It was never as big a poser as the disappearance of Lord Lucan or that of the racehorse Shergar. But for a couple of days in the 1950s the city of Bristol was highly axcited after a 7ft-tall pressed chimpanzee called Alfred dead from the internal museum.
Half a century on the nonplus over what happened to Alfred has been solved after the genocide of one of the culprits, Ron Morgan, a Bristol estate agent.
It turns out that Alfred was taken as a antic by 3 students who whisked Alfred afar after stealing out in a belfry. They ready to go the chimpanzee up in a accumulation of hats and wigs and took photographs of themselves with the savage prior to returning Alfred by withdrawal him in the watchful room of a tyro healing centre.
Alfred was the longest-living chimpanzee in chains in the universe when he died at Bristol Zoo in 1948. He was pressed and put on arrangement in a potion box at the city"s museum, where he became a renouned attraction.
But Alfred dead during Bristol University"s tyro broom week in Mar 1956, call a military investigation.
Fred Hooper, who was additionally concerned with the theft, together with a third chairman well known usually as DS, currently carried the lid on the poser after Morgan"s death, elderly 79.
Hooper, 77, who right away lives in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, said: "It was primarily my idea. I was about twenty-three at the time and I thought it would be a great broom week jape.
"We took Alfred since he was such a big Bristol celebrity and he was close by. It took a bit of planning. We knew the porter and so we were means to get a key cut to the doorway that related the notable relic to the university.
"Then we hid in the belfry until about 1am when all was closed. It wasn"t such a great thought in hindsight as the bells were still toll and incredibly loud.
"We got in to the notable relic and afterwards we used the side doorway to get him out. It was really early in the sunrise and we pressed him in to the foot of an old Vauxhall car and sped off to my bedsit.
"That"s where he stayed for the generation and we took cinema of him in opposite guises."
The friends kept Albert warrant for 60 hours in their prosaic in Clifton.
Hooper added: "There were all sorts of stories going around, people thought Cardiff students had kidnapped him and there was a gossip he was in a cavern somewhere but we never told any one we had him.
"It was regularly the goal to lapse him and so the easiest thing was to take him to a doctor"s watchful room that was only opposite the road.
"It was midday on a Saturday and we only carried him over and left him there."
Morgan swore his friends and family to privacy since he feared he could be prosecuted. But he kept a scrapbook with dozens of cinema of the stolen chimpanzee as well as internal journal cuttings from the time.
Tim Corum, the emissary head of Bristol"s Museums, Galleries and Archives service, pronounced they would not be posterior the flourishing pranksters.
"We are intrigued and gratified to listen to about the revelations connected with Alfred"s "escape" from the City Museum and Art Gallery in 1956," he said. "Although we would never acquit any such bootleg wake up as reportedly happened, the legislature will not be receiving any movement opposite the conjectural perpetrators either. Instead we will be adding the ultimate reports to the prominent record relating to one of Bristol"s most appropriate desired figures."
Alfred stays on arrangement at the museum, where he is still a big draw.
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