Viral e-mail’s sheer falsehoods weave a wide and wooly web

It was a viral e-mail, the kind that people love to forward, forward and forward again, since they reveal the glorious natural wonders of the world.

It arrived at our inbox at home with this breathless, anonymous introduction: “This really is something! How do these sheep keep from falling in the water?”

It consisted of three photos of some horned critters walking across the face of a dam – seemingly defying gravity – with the subject line “Big Horn Sheep taking stroll @ Buffalo Bill Dam.”

All I can say is, boy, did someone send that viral e-mail to the wrong household.

My wife, Carol, was born about six miles from Buffalo Bill Dam, which is right next to Cody, Wyo. She spent approximately the first 30 years of her life staring out a picture window at Rattlesnake Mountain and Cedar Mountain, with Buffalo Bill Dam sandwiched between.

So when she saw these pictures, she barely knew where to begin.

“That’s not the Buffalo Bill Dam,” she sputtered. “It doesn’t look anything like the Buffalo Bill Dam. And that’s not what the cliffs around it look like. And the face of the Buffalo Bill Dam is smooth concrete – it doesn’t have all of those stone blocks.”

The latter point was especially significant, since these alleged “Big Horn Sheep” were using the bumps and ridges of the stone blocks as footholds as they grazed, seemingly miraculously, across the face of the dam. If bighorn sheep had tried to venture across the smooth face of the Buffalo Bill Dam, they’d have to take pitons, hammers and carabiners.

And then there was another problem.

“Those don’t even look like bighorn sheep,” she said. “And besides, there are no bighorn sheep at the Buffalo Bill Dam. I have never seen a bighorn sheep on Rattlesnake or Cedar mountains, much less down there by the dam.”

She then proceeded on a detailed lecture about the “South Fork” and “Ishawooa Creek” and “Deer Creek” – places where you might actually see a bighorn sheep.

So she sent a note to whoever forwarded it to us, saying, essentially, those are pretty pictures, all right, but it sure as hell ain’t the Buffalo Bill Dam.

And there we would have left it, if not for one further development. Two days later, someone else forwarded us another e-mail: “This really is something! How do these sheep keep from falling in the water?”

Same pictures, same “Buffalo Bill Dam” location. These “Big Horn Sheep” would not die.

So we decided to do a little bit of sleuthing. On various websites with names like truthorfiction.com, urbanlegends.com and snopes.com, we discovered that these viral images have been spread worldwide and have been thoroughly debunked by many sources, including the Billings Gazette and the Lewiston Tribune. We also called the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Buffalo Bill Dam, and which has been fielding lots of inquiries about sheep.

To our total lack of surprise, we discovered that these pictures were not from the Buffalo Bill Dam. Nor were they of bighorn sheep.

They are photos of alpine ibex, a kind of wild goat, evidently on the face of the Lake Cingino Dam in the Italian Alps. Ibex are excellent climbers and, yes, they have been known to venture out on the face of the Lake Cingino Dam to lick salt off the stones.

If you look hard enough on the Internet, you can even find video clips of the ibex walking gingerly across the face of the dam.

So, yes, these pictures really do reveal the glorious wonders of the natural world. They also raise questions, which encompass all that is frustrating, baffling and just plain insane about our electronic culture.

Why on Earth would someone send this out as “@ Buffalo Bill Dam” when it is so demonstrably not? Did someone just think, “I dunno, that just sounds better than the Lake Cingino Dam?”

I mean, do people simply make stuff up on the Internet?

Oh, right. I forgot.