Robert Ripley's life is the stuff of a classic fairytale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness of the world. After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at the age of eighteen, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his Believe It or Noto conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it spawned that would make him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him to search the globe's farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human curiosities, and shocking phenomena. Ripley delighted in making outrageous declarations that somehow always turned out to be true that Charles Lindbergh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that The Star Spangled Bannero was not the national anthem. Assisted by an exotic harem of female admirers and by ex-banker Norbert Pearlroth, a devoted researcher who spoke eleven languages, Ripley simultaneously embodied the spirit of Peter Pan, the fearlessness of Marco Polo and the marketing savvy of P. T. Barnum. By the 1930s Ripley possessed a vast fortune, a private yacht, and a twenty-eight room mansion stocked with such 'oddities' as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices, and his pioneering firsts in print, radio, and television were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, dumbest and most weird.

Today, that legacy continues and can be seen in reality TV, YouTube, America's Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, MythBusters and a host of other pop-culture phenomena. In the end Robert L. Ripley changed everything. The supreme irony of his life, which was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual, is that he may have been the most amazing oddity of all.