The following story was taken from the Weekly World News. It was published August 18,1992. The story was written by Beatrice Dexter.

The fearsome "curse of the mummy" caused the deaths of the discoverers of King Tut's tomb,and now experts believe they have found the reason why: Someone stole the Pharaoh's penis and the Tut is out for revenge!

Dennis Forbes,an American Egyptologist,says his research shows that the King's body was horribly abused following its discovery in 1922 and that Tut's gold penis sheath and his mummified member itself are missing. No one knows who might have damaged the ancient Pharaoh's corpse,but Forbes believes most of the mutilation occured when the mummy's discoverers removed Tut's jewelry and extracted him from his coffin.

Forbes is the first to reveal the penis theft,and since his paper appeared in K.M.T. magazine in June a debate has arisen over whether the missing penis may be the cause of the ancient curse which doomed the discoverer of Tut's tomb to an early death.

According to Forbes,the Pharaoh's head was cut from his trunk so his solid gold face mask could be removed. His torso was sliced in half to make removing the mummy from its coffin easier. After that the dead king's arms and legs were amputated,and his forearms cut off so that 11 bracelets adorning the corpse could be removed.

Then,as if that weren't enough cutting and hacking,the poor Pharaoh's pelvis and legs were removed separately in order to make it easier to remove his torso,which was glued to the coffin floor.

But in spite of the mutilation,the dismembered mummy was pretty much all there...except for his royal privates. These were nowhere to be found. X-rays of the mummy taken not long after its discovery show the organ exactly where it should be. But when the mummy was X-rayed by Professor George Harrison of Liverpool University,there was no trace of the mummy's member.

"We think someone snapped off the penis before Tutankhamen was reinterred the first time,in 1926," Forbes says.

Believers in the mummy's curse say the missing penis is why so many disasters struck Tut's discoverers.

"The spirit of the dead Pharaoh must be furious that his body was treated so badly,and especially that his sex organ was removed for a trophy," said Andrew Handler of London,who has studied the ancient Egyptians for decades. "No wonder Tut saw to it that whoever stole his penis died a horrible death."

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