At some time, there also appeared versions of the "legend" asserting that the plants had been given away as a gift by a Japanese delegation at the fair. This claim is absent in a pertinent article published in a military engineer's trade journal dating to 1940, but appears in a piece penned in 1941 by the director of the wildlife and fisheries division at the Louisiana Department of Conservation, where the author writes, "the Japanese Government maintained a Japanese building" at the fair, and the "Japanese staff imported from Venezuela considerable numbers of water hyacinth which were given away as souvenirs". The claim has been repeated by later writers, with various shifts in the details. Thus NAS fellow Noel D. Vietmeyer (1975) wrote that "Japanese entrepreneurs" introduced the plant into the U. S., and the plants had been "collected from the Orinoco River in Venezuela", and the claim was echoed along the same gist by a pair of NASA researchers (), who asserted that the souvenir plants were carelessly dumped in various waterways. Canadian biologist Spencer C. H. Barrett (2004) meanwhile favored the theory they were first cultivated in garden ponds, after which they multiplied and escaped to the environs. The account gains a different detail as told by children's story-teller Carole Marsh (1992), who says "Japan gave away water hyancinth seeds" during the exposition, and another Southern raconteur, Gaspar J. "Buddy" Stall (1998) assured his readership that the Japanese gave each family a package of those seeds.