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Winklebottom posted:I know it's been brought up before but I really love this might-be-a-fossil monster on a greek vase  What, they're just having a fun Christmas celebration!
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Jan 2, 2020 23:54
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DontMockMySmock posted:The flood myths thing is way more easily explained by the fact that early civilizations were all in dank river valleys that flood a lot (because that's how you get good soil for agriculture). So floods were common disasters, and it doesn't take much imagination to say "what if there was a really big disaster." It's telling that Egypt doesn't have a big flood myth, because to them, floods weren't disasters, since the Nile flooded regularly. Oh, poo poo. I have read and listened to nearly everything Graham Hancock has put out on this. I think he is a mix of crank and serious researcher but with zero academic training which hampers him. He does have a convincing argument for the flood myth from the melting of the ice sheets and the spread of a lost civilization. I find some of his ideas sort of credible but other areas of of research are pretty bad. His engagement with Egypt is an example of pretty bad. He completely discredits academic Egyptology from his dealings with Robert Shoch and the idea of a 20,000 year old Sphinx. If you don't know what they hell I am talking about, Shoch is a trained Geologist at BU and has given the green light to the idea that the Sphinx is far older than Egyptology wants is to believe thanks to water wear lines. I believe somebody else in this thread laid out a reason why this is wrong. I have seen the water wear theory, if you call it that, on other formats so it's spreading. Problem is this: Shoch is a trained Geologist. However if you look him up, he has very little standing with the Geology Department at BU and mostly works with Freshman Orientation and other programs not related to his field. He also has other odd beliefs that chip away at his academic training. I have made this clear many times: A PhD does not insulate you from bullshit. In fact it makes you a bit more susceptible because of the narrow focus and isolation. Somebody mentioned Men in Black up thread in relation to a podcast. I used to find that poo poo creepy. Then I found Jim Moseley. Moseley was an old-school UFO guy in the '50s until he died in 2012. He published Saucer Smear which was a newsletter dedicated to UFOlogy (pronounced UFoology). He never really stopped believed in UFOs but decided it would be more fun to interact with the UFO community. Him and a friend, Gray Barker, made up the MiB stuff to generate newsletter sales in the 1960s. If you look into many of the cases most of them are fakes designed to up newsletter sales. The MiBs and MJ-12 are the first ones that come to mind. Moseley was a prankster, a jerk and all around hilarious guy. I have a letter from him that I will always treasure, as it's signed. https://www.amazon.com/Shockingly-C...8016007&sr=8-19 Moseley's book, worth your time. You used to be able to find back issues of his newsletter Saucer Smear on line for free but some assholes monetized them after he died. You can still Google up the occasional newsletter. Moseley never had internet, which makes his stuff almost quaint. While none of this stuff is really fringe, I think it shows how hilarious and duplicitous the fringe community can get. No mind for me, I love it. The unknown, the known, the assholes and the pranksters are all fair game.
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Jan 3, 2020 02:56
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nonathlon posted:Keel is an ... interesting character. If you look at his background, he started out as an adventurer, going exotic places and doing and seeing interesting things. So he seems like a credible and open-minded reporter. And mix in the fact that Gray Barker was always nearby, and Barker was absolutely, definitely making stuff up, sometimes to enhance a story and sometimes just to see what he could get over on people. Between Barker and Raymond Palmer, it's really hard to trust anything from that era, even if it comes from otherwise "reputable" sources. Captain Monkey posted:Possible, but without any evidence it's just speculation. If they did exist they didn't invent plastic or use oil, or discover nuclear energy, or use anywhere near as much metal as we did/do or we'd have noticed it in the geological record. I've read speculation that there's likely a TON of ancient cities waiting to be discovered in sub-saharan Africa, which we haven't looked for previously because of a combination of inaccessible terrain, political difficulties, and good, old-fashioned racism. Probably the most well known culture is the Nok culture in what is now northern Nigeria. They started working iron at around the same time as the proto-Celts in central and northern Europe, and they appear to have developed that technology independently, we also know that they were practicing complex farming techniques using indigenous crops. That culture has only been investigated since the 1960s at the earliest, and we only know a fraction about them compared to what we know about European cultures of the same time period. However, the idea that a culture as complex as theirs would not somehow have cities and settlements on par with other cultures of similar time and technological advancement is laughable. And, not to put too fine a point on it, this culture developed from another culture, and from another, and from another, even if we don't know about those antecedents, and Africa is where modern humans first developed. The notion that while the earliest cultures of the Fertile Crescent were developing there was not similar cultures rising and falling in Africa is a profoundly stupid notion. Now, that isn't to say that we can reconstruct said cultures like we have ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, the environment of those areas lends itself far better to preservation. Estimating population levels in areas that didn't leave a written record is fraught with problems, but I think it is particularly telling that throughout the dispersion of modern humans, Africa continually saw an outflow of people. To me, that speaks to a high population, definitely more so than surrounding areas, all of which have evidence of ancient cities, yet somehow the received idea of Africa at this time is that no such thing existed outside Egypt. I both hope and expect that this attitude will change in the coming decades.
