A man swallowed by a snake

This photo comes from a now-defunct site titled The JoshReport. After receiving a previous email from one Andrew Maddox questioning the authenticity of the photo, which we published on this page, Josh himself from the aforementioned JoshReport wrote to us saying:

The picture you have of a sliced open snake with a man coming out of it was ripped off my site “The JoshReport” (www.pitt.edu/~jcm11/index.html). Whoever andrew maddox is, he’s wrong about that snake. It is an anaconda from Bolivia. My cousin, who is a missionary to that country came across a few guys wrestling with the snake and took three pictures of it. They tied it up in the back of their pickup truck and it had an enormous bulge in it so they sliced it open and this guy fell out. This photo wasn’t altered, and if you go to my site you’ll see that I don’t make any money off it. So, I thought I’d warn you about people who parade around acting like they know it all when they email you, that is, if you did not already know.– V/R, Josh Mattingly

I’m sorry to tell you that the picture of the man inside the snake is not an anaconda as told by Josh of thejoshreport. Josh don’t know jack about snakes; the snake in the picture is of a reticulated python (Scientific name: Python reticulatus), native not to South America. Its distribution includes coastal Southeast Asia, from Burma and the Nicobar Island east to Vietnam, Peninsular Malaysia, and most of the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia. The species is not known to occur on New Guinea, but does occur on most or all of the Moluccan islands. Notice the same coloration and pattern on the snakes in this link (defunct – removed)…same as the one in the pic of the man eating snake. Just thought you might want to tell Josh he is full of dung. – Kirby Mitchell (edited for clarity)