Getting away from the fundamentalist aliens openly bearing arms, it strikes me that a topic tailormade for this board is the question of “legendary creatures.” What is your take on Bigfoot/sasquatch, the yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Ogopogo, and the Nandi bear? Real? If so what? Legendary fictions? If so why? What evidence can be brought to bear on them?
Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are undoubtedly figments of the imagination. In the case of the former, not a single piece of convincing forensic evidence has ever been produced. (SI recently did a cover story on this.) As far as the latter, the guy who faked the first famous photo of “Nessie’s” head and neck protruding from the lake admitted it, and showed how he did so, with a miniature in a small estuary of the lake.
AFAIK The one well-documented sighting of Bigfoot coming from an educated, intelligent and respectable person came from a man who had been near-starving for months and had walked through the Himalayas to India all the way from a Russian concentration camp in Siberia. This is not a very reliable source for that reason, (hallucinations?) but the book of his travels is very, very interesting. It’s called “The Long Walk” if anyone is interested.
The most interesting thing about some of these theories (haven’t heard of all of them) is the lengths people will go to to explain how they could be scientifically true.
The one I know best is the story of how the Loch Ness Monster is really a marine reptile (perhaps an elasmosaurus?), whose species was trapped in the Loch after it was cut off from the ocean in prehistoric times. The rest of the species went extinct, but Nessie and her family are perfectly fine paddling around in what seems like an astonishingly small range for a whole species.
The other fun thing about these theories is that they were a lot of fun to mix with superheroes and movie monsters in fourth-grade speculation. “So if Big Foot and Superman and Godzilla teamed up against Spiderman, a t’rannosaurus, and the Loch Ness Monster, who would win?” “It depends on whether the Fantastic Four were involved or not.” “What about Little Foot?” “There’s no Little Foot you stupid.”
I saw a show on TV recently, that debunked Bigfoot. There’s a classic photo of Bigfoot (or was it film?), and the film was blown up a bajillion times…and they found that Bigfoot was wearing a belt. Oops.
I said Juanita, my sweet Jaunita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
I said Jaunita, my sweet taquita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
Oh, wait. I thought you said Little feat…
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine
I really liked the way that ole Sasquatch turned and smiled for the camera before disappearing into the woods (in that old film).
International Sasquatch symposium apparently met recently…
this is just a news byte, not the whole story:
http://go.borders.com/dailybyte/index.xcv
Tsk tsk tsk, we all know that Bigfoot was really an alien-built robot sent to foil Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers.
Ah, finally! My favorite topic! I study this in my spare time, I do. Yes, most of those aren’t true…chupacabras inclusive acourse. Ehehe. The ones that I like to study are more the giant birds of the U.S. (I’ve seen 'em, like albatross they are). And if you want to know more about them, I recommend Unexplained! by Jerome Clark. It deals with all sorts of anomalous things (and debunks quite a few), like anomalous falls of…varied things, the silly Mad Gasser of Mattoon (I have relatives live there), spontaneous human combustion debunking, Roswell debunking, etc. It’s my favorite book, considering how it deals with all these things I’ve read up on. One book I’d recommend for a real good laugh is The Field Guide to North American Monsters by W. Haden Blackman. I mean…this book is quite recently made, but it talks about earwigs eating people’s brains, and monsterologists. Ehehehe! The idiot.
Snappy, The Crazy Toddite - Friend of Skippy
¿Dónde está la chupacabra?
La Chupacabra está en su mente, mi amigo…
Godzilla would beat them all by himself, of course!
Another favorite one where I used to live in the Jersey Devil. I think it was invented for Scout camps (trust me, it worked wonders!)
“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument” - William McAdoo
I recommend The Goodies episode parodying Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World. The answers are all there…
“So what you are telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else that you have never seen.”
Hey, GuanoLad ! A Rowan Atkinson quote - good on ya, mate… Always liked that scene.
All this talk about bigfoots, yeti and Nessie make me recall the ultimate prank of elders to scouts, the Snipe Hunt.
WHAT in the hell is a snipe suppose to be?
BTW, a recent post about “phantom Kangaroos” in the U.S., taken from a “cryptozoology” site reminded me… well, are there any “phantom roos” in AU or NZ where you might expect them ?
Crypto-zoo-o-topics
1-Phantom kangaroos-silly\probably deer 
2-Phantom’black dogs’
eurological problem?
3-giant carniverous reptiles in Australian outback\ maybe. Not dinosaurs. Existing fossil record confirms that such an animal existed there at one time. Near island of Komodo. Komodo dragon relative?
4-Tasmanian tiger\wolf-probably real. Photos from 1930’s. Repeated sightings since then, sheep killed, tracks, remote & difficult to traverse area.
We have met the enemy, and He is Us.–Walt Kelly
Apparently there really is a marsh-dwelling bird called the snipe. I suspect a snipe hunt is more or less the same thing as a wild-goose chase - something that is so hard to do that you’d only send someone on it if you wanted them to fail.
But I bet it’s easier to find snipe than Bigfoot.
There aren’t even any real kangaroos in New Zealand, let alone phantom ones.
There was a highly questionable sighting of an extinct bird about ten years ago - a big mother known as a Moa. Looks a lot like an Emu or an Ostrich, only bigger. And, as I say, extinct these past 100 years.
“So what you are telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else that you have never seen.”
One of the best cryptozoology books I’ve ever read was “The Encyclopedia of Monsters” by Daniel Cohen. I love his “Encyclopedia” books, the others of which are “…of the Strange,” “…of Ghosts” and “…of Unsolved Crimes.” Great reads, all.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@schicktech.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective