)
Although the story of the Blue People is a legitimate phenomena that
has been well documented and written about in all manner of
publications from science journals to mass-market magazines, we
really don't want to encourage readers to load their cameras and go
on a gawking spree, bothering people. Still, it's too fascinating a
story not to recount here.

For a century and a half, since 1800 or so, it was well known that
multiple families of blue-skinned people lived along Troublesome
Creek near Hazard, KY. Because their offspring were always blue, it
was often assumed that they were a distinct and separate race of
people, even said by some to be alien or descended from aliens, or
even angels. The Fugates were the original blue-skinned family that
came to the area in the late 18th or early 19th century. They
descended from one Martin Fugate, who supposedly hailed from France.

But in the 1960s, a Lexington hematologist named Madison Cawein
theorized that what was happening here was a rare disorder called
methemoglobinemia, which creates an abnormally high level of
methemoglobin in the blood, causing blue-tinted skin. While most
people with methemoglobinemia acquire it through health-threatening
circumstances such as heart and artery defects, nitrate poisoning
("Blue baby syndrome") or respiratory problems, the Fugates and the
other blue families were in perfect health and lived long robust
lives.

Cawein's theory was correct: he administered a chemical substitute
for the missing blood enzyme to some of the Fugates, and their skin
turned pink within minutes. Once the call was put out that the
blueness could be cured easily, most of them came out of their rural
seclusion to line up for the treatment. A very few, it is said, chose
to remain blue, but the most recent reliable sightings of them
occurred in the late 1970s.

It is unknown how many, if any, blue-skinned people still exist in
the area. If they do still exist, they no doubt wish to be left
alone. There's a story, apocryphal or not, about a Hollywood camera
crew getting shot at and chased away by dogs when they trespassed on
a blue person's land. The very few family photographs known to exist
of the blue-skinned people were taken, alas, with black and white
film.

According to an article in Science 82, these families were intensely
inbreeding and intermarrying, which perpetuated the methemoglobinemia
gene on both sides. What I find interesting here is that despite what
we are told about the disastrous effects of inbreeding, these people
did it consistently for generations with seemingly no ill effects:
the Fugates were not impaired in terms of mental or physical
abilities in any way. One woman, by the name of Luna, gave birth to
13 healthy blue children and lived to be 84.

A few years back I corresponded by e-mail with a distant descendent
of one of those families. He was attending Eastern Kentucky
University and reported the only traces left of his blue heritage
were a slight bluish tinge to his fingernails. And thus another
marvelous bit of human uniqueness has been all but eradicated by
modern technology. (Since there're seemingly no ill effects in having
a higher level of methemoglobin, I'd love to see deliberately induced
blueness become a new fad in body modification. )


~~Jason Lavigne