VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: The Flying Pink Elephants of Circus Circus … (OOPS!)

Posted on: January 20, 2025, 09:26h. 

Last updated on: January 21, 2025, 01:29h.

Welcome to the one Vegas myth we actually helped spread instead of bust. On Dec. 30, we ran a story claiming that elephants once dangled from the ceiling of Circus Circus. That story was a pile of elephant dung.

AI imagines what many claim actually took place at Circus Circus when it opened in 1968. (Image: GROK2)

We could point out that we relied on a very legit source — none other than a daughter of Circus Circus founder Jay Sarno — who swore that, yes, elephants once flew there. We could also point to our unblemished and unprecedented record of busting 130 Las Vegas myths that never had a basis in reality. And we could point out that our story ran for only three days before we corrected it.

But we won’t. Instead, we come to you with our elephant tail between our legs. We apologize not only to those of you we misinformed directly, but also to the 100K people who viewed either the “Miles to Memories” or “Turn It Up World” Las Vegas YouTube vlogs, which talked up our initial story.

Though we are supposed to be the expert in how readily false narratives can spread about Las Vegas, we apparently needed to learn this lesson for ourselves.

Let’s begin at the beginning…

When Elephants Fly

“According to some accounts, a short-lived publicity stunt involved baby elephants that were transported around the casino via an overhead tram, giving the illusion that they were flying,” the Wikipedia entry for Circus Circus states about the casino’s earliest days in 1968.

We’ve become pretty good at spotting myths, and this sounded like the surest candidate ever to fly into our crosshairs via an overhead tram.

Of Wikipedia’s three citations for its claim, only one asserted that the stunt was a thing that actually happened. (The other two doubted it.) On Feb. 7, 1999, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran this story about Circus Circus founder Jay Sarno, a modern-day P.T. Barnum, in which reporter Kevin J. Evans casually tossed off the following sentence 25 paragraphs in…

“A live pink elephant ‘flew’ around the casino on sort of an overhead tram.”

That was all he wrote. No elaboration. No kidding.

First of all, even baby elephants seem very heavy to us. So why would any casino owner want to dangle one 80 feet over people they were trying to convert into return customers? Even if Babar didn’t crush any of them to death, being beaned in the head with his plummeting poop doesn’t sound like a fun night out, either.

More importantly, not a single photo is known to exist of this alleged publicity stunt. And there is no such thing as a publicity stunt where photos are not taken — at least not since the dawn of photography. No photos makes this a fraternity prank, not a publicity stunt.

Swing and a Myth

We weren’t the first to try busting this story as a myth. One of Wikipedia’s other two citations was a column by our late friend Robin Leach, the former host of TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” who spent his final decades as a Las Vegas entertainment reporter.

“Were there flying elephants at Circus Circus back in the day?” Leach headlined this 2011 Las Vegas Sun column. (By the way, if you didn’t read that in a half-screaming British accent, please do yourself a favor and read it again like that. We’ll wait…)

Attention animal rights activists: We are not celebrating how many times this poor wild creature had to be whipped in order to learn to call Keno. We are merely recounting a very different time in entertainment history.  (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

Leach had heard Las Vegas author Jack Sheehan tell the story once and, like us, called bullshit on it.

So he checked with Elaine Wynn, who clearly remembered the early days of Circus Circus but no airborne pachyderms, pink or otherwise.

Leach then asked his friend at the Las Vegas News Bureau to scour the archives for proof. Darrin Bush found plenty of snapshots of Tanya, the very Earthbound 4,000 lb. Asian elephant who pulled slot handles, shot dice with her trunk, and “called” Keno to the delight of crowds. (Her slot trick was even featured in the 1971 James Bond flick, “Diamonds are Forever.”)

Alas, there were no photos of flying baby elephants, not a one.

“Jack must have heard it as a golf story,” Bush told Leach, who ended his column by asking his readers if any knew the truth.

Leach never followed up, so we assume he didn’t crack the case and moved onto less important matters. (Because all matters are less important than this!) In honor of our old friend, we picked up the ball 13 years later.

Myth Information

We managed to track down the email addresses of all four of Sarno’s children and queried each one about the flying pink elephants.

Unfortunately, none replied, but that didn’t diminish our resolve. We uncovered a 1971 program describing all the acts at Circus Circus. It was the blurb for “The Cage Girls” that caught our attention. It mentioned four go-go dancers who shimmied “while dangling from an aerial tram.”

Hmm. So that establishes the mechanism by which the alleged pink baby elephants allegedly flew. Were we getting closer to the truth, or just piecing together the origin for yet another myth?

The Cage Girls dangle from an aerial tram while jiggling behind bars, reminding us, once again, how different a time this was. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

Then we found a pre-opening interview with Sarno in which he promised “two little pink elephants you can ride … or pet” at the grand opening on Oct. 18, 1968.

And we learned that month-old baby elephants only weigh about 300-450 lbs. That’s less than the combined weight of The Cage Girls and the clown they shimmied beneath in the photo at left.

Hmm. So the elements were now seemingly in place. Still, without photographic proof of one of the most irresistibly photogenic events ever to have supposedly occurred on this planet, we were solidly on the fence, just like Leach was.

“It sounds too good to be true,” he wrote in 2011, “but in the good ol’ days of Vegas, anything was possible.”

Couldn’t someone have confused The Cage Girls with Sarno’s pink baby elephants while trying to remember what flew above them after they spent too much time at the cocktail bar?

Pink elephants are literally what people see when they hallucinate.

That’s when the magic occurred that we live for. Heidi Straus, the youngest of Sarno’s children, emailed back.

“It’s real, Corey!” she wrote. “Not sure if the flying elephant was pink, yet quite sure it required a diaper while flying.”

We didn’t even think to ask her about the plummeting poop in our outgoing email. She just volunteered that.

Even with a diaper involved, though, gamblers in the pit below didn’t quite consider it potential good luck to get to cushion the fall of a flying elephant with their internal organs.

“They weren’t all that keen on what was going on overhead and the attraction ended as quickly as it began,” is how Straus phrased it.

As for how no one could have figured that out before any elephants were hoisted, Straus offered a quote that proves who her father was…

“How would we know unless we tried it?”

Stop the Presses!!!!

Three days after we ended our story as you just read it above, we heard from a Mike Hartzell. He said he was the ringmaster, and later director of entertainment, for Circus Circus for 28 years. We verified this with our friend Mike Weatherford, who used Hartzell as a source for many of his old Las Vegas Review-Journal columns.

“The Flying Elephant didn’t fly,” Hartzell refuted Straus’ claim. “I worked there from the opening and, yes, it was advertised and, yes, a platform for the elephant to stand on was created. But doing a test, the poor baby was going nuts after being lifted off of the stage and it was feared the animal’s restlessness would damage the apparatus that telescoped above the animal’s platform.

“For safety reasons, it was called off.”

It turns out, Straus wasn’t old enough to witness the flying elephant and only heard about it later. (Just because your source is legit, doesn’t mean their story always is.)

And this explains the unlikely lack of any photos.

Robin, old friend, consider this case finally cracked. Not unlike the egg running down our face!

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.