Alice Humbarger of Houston could reach two piano octaves with one hand! Yes! Absolutely true! El Gran Lazaro of Havana could stick a needle in his eye and pull it out of his mouth! Yes, he could! Really! Believe it ... or not!

Old Ben Seiff of Venice, Calif., had a splitting headache every day of his life for 26 years but yet never missed a day's work! And H.E. Rickel of Cozad, Neb., could actually touch his nose with his teeth! And Eastman Smiley of Hartford had a mustache 25 inches long! And Paulina Cannegiter of Ghent ate gold every day for 41 years! (What?) (Gold?) (Forty-one years?)

As it turned out, Rasmus Nielsen of Angel's Camp, Calif., could lift a 200-pound anvil with his nipples. So, the heck with Raymond Van Cleef, anyway. But the other fantastically unbelievable stuff usually stood as recorded.

The man who could read with his tongue. The blind guy who singlehandedly built a three-story house. The dead guy whose coffin was washed out to sea in a storm and borne to the steps of his very childhood home. The gent who could inscribe eight typewritten pages on a single grain of rice. The fellow who lived a rich, full life even though a 13-pound iron bar had been blown through his skull in an industrial mishap. Believe it ... or not.

On and on it went for years, in the daily newspapers, in the movies, on the radio, the most incredible things you could imagine, and people just clapped their heads and dropped their jaws as the sensational enterprise called "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" regularly introduced them to the planet's most unusual inhabitants and most riveting weird-but-true factoids. The very word "Ripley" became absolutely synonymous with "strange."

Did you know that King Louis XIV had such an abhorrence of water that he never in his life washed anything but the tip of his nose? Did you know that ancient Japanese masseurs were required by law to be sightless? Did you know that back in the 1860s there was a famous Chilean street dog that spent its days begging for coins and then using the money to buy ham sandwiches? (What?)

All true, all true, every word of it carefully verified by teams of fact checkers. If you heard it from Ripley, you could believe it. Or not, of course, but it was all true anyway.

This was all purely an accident. Robert Ripley had wanted to play professional baseball, but upon coming East from San Francisco in 1913 to try out with the New York Giants, he broke his arm, and that was the end of that. Instead, he went to work as a sports cartoonist for the New York Globe, and one day in December 1918 he found himself facing his deadline with no ideas. So he cranked out a whimsical drawing of a runner who recently had done the 100-yard dash backward in 14 seconds and captioned it "Believe It Or Not!"

Readers loved it and demanded more, and Ripley's cartoon became a phenomenon overnight, and after a while Ripley started digging up nonsports oddities as well. By the late 1920s, he had a best-selling book collection of his prime stuff, and he was a big hit.

Whereupon William Randolph Hearst decided it was time to sign up "Believe It Or Not" for his own newspapers, and soon Ripley was famous around the world. He launched his long-running radio program in 1930. He appeared in movie shorts and did stage shows. His Odditorium exhibit was one of the major draws of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. In the depths of the Depression, he was earning a half-million dollars a year and trotting around the globe, to such unheard-of lands as Tchad and Er Rif, a modern P.T. Barnum always in search of ever more fantastic unbelievabilities.

He was, in truth, mostly just the ringmaster by now. Most of the actual work was done by a squad of researchers led by one Norbert Pearlroth, a Brooklyn clerk Ripley had hired in 1923 because he was fluent in 14 languages and could cull material from foreign newspapers.

Bert Pearlroth was the one who spent his life buried in the stacks at the New York Public Library, digging up unbelievabilia - the Frenchman who strolled the Paris boulevards walking a pet lobster on a leash, the Irish lady who sat on a nest of chicken eggs for three weeks and hatched them, the Chinese peasant who overcame the handicap of a cleft skull by sticking a candle into his head and hiring himself out as a lantern.

Pearlroth aside, there was no danger of coming up short on items, anyway: Ripley customarily got 3,000 letters a week from folks who wished to offer themselves up as oddities. The letters came from all over the world. Places like Borneo were literally full of people who wanted to tell Ripley about their mustaches and their headaches and their anvil-lifting abilities. It was said of Ripley that he got more mail than anyone else who has ever lived on this Earth.

By the of spring of 1949, "Believe It Or Not" was a huge business, tended by dozens of staffers as the boss continued to roam the globe. He had gone around the world 17 times; he had visited 198 countries; his Manhattan penthouse and his Mamaroneck estate were stuffed full of bizarre trophies; he sailed around on his own authentic Chinese junk.

A museum was prosperously operating at Broadway and 45th St., successor to the three-floor Odditorium that Ripley had opened at 48th St. in 1939, featuring the world's only living two-headed baby, imported from Sumatra. His daily cartoon ran in hundreds of newspapers; he boasted 80 million readers worldwide. And the durable radio program, a national fixture for 18 years, had recently moved to television.

On Tuesday the 24th of May, Robert Ripley, 55 years old and at the top of his game, hosted his new TV show and, against a backdrop of drifting clouds, related the history of taps, the bugle call for the dead. Three days later, a heart attack killed him. Believe it ... or not.

Much of Ripley's private collection was auctioned off and the TV show shortly folded, but the popular newspaper cartoon endured. So did the museum, until 1972, when its owners got fed up with Times Square - "Full of bums and loose women," sniffed one executive - and shut the place down, thereafter to concentrate on Ripley museums in Florida and California and elsewhere.

Norbert Pearlroth retired from "Believe It Or Not" in 1975 and died in 1983. He had spent practically every day of his life at the New York Public Library for 52 years. (What?)

AEI co-reps, with Signatures Network, Ripley Entertainment for publishing and dramatic rights.