MYSTERY OF THE MANCHESTER MUSEUM'S
EGYPTIAN STATUE THAT MOVES BY ITSELF
FOR 80 years an Ancient Egyptian statuette in a museum in Britain has been said to move by itself.
And for years, curators at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, England, thought some trickster was moving the 4,000-year-old statue, recovered from a mummy's tomb.
Now, for the first time, surveillance cameras have caught the statue actually turning on its axis without anyone touching it.
The 10-inch-tall (25 cm) statuette of a man called Neb-Senu, which dates back to 1800 BC, mysteriously spins 180 degrees with nobody going near it.
Curators were left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way and rigged up a time-lapse camera to catch whoever was moving it.
But incredibly the camera shows the figure moving of its own accord in front of crowds of visitors who pass by with hardly a second look.
Museum curator Dr. Campbell Price says: "I noticed one day that it had turned around. I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key.
"I put it back but then the next day it had moved again. We set up a time-lapse video and, although the naked eye can't see it, you can clearly see it rotate on the film.
"The statuette is something that used to go in the tomb along with the mummy.
"Mourners would lay offerings at its feet. The hieroglyphics on the back ask for 'bread, beer and beef'.
"In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement."
Other experts have a more rational explanation ... suggesting that the vibrations caused by the footsteps of passing visitors makes the statuette turn.
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