and gang-raped or rented out as prostitutes.

   

In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough to surrender her youngest child.

  

Most troubling for police is the way the drug acts on the brain. Since scopolamine completely blocks the formation of memories, unlike most date-rape drugs used in the United States and elsewhere, it is usually impossible for victims to ever identify their aggressors.

 

"When a patient (of U.S. date-rape drugs) is under hypnosis, he or she usually recalls what happened.

  

But with scopolamine, this isn't possible because the memory was never recorded," said Dr. Camilo Uribe, the world's leading expert on the drug. Scopolamine has a long, dark history in Colombia dating back to before the Spanish conquest. 

   

Legend has it that Colombian Indian tribes used the drug to bury alive the wives and slaves of fallen chiefs so that they would quietly accompany their masters into the afterworld.

  

Nazi "Angel of Death" Joseph Mengele experimented on scopolamine as an interrogation drug. And scopolamine's sedative and amnesia-producing qualities were used by mothers in the early 20th century to help them through childbirth.

  

Finding the drug in Colombia these days is not hard.

  

How to react to fear of secret-zombie agents and operatives? Buy a kit? (Examiner).

   

The tree which naturally produces scopolamine grows wild around the capital and is so famous in the countryside that mothers warn their children not to fall asleep below its yellow and white flowers. 

  

The tree is popularly known as the "borrachero," or "get-you-drunk," and the pollen alone is said to conjure up strange dreams.

  

"We probably should put some sort of fence up," jokes biologist Gustavo Morales at Bogota's botanical gardens, eyeing children playing with borrachero seeds everywhere. "If you ate a few of those, it would kill you."
  

Although scopolamine can be easily extracted from the seeds, experienced criminals hardly ever bother with them, police say.

   

Pure, cheap scopolamine is brought across the border from neighboring Ecuador, where the borrachero tree is harvested for medical purposes, Uribe said. The alkaloid is used legally in medicines across the world to treat everything from motion sickness to the tremors of Parkinson's disease.

 

The use of scopolamine by criminals appears to be confined to Colombia, at least for now, and it's not clear why the drug is such a rampant problem in Colombia. Some analysts blame it on a culture of crime in the Andean nation, home to the world's largest cocaine and kidnapping industries, not to mention Latin America's longest-running [CIA-sponsored] guerrilla war.

  

There are so many scopolamine cases that they usually don't make the news unless particularly bizarre. One such incident involved three young Bogota women who preyed on men by smearing the drug on their breasts and luring their victims to take a lick.

   

Losing all willpower, the men readily gave up their bank access codes. The breast-temptress thieves then held them hostage for days while draining their accounts.

   

The U.S. Embassy in Bogota takes scopolamine very seriously and offers staff tips on how avoid being drugged. One piece of advice may seem obvious: Don't let your drinks out of your sight when at a Bogota bar or nightclub.

  

Still, at least three visiting U.S. government employees here have been drugged and robbed over the past two years. Other American victims from time to time appear at the embassy seeking help, still shaking off a scopolamine hangover.

 

"I remember one case; an American reported being drugged," an embassy official said. "He says to his doorman, 'Why did you let them walk out with my stuff.' The doorman says, 'Because you told me to.'"

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