Recently alligators have been making the news and not just on Animal Planet’s Gator Boys show.

I told you about the gator that went shopping at a Walmart in Apopka, Florida.

Well now we get  word that one turned up in Chicago, in the airport no less. It must have missed it’s flight and gotten lost in the terminal. A maintenance worker discovered the alligator, which is about a foot long, on Friday in Terminal 3.

With all this attention to the scaly reptiles I thought I’d see just how often they turn up in the news. Quite a lot it seems and going back a number of years.

A couple of really interesting articles that caught my eye were a bit older. This first one concerns a 66 year old retiree that may have a new career as an alligator wrestler.

In some crazy alternate universe called “Florida,” a mild-mannered retiree dived into a pond and fought a 7-foot gator that was making off with his terrier—and the retiree won. Seems 66-year-old Steve Gustafson was trimming an oak tree at his home in a retirement community when he heard what the Orlando Sentinel calls a “blood curdling yelp.” He turned and saw the gator snatch his dog from the shore of a nearby pond. Gustafson then kind of wigged out.

“For whatever reason, I don’t know, I just yelled, ‘You’re not going to get her!’ and just leaped on the gator—just like you do some silly belly flop in a pool,” he recalls. “The only difference was I landed on top of a gator.” They wrestled, and Gustafson won. At one point, he tossed the gator deeper into the pond to enable him and little Bounce to make it to shore. Both are fine. The gator, however, was later trapped and is bound for Gustafson’s mantel.

For years it’s been said that there are alligators in the sewer in New York City. It’s debunked periodically as Urban Myth but in searching for interesting  Alligator stories I found this blurb–
Hold the phone: it’s not a croc; there are alligators in the New York City sewer
system—at least in Queens. The alleged urban legend turned out to be the real
thing when Joyce Hackett pulled over to find a group of passers-by and a cop
staring, agog, at a 2-foot-long young alligator tucked beneath a car at an
intersection curb. “It was like the urban legend washes up from the sewer and
says, ‘What the heck am I doing here?’ and hides under a Datsun,” Hackett
quipped to the New York Times.

So is it “Fact or Fiction”? The Gator’s aren’t telling.