Jason Wiest, a CT technician at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, helps scientist Gerald Conlogue ready the mummy for her CT scan.
When a Portland woman inherited a creepy old mummy, she wasn’t sure who or what it was. That changed when she put it up for sale on E-bay. Two scientists from Quinnipiac University saw it and contacted her. Ron Beckett and Gerald Conlogue — former hosts of the National Geographic program “Mummy Road Show” — were so intrigued by the mummy, they arranged to have it x-rayed at the OSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
Last week Beckett and Conlogue, plus several cameramen from Portland television stations, accompanied the mummy to Corvallis to run it through the vet hospital’s CT scanner. It turned out the mummy was a dummy. The scanner revealed a largely empty wooden shell wrapped in layers of bandage. Beckett said the fake mummy most likely travelled with P.T. Barnum’s circus as a sideshow hoax.
