Brazil's Mystery of The Twins

On Thursday, The Week magazine jumped into an odd conspiracy theory making the rounds on The Internet - why a small town in Brazil has so many sets of twins?

In fact, the village of Cândido Godói has about 1,000 percent more twins than the global average, and many of them, supposedly, are blond-haired and blue-eyed, also genetic rarities in Brazil (and the photo editors at The Week show that they really know how to illustrate a story). The conspiracy theory is that the boom in Nordic-looking twins is in fact the result of secret genetic experimentation by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who fled to South America after the end of World War II.

And how could a story that juicy not be an Internet sensation? But in their round-up The Week cites one source that says the twin birth boom in Cândido Godói goes back to 1927, well before the alleged arrival of Mengele. A secondary conspiracy theory suggests that Mengele didn't experiment on people in the village, but on their cows, whose milk and meat was eaten by villagers, thus producing an abundance of twins (the 1927 part though still isn't explained). And at least one person in The Week's comment section noted that in the National Geographic report that sparked the whole story, most of the twins shown are neither blond or blue-eyed.

The take-away here is to remember on The Internet, stories are often too good to believe.