Many people in the well-scrubbed and highly visible world of international primatology and lumbering, including not a few in the dusty, primate-infested southwest Arizona community of Hellmouth, were completely caught off guard by the announce- ment yesterday from the Lenin Monkey Institute in Braty-Bublinsk that the USSR's Volga-138 spacecraft has accidentally discovered some definite and incontrovertible evidence for the presence of what can only be rainforests on the cloud-covered surface of Earth's twin planet Venus, something that the first 137 probes apparently failed to do.  The data from the spacecraft was relayed to the Institute from the Chudleigh-Lilydale Royal Tasmanian Primatological Observatory, which was searching for more information about the giant space primate heading towards Earth, and which was the only station to receive the strange telemetric broadcasts.
        The amazing and unexpected news was revealed in a press conference held in his office by Dr. Ivan Grozny, Professor of Simian Socialism at the Institute, which has sponsored and supervised the entire Venus-Volga project.  On an open telephone line were Drs. Mawbanna Waddamana and Basil Smith from Chudleigh-Lilydale, who could be heard arguing vociferously in the background. Perspiring heavily, the crusty old Russian scientist squinted at a dimly-glowing computer terminal and pointed to some squiggly blue lines.  “See that peak right there?” he said with growing excitement, “that's the thermal signature of chlorophyll.”  Rustling busily through some heavily-inked graphs, he warned against premature and unwarranted conclusions. “These will not be like rainforests on Earth,” he said, pausing for a drink of brown water from a mineral-encrusted tea cup.  “We must be prepared to accept some very strange things. Everything will not be exactly the way we think it is.”
        Whether there are primates in the Venusian rainforests and whether or not they plummet the way terrestrial primates do remains an open question.