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Most people who first encountered the exploding whale tale online back in the 1990s didn't believe it ... including us. Newspaper stories be darned, nothing less than a conversation with Ed Schoaps, the public affairs coordinator for Oregon's Department of Transportation would do. A couple of phone calls later we were talking to Ed himself about the story that refused to die. Yes, he said, they actually did explode a whale and yes, cars far away from the blast site were damaged by the flying blubber. But the interesting slant to it was that although this incident had taken place more than a quarter of a century earlier, the story refused to go away. In true urban legend form, it was passed along from newspaper to Internet to newspaper to TV news report, each time gaining momentum, each time creating more interest. Fascination with the subject only intensified when a video clip of a local Oregon television station's contemporaneous news coverage of the whale explosion began making the rounds on the Internet and other computer bulletin boards: One thing became clear during our conversation with Ed: up until we called, no one in cyberspace had ever contacted Oregon's Department of Transportation to get the facts. Rather than reaching for the source, people instead reposted a much-altered version of a Dave Barry column on the subject and thus spread a somewhat inaccurate version of the story even further. Because no date was attached to the whale disposal narrative, those who received it believed it was a recent event. As such, Ed had to deal with this whale of a tale on an ongoing basis as news agencies kept discovering this fascinating new story in cyberspace. The Internet has certainly played a role in spreading older urban legends, but this was an unusual case because this tale wasn't being widely told before the Internet discovered it. This story had taken place quite a long time earlier, and although it was news at the time, it had faded away after its moment in the spotlight. Even Dave Barry's column twenty years after the fact did little more than give us all a brief chuckle. But we'll let Ed tell you how a 25-year-old story came to be part of his daily existence when a portion of the tale was flung into cyberspace. He graciously e-mailed us permission to post his Son of Blubber story: George Thornton, the man who gained fame as the Oregon Department of Transportation highway engineer who blew a massive beached whale to smithereens, passed away in October 2013 at the age of 84. Sightings: Although they may have achieved the most spectacular results, the Oregon Department of Transportation folks weren't the first ones to come up with the idea of disposing of a noisome whale carcass by blowing it up. In Patrick O'Brian's 1937 short story Two's Company, a pair of men manning an isolated lighthouse find themselves at the center of a seabird and shark feeding frenzy, not to mention an atrocious stench when a huge whale is washed up against their lighthouse by a storm. They dispose of the hazard by begging some explosives from a destroyer sent to re-supply them.
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