LEXINGTON

A FRESH THEORY on an old question has seen an Iranian historian suggest that the confused first shot of the American War of Independence, fired at Lexington in April, 1775, may actually have been someone among the crowd of spectators there that morning, farting.

“Arguments about who fired first, the British regulars or the colonial militiamen, have raged for two hundred and fifty years; it’s actually likely that neither side fired first, and that the noise heard was someone in the crowd, watching, breaking wind,” says Professor Jose Ayatollah, a reader in American Conquests at Hugo Chavez College in Havana, Cuba, whose new book critiquing the Republic’s quarter millennium, America: So Much Hot Air, is published this week .

“Most scholars have tended to look past the spectators but at least three recollections from people there that morning make reference to excess wind being in the air. This has usually been taken as comment on the fresh morning breeze but I think the early hour – it was sunrise – meant that many were just up and had yet to evacuate themselves. Their bodies would have been bloated and wind would have been pushing itself at their rectums. In the tense atmosphere of armed men facing each other, a sharp fart may well have been mistaken for a shot and led to the exchange which began the war.

“People did remark on the strange smell surrounding the engagement but most historians have interpreted that as the whiff of gunpowder. Not the case, I say. This was broken, perhaps in terror, or excitement. And if not smelled around the world, then heard.”