That's it, that's all I ask for
A podcast just released an episode on Woodsy the Owl and all the people who remember creating it themselves. It’s wild how many people truly think they created the owl or the saying or both!
Link to the podcast is here
Have to preface this with my obligatory not-an-ME-believer comment.
That said, this is a bizarre case. While the explanation I describe at the end is probably true (and I think every ME here, including every one I’ve “experienced,” has a non-supernatural, non-alternate-universe explanation as well), it is the sort of incident where “a global, well known fact has apparently changed for a large group of people.” Originally posted to r/nonmurdermysteries.
Woodsy Owl is a U.S. Forest Service mascot for children, a cartoon owl whose famous slogan is “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”
He’s pretty much just like Smokey Bear (just for pollution instead of forest fires), so it’s no real surprise that he was co-created by Harold Bell, the same guy who produced the Smokey public service announcements for the Forest Service. The other co-creators were Forest Service employees Glen Kovar and Chuck Williams.
Unless, that is, you believe the many different people online who swear that they, not Bell, Kovar, and Williams, created Woodsy Owl and came up with his slogan.
This belief is so prevalent that the Forest History Society devoted four paragraphs to debunking it in a 2012 article about the mascot. It’s been going on since at least 2009, when Harold Bell died: The comment section for a Forest History Society obituary post for Bell is filled with people definitively claiming that they created Woodsy.
I count 27 people in that comment section, all claiming the same thing. They could all be the same person, hypothetically, but most of the writing styles are different, and the History Society article mentions that the Forest Service is “occasionally contacted by people attempting to have their claim recognized.”
Several of them claim that they (or their friends or siblings) participated in a school contest, in which kids from around the country had to come up with a mascot, and all the entries were sent to the Department of Agriculture (which manages the Forest Service). The winning entry—which, these commenters say, was Woodsy—would become the mascot.
A few commenters get mad, implying that there’s a conspiracy and that the Forest Service is hiding the truth that a kid created Woodsy.
People (maybe the same, maybe not) made the same claims from 2012-2015 at Wikipedia’s “talk” page for Woodsy.
In reality, there was no contest; the Forest History Society article details rock-solid evidence that Bell, Kovar, and Williams created Woodsy on their own, not based on non-ex
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