Believe It, the Winner Crows : <i> Peculiar Parade at Ripley’s Is Led by a Japanese Rooster With a 16-Foot Tail </i>

Victor Forte, 31, may not be as strange as a lemon that’s shaped like Elvis, or as odd as a six-clawed cat, or even a necklace made of gallstones.

But the self-professed oddity said he competed in a contest of the bizarre Friday at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum here partly to find out how weird one has to be before Southern Californians take notice.

Forte’s claim to fame is his own body, which has undergone more than 30 operations--at a cost of $750,000--since a recent car accident. In fact the Downey resident, wearing a knee brace and showing off stomach scars, said: “I stopped on by here on the way back from the orthopedic surgeon’s.”

Believe it or not.

Among the truly bizarre submissions--many of them entered by telephone and verified by event staff--were a petrified turtle, X-rays from a 2-year-old child who was hit by a car twice but not hurt and a Christmas wreath made of horse dung.

Radio disc jockey and event host Charlie Tuna quipped to the small crowd assembled in front of the museum that “fortunately, they didn’t show up with that last item.”

The two-week contest, sponsored by the museum and a local FM radio station, started July 8 and attracted hundreds of entries. The 30 finalists were judged on visual impact, rarity, bizarreness and unbelievability.

“We definitely have some strange things in Southern California,” event coordinator Mark Edwards said. “And some even stranger people.”

But only one thing makes the truly weird people able to distinguish themselves in an area regarded by the rest of the nation as a haven for odd, strange, peculiar and just plain bizarre folks, Edwards said.

And that’s “the capability of just admitting it, (of saying), ‘I’m weird and I’m proud of it,’ ” he said.

A stuffed rooster with a 16-foot-long tail won the grand prize, a trip for two to San Francisco, awarded to its owner, Garry Waples of Anaheim, who was unavailable for comment.

Edwards said the rooster came from a tiny rural town in northern Japan, where a single family breeds the long-tailed fowl.

The birds are considered a national treasure and are only rarely allowed out of the country, he said. Because the birds are unable to lift their tails as peacocks do, human valets must constantly be on hand to lift the bird’s tail feathers so they don’t drag on the ground when the birds wish to roam.

Disc jockey Tuna, who answered most of the calls from contestants, said at first he thought that the rooster was a prank: “Some mornings you get a few wacko calls. I didn’t believe him. But it turned out to be the real thing.”

Juli Stroma, 28, of Anaheim won a runner-up prize with her heart-shaped rock, which she found 10 years ago while hiking in nearby mountains with her then-boyfriend. She said that immediately after she found the rock, he proposed to her. “It was just a sign, I guess.”

Stroma said she liked being in the contest of the bizarre and added that a little weirdness is important for people: “It balances life out.”

Some of the entries were not available for viewing during the awards presentation, so the crowd missed out on the talking cat, the 10-billion-mark postage stamp from 1923 Germany, the 1848 marriage certificate and the gallstone necklace.

A few other entries that were never seen were disqualified. For example, Tuna said, several people suggested names of various politicians who should be inducted into Ripley’s Believe It or Not, “but in the interests of good taste, we had to decline.”

Besides, he added, “nobody would believe them anyway.”