I found an incredibly fascinating website call Anomalies Unlimited. In it they have a picture and a loosely translated story of an unexplained “creature.” Has anyone heard of this before, and is it a legit story? I’m not asking if the creature is real, only if the story is. Or is it some prank turned urban legend, Or could it be a hoax perpetrated by the Uninted Arab Emerates to create more interest (tourist, scientific, etc) in their lands?
Mummified remains of what? It’s not human. Look at the feet and legs. And the coloring is all wrong for mummified flesh. Believe me, I’m one of the most skeptical person when it comes to these things, but this one I really can’t explain. All I know is what ever the “beast” is it’s not human. It could in fact be a cave gremlin, or it might just be a sculpted piece of latex, but it cant be a mummified human or ape.
I think we can rule out cave gremlin. They bury their dead in another dimension. Proportionately it could be the body of a child that has been mummified either naturally or by humans.
It isn’t black like Egyptian mummies because much of their blackness is due to the resins used during the mummification and wrapping processes.
My suggestion is that either:
A fair bit of calcification has taken place. In limestone or halite caves, as water percolates from above, calcium or other mineral salts dissolve from the overlying rock, then precipitate and crystalize when they contact the air (as with stalactites). Human objects left in old mines and caves are sometimes found with a whitish rock casing after several decades. Calcification may also account for the perculiar shape of the hands and feet.
This Jeff Rense site provides a closeup of the face, as well as a debunking. Of course, the debunking is not well documented. An interested reader provides a detailed debunk of the debunk. Art Bell is aware of the creature.
With regard to the “photograph”: I’ve found it at several sources, and it appears to be identical in each case. The color is bad enough that it might actually be a colorized B&W picture. Surprisingly, the image appears to be a directly scanned photograph, as opposed to a picture from a magazine. There’s no dot pattern visible, but close examination, particulary of the enlargement, shows digitization artifacts. Whoever first put this out on the internet seems to have had access to the original image, or a photographic copy thereof. The question is, where’d they get it ?
Thanks for the compliment. They are a rare commodity these days. For the record, I’ve only recently begun posting because I’ve spent the last 15 years (since I got the first Straight Dope) working on the omniscience thing and well…
This is a complete and utter tangent, but doesn’t this phenomenon–the propagation of (nearly) identical copies of webpages, articles, etc.–seem to be characteristic of fringey websites?
Maybe it’s because the devotees of these subjects don’t tend to have long-term stable web hosting (like academic institutions for example) so, after losing some “valuable” references, the paranormal enthusiasts start copying and displaying stuff on their own webpages to safeguard their sources.
Oh, yeah, absolutely, they copy off each other’s test papers all the time, even right down to the typos. None of them would dream of searching out an original source–they just Copy and Paste whatever “Joe Blow’s UFOs” has on his website right into their own website.
I don’t think you can blame it on lack of long-term web hosting, I think it’s just sheer laziness.
Oh, you know me, DDG, I’ll buy that explanation, too. I was just trying to be charitable.
The greater crime, IMHO, is that one frequently sees news stories where, even if at some point in the past the article had a legitimate attribution, after a few generations of cuts ‘n’ pastes, it gets scrambled, lost, reinvented, rescrambled, translated to Finnish, then Tagalog, then Swahili, and then lost again, so you’ll find the same article on nine different web pages with bylines from the New York Times (on five different dates), and also from Scientific American, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Ladies Home Journal.
If you’re trying to track down the original source, these random attributions are maddening. To the casual reader who only sees one copy, I’m afraid, the bylines are simply convincing.
I think it’s more fundamental than that. The way these people copy and post things verbatim is symptomatic of the very reason they believe in these things in the first place. These people are unable to critically differentiate between different kinds of evidence and their reliability. When they read something like this, it never occurs to most of them to do an independent investigation. Rather, they simply assume that since they read it, it must be true.
I should add, for people who don’t feel like reading the whole thread, someone emailed Cheddar Showcaves & Gorge (which is a tourist attraction in Somerset, England) and they responded, confirming that it is, indeed, a sculpture that’s part of a display of theirs.
So now we have dueling claims for what Kate Walton at Cheddar caves said about the photo.
From alleged ‘Walton’ email on Rense site: “Unfortunately, this particular plaster goblin is not one of our exhibits.”
From alleged ‘Walton’ email at Snopes: “Yes, the sculpture featured in the attachment does exist in Crystal Quest.”
The email address for Walton at cheddar cave (http://www.visitcheddar.co.uk/) is given correctly in the Rense article. The thread in snopes fails to provide an email address for Walton.
That puts us back where we were before checking snopes.
The Crystal Quest ‘dark walk’ was designed by a company called “Scenic Route”. Here’s one of the statues they created for the display. The style is drastically different from that of our goblin boy. This site contains a picture of the Aug/Sep 1995 (issue #52) article in the Fortean Times, which claimed that the goblin picture was from Cheddar. The site also reproduces an email from Kate Walton, in which she claims “this particular plaster goblin is not one of our exhibits.”
It bears the same timestamp and is almost identical to the email displayed on the Rense site.
-Must be a form letter.
As Asterion mentioned, the eyes look funny, but the debunking still seems to rest on little better ground than the original story.
I believe that this isn’t actually correct (although it was once thought to be the case and appears to be in wide circulation - the modern word mummy derives from the word mumi(y)a - a kind of tar, which the bodies do resemble, but the preserved remains are black and glossy because they were dehydrated by burying in a mound of salts, making a sort of human jerky).
