World's shortest man found in Philippine jungle

Craig Glenday had good reason to be sweltering in a jeep and bumping along a primitive road in the remotest jungles of the Philippines.

Shortest Man In Jungle

After all, he was on the track of the shortest man in the world. And, as the intrepid editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, he had some verification to do. In other words, the guy had to be measured to ensure that he was, in fact, only 22 inches tall.

As he awaits this week's publication of the 2012 edition of Guinness World Records, Glenday is remembering that wilderness expedition. It sums up both the continuing excitement and mounting challenges of annually producing a book that enjoys sales of three million internationally and now appears in 25 languages. And if you assume that the Internet makes it easier for Glenday and his team to do their job - well, think again.

The world's shortest man is a case in point.

"When it comes to monitoring and verifying, there's so much more we now have to do because of the Internet," Glenday explains. "We have this 18-year-old man who lives in the middle of the jungle in a very remote area of the Philippines that barely has electricity, and somehow we found out about him because of emails from this person to this person to this person.

That's a blessing in one sense, because it makes everything faster and you find out things much more quickly, and it opens up the world."

But information transmitted so rapidly on the web is often unreliable.

In the past, candidates from several countries - including Colombia, Nepal and Taiwan - had vied for the shortest-man record, but the reports coming out of the Philippines, some attributed to doctors, were the most tantalizing.

"We hedged our bets and said we're going to go and investigate this guy."

That entailed a flight from London to Hong Kong, another to Manila, and then a further one to a tiny regional airport.

"Then came our Jeep Ride through the jungle to find the nearest village with a health centre, which, in this case, was just a shack.

He and his family were 14 miles from there, but somehow, they got in and we met and I measured him."

As a result, 22-inch Jun-rey Balawing has made it into Guinness World Records 2012. But this isn't the only mind-boggling measurement. Glenday is reporting a new record for the world's longest set of female fingernails.

"One previous recordholder had metre-long fingernails and then lost them in a car crash. We never thought we'd see something like that again. And then this lady - Chris "The Dutchess" Walton - appears, 10 feet 2 inches for her left hand and 9 feet 7 inches for her right hand.

Total of 19 feet 9 inches. She's a singer and recording artist - quite big in Vegas."

The new edition includes a host of new features. One involves an "augmented reality feature," where specified pages will burst into life with the use of the owner's webcam. Another challenges readers to try some do-at-home challenges: the most cocktails you can mix in an hour, the number of balloons you can blow up in an hour, how far you can carry a car.

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