Massimo Polidoro is an investigator of the paranormal, lecturer, and cofounder and head of CICAP, the Italian skeptics group. His website is at www.massimopolidoro.com.
There was a time when people believed lambs grew on trees. Sir John Mandeville, an English knight who lived during the reign of Edward III in the middle of the fourteenth century, writes in his memoirs of the many journeys over thirty-four years that led him to discover the remotest places in the then-known world, among what are now Asia Minor, North Af rica, and India. It was on his way to the latter country, after passing through Catai (present-day China) and Tartary (Russia and Mongolia), that a curious incident happened. During the journey, he came across a very unusual plant that generated strange gourd-like f ruits: “And when they are ripe, men cut them a-two, and men find within a little beast, in flesh, in bone, and blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both the f ruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that f ruit I have eaten, although it were wonderful, but I know well that God is wonderful in His Works” (quoted in Lee [1887] 2008).