To hear Marina Chapman tell it, her story goes as follows: in the 1950s, sometime around
her fifth birthday, she was playing outside by herself, enjoying the sunshine in a small
village in Colombia.
That's when she says two men snuck up and chloroformed her, employing the old rag-across-the-face
routine favored by onscreen abductors.
During the abduction, Chapman says she has vague memories of hearing other children crying.
What came next was unexpected.
Chapman says that, rather than being trafficked across international borders or forced to
work in a sweatshop, she was unceremoniously dumped in the Colombian rainforest.
"Very confused and very alone and I just really felt very lonely."
Chapman then recounts a period of uncertainty, saying that she expected her captors to return,
or for a passerby to rescue her.
When neither event transpired, she walked into the jungle until her clothes fell apart,
then she walked some more.
At last, a boon: along came the monkeys.
Capuchin monkeys, to be precise.
Chapman says that they didn't take to her at first, but she observed them and envied
their familial bond.
One day, she suffered from a bad case of food poisoning, and a monkey she calls "Grandfather"
took pity on her, escorting her to a muddy stream and forcing her to drink.
She drank, became ill, vomited, and felt better.
The capuchins then accepted Chapman into their fold, though her account of their relationship
paints her less as an honorary monkey and more as an adopted pet.
By observing the creatures, Chapman says she learned how to climb trees, eat healthy, and
groom herself to the standards of a small primate.
She knew that they really loved her, quote, "when they started to wee on [her] leg."
How that never made it into a Jungle Book adaptation, we'll never know.
As reported by The Guardian, Chapman's story is so far out there that several publishers
refused to print her memoir, A Girl With No Name, and it's easy to see why.
Surprisingly, the tale of a pint-sized South American Tarzan just gets more dramatic once
you get past the part in the jungle.
Feeling isolated and drawn to fellow humans, Chapman says that around age 10 she approached
a group of hunters in the jungle.
The hunters took her in and, in a classic "man is the most dangerous creature of all"
twist, sold her to a brothel.
Bathed and clothed, Chapman says that she was moments away from being put to work, but
she escaped in the nick of time.
From there, she moved to the Colombian city of Cucuta, where she was briefly enslaved
by an organized crime family and forced to clean their house.
She was then adopted, moved to the capital city of Bogota, and took the name Marina.
There, she met a nice boy named John at church and the two were married, eventually moving
to England and having a couple of kids.
Difficult to swallow?
Maybe.
Researchers and psychologists have been bickering back and forth about Marina's story for decades.
Some claim that her stories are a textbook case of false memory syndrome, basically the
brain equivalent of "the heart wants what it wants."
An article published by NPR in 2014 is especially skeptical.
As they point out, many of the facts cited by Chapman don't mesh with reality.
Her accounts of the monkeys building nests in trees just can't jive with the observations
of biologists.
Even Chapman's daughter Vanessa, who helped write Marina's book alongside a ghostwriter,
is quick to point out that, at the very least, her mother has no sense of the chronology
of her story, and that specific details are even murkier.
She told NPR,
"We only feel confident that it's fairly accurate with how everything managed to slot in together
neatly once we'd got the pieces in some order."
NPR also cites Katherine MacKinnon, a biological anthropologist at Saint Louis University,
as a major skeptic.
MacKinnon told NPR,
"I think getting enough basic nutrition with no knowledge of the forest or no human to
show her would be near impossible to impossible."
MacKinnon also believes that the "Grandfather" monkey, if Marina's story is to be believed
at all, was likely trying to drown her, not save her life.
And a different Kate McKinnon, the one on Saturday Night Live, well … here's what
she and the SNL writers think of Chapman's story:
"Every morning, I wake up to a monkey alarm."
"Okay, and now what is a monkey alarm?"
"That's a big red monkey butt right on your face."
Bottom line?
We'll probably never know what really happened to Chapman out in the rainforest, but, as
her book's cover promises, it sure does make for an "incredible story."
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