SEATTLE — Chances are you’d find the newest Pacific Science Center exhibition pretty interesting — unless, of course, you already:
• Have a Rolls-Royce made of a million wooden matches.
• Have stepped into the jaws of a 55-foot-long snake.
• Have had a nearly 9-foot-tall man rise to greet you.
Those are all part of “The Science of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” exhibition, which opens today and runs through Jan. 4.
“We’re trying to feed people’s curiosity for a better understanding of their world,” said Crystal Clarity, the center’s vice president of marketing and communications.
There’s a lot of gee-whiz stuff in this traveling exhibition, a joint project of the Florida-based Ripley Entertainment and Science North, a museum in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Where else can you see a calf with two faces or a chicken with four feet — both preserved through taxidermy?
And for that matter, how often do you get to see a huge portrait of Albert Einstein made of more than 400 pieces of toast, browned with a torch?
Or actual shrunken heads from South America, shown in a darkened nook that asks you to respect the fact that they came from real people.
Seattle is an appropriate stop for Ripley gear, because it is the home of Ripley’s biographer.
Neal Thompson’s “A Curious Man,” published last year, explores the artist/adventurer/media pioneer who Thompson says was, “Howard Hughes crossed with P.T. Barnum; Peter Pan crossed with Marco Polo.”
Baby boomers remember “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” as a staple of their newspaper comic sections. It took readers to faraway places and long-ago civilizations — but also showed them oddities under their own noses.
Thompson speculates that Ripley, who traveled to more than 200 countries to expand his collection of oddities, had something akin to an attention-deficit condition, constantly moving his enthusiasm from one topic to another.
That scattershot feel is relayed in this exhibit, with a meteorite to touch here, a depiction of a Ripley cartoon there, a Justin Bieber face made of candy along one wall and a video showing how much energy can be released by dissolving a single gummy bear.
Thompson says Ripley, born in 1890, was an awkward, shy, bucktoothed kid with a knack for drawing.
He began his work as a sports cartoonist, which evolved in 1918 to the first “Believe It Or Not” cartoon.
Ripley’s real-life adventures included — believe it or not — a brief marriage to a gorgeous Ziegfeld Follies dancer. The union was a mismatch from the start, Thompson said. And though Ripley never remarried, he fell into a long-term love affair with a married woman nicknamed “Oakie.”
Ripley spread his talent from newspapers to radio and television, and died in 1949 while working on the 13th episode of his TV series. Perhaps fittingly, he was working on a segment exploring the origin of the funeral song taps.
Thompson said Ripley’s show set the model for today’s seemingly limitless variety of reality-based TV shows. Thompson was drawn to his project when he saw a story about a Ripley attraction reopening in New York City, but he could find no biography of the man who set it in motion.
The traveling exhibit here looks at the science behind some of the nearly unbelievable pieces.
The life-size model of Robert Wadlow, of Illinois, rises from a seated position to Wadlow’s actual height of 8 feet 11.1 inches.
The exhibit explains that Wadlow’s dramatic growth stemmed from a pituitary-gland disorder. If he were alive today, Clarity noted, the condition might have been treated, and his dramatic growth would not have occurred.
Wadlow, born in 1918, died at 22 from an infected blister caused by one of the leg braces he needed to walk.
He is acknowledged by Guinness World Records as “the tallest person in medical history for whom there is irrefutable evidence.”
Youngsters visiting the science exhibit might want to clamber through the 3-foot-wide reproduced section of a titanoboa, a mammoth snake that existed 58 million years ago. It could swallow a crocodile whole.
Visitors young and old may be drawn to the game-show-style exhibits that test a person’s knowledge on a variety of science-related topics.
Admission to the Ripley exhibit is included with admission to the science center.
Seattle is the fifth stop of the exhibit’s 13-city tour. Ripley Entertainment also boasts more than 90 attractions worldwide.
