Question: It stands unique as quite likely the only movie in history to establish two urban legends that have remained part of our culture for more than 40 years.
Answer: Ask baby-boomers what happens if you fire a gun in an airplane at 35,000 feet and blow out a window, and many will relate the gruesome story of the evil spy Auric Goldfinger trying to kill James Bond in the 1964 smash-hit movie "Goldfinger," say Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg in "The Science of James Bond."
The sudden depressurization of the cabin sent passengers swimming about in a whirlwind until being sucked out through the window. But as one expert explains it: This is all urban myth. With a window-size hole, rapid depressurization of the cabin would occur but the airflow would not be forceful enough to lift a person.
Of course, a much bigger hole — as can tragically occur — might very well pull someone out.
In one dramatic case of a Boeing 737 enroute to Hawaii, a front-roof section of the first-class cabin ripped off at 24,000 feet, opening an 18-foot hole and sucking out a standing flight attendant. Fortunately, the cockpit was undamaged and the plane landed safely with no other casualties.
A more gilded legend concerns Goldfinger's beautiful secretary Jill Masterson, who suffocates when her body is completely covered with gold paint.
Bond claims that professional dancers who paint themselves know to leave a small bare patch of skin for air. In 1964 many people might have believed this.
"We can only assume that none of them used a snorkel to swim under water, where their entire body was completely covered with water," Gresh and Weinberg say.
So for Masterson, likely the only danger was her pores being clogged by the paint, causing overheating. Yet the painted golden girl of "Goldfinger" has become one of the most enduring urban legends of all times.
Question: The first stage is odorless and often barely detectable.
The second stage lasts but a few days, depending on environmental conditions. Soon a sulfur-dioxide skunklike smell can be strong enough to be mistaken for a natural-gas leak, followed by liquefication and fermentation aromatic enough to attract butterflies and bees.
By day 6, amino-acid breakdown produces the chemicals putrescine and cadaverine (found in bad breath), and a super-offensive rot is replaced by an ammonia-like scent.
Dry decay a week or so later ushers in a smell like "wet fur and old leather."
The final stage is nearly as odorless as the first.
What's behind this chronology of stench?
Answer: A decaying human corpse, of course, says AveryGilbert in "What the Nose Knows."
Its slow processing leads to the body-in-the-bed stories, such as motel room murders going undetected for days. Urban legend has it that not until the fourth renter would a body UNDER the bed be discovered.
In my opinion, says Gilbert, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for macabre bodily decay goes to A.R, the young hiker whose arm got wedged under a boulder as he was climbing a rock face. Stuck out alone in the wilderness, A.R. could do nothing as his injured limb turned gangrenous and he smelled his own rotting flesh. Forced then to self-amputate his arm, he happily lived to tell the tale.
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