The Living Unicorn at the Circus

When Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus started hyping its newest attraction for the 1985 season, I was exactly the right age to fall for it completely. I was a kid in New Jersey, and the ads were everywhere. A beautiful white creature with a single horn rising from its forehead, standing in a spotlight like something that had wandered in from another century. “Seeing Is Believing,” the posters said. My mother took me. I believed.What I did not know then was that before long people would be arguing over what, exactly, they were looking at. The Living Unicorn had a creator, a backstory, and even a patent behind it. Beneath the spotlight and the circus language was something much stranger and much more earthly, with a goat named Lancelot at the center of the story.To understand Lancelot, you have to go back a few decades before he was born, and a few miles north of anywhere the circus ever pitched a tent.Support the Retroist on PatreonIn 1933, a biologist at the University of…