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Jan 3, 2020 04:00
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Sure I don’t disagree with that at all, and in fact would easily accept evidence for it, but the idea that there was a super civilization out there with mythical Atlantean levels of tech is unrealistic. I may have been reading too much into what the first post was saying though.
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Jan 3, 2020 04:23
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Burning Beard posted:You used to be able to find back issues of his newsletter Saucer Smear on line for free but some assholes monetized them after he died. You can still Google up the occasional newsletter. Moseley never had internet, which makes his stuff almost quaint. The Internet Archive only has a few, which is a shame, but turns out they do have 10,000 other UFO magazines/newsletters (including a few mis-categorised items): https://archive.org/details/ufonewsletters (or this link for the stuff that's never been viewed) Note: Some of the covers are NSFW (nudity) I think I linked to something on the archive in my last post in this thread. It's cool. I'll try not to to shill it every time though.
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Jan 3, 2020 04:25
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Captain Monkey posted:Sure I don’t disagree with that at all, and in fact would easily accept evidence for it, but the idea that there was a super civilization out there with mythical Atlantean levels of tech is unrealistic. I may have been reading too much into what the first post was saying though. Oh, yeah that's total bullshit and much like giants going from buff dudes to actual giants, it's almost certainly based on a folk memory of very real times when trade networks collapsed and foreign goods became unavailable.
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Jan 3, 2020 04:37
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OutOfPrint posted:Over the course of tens of thousands of years, anything but the biggest, baddest stone monuments would have decayed to non-existence. That's why I can buy the pyramids, Sphinx, pre-Incan cities, and sites like Gobekli Tepe are older than commonly thought. Those are big loving stone monuments, and, in the case of the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe, were buried for centuries, if not millennia, preserving them. We've got some pretty good documentation that dates the creation of the pyramids in Giza rather precisely, including records from the time of the wages paid to some of the workers.
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Jan 3, 2020 08:45
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Azathoth posted:Keel is important to understand on a historiographical level, if not for his credulous reporting. There's a direct line from him to the conspiracy culture that grew on the early internet to what we have today.
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Jan 3, 2020 09:59
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:We've got some pretty good documentation that dates the creation of the pyramids in Giza rather precisely, including records from the time of the wages paid to some of the workers. Don't let facts get in the way of good old fashioned bullshit!
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Jan 3, 2020 10:07
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Azathoth posted:I've read speculation that there's likely a TON of ancient cities waiting to be discovered in sub-saharan Africa, which we haven't looked for previously because of a combination of inaccessible terrain, political difficulties, and good, old-fashioned racism. Africa is diverse as hell in just about every way, so I have absolutely no problem believing that there could be multiple independent centers of ancient civilization. Possibly the nature of geography might mean that such cultures were less interconnected with each other than the fertile crescent civilizations, thus operating on a smaller scale, being more vulnerable to collapse for whatever reason and more likely to be lost and forgotten.
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Jan 3, 2020 12:35
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A lot of the problem, besides the above-mentioned ones, with finding ancient settlements in sub-Saharan Africa is the fact the climate is much, much less likely to preserve artifacts than the dry deserts of the Middle East and such.
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Jan 3, 2020 12:53
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Randaconda posted:Don't let facts get in the way of good old fashioned bullshit! You know who won't look into this? SCIENTISTS!! 
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Jan 3, 2020 21:01
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Randaconda posted:Don't let facts get in the way of good old fashioned bullshit! Disagreed. We need to stop letting these charlatans ignore the historical written record of hebrew slaves constructing the pyramids.
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Jan 3, 2020 21:06
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 Anyone who wants some fun stuff to watch this weekend, some folks brought this show up in the forum sagas thread and it's basically a 110% fit for this thread. I never heard of it before but it's a blast, it's a team investigating SpOoOoOkY goings-on in the house of the week but the fun part is that they're a complete mix of backgrounds. So you have two of them coming in with paranormal investigation in mind and (metaphorically) digging up whatever past spookiness is associated with that house's location, then the other guy is just a legit home inspector so he's always just like "your weird electricity spikes are just the tram going by next door, buy a surge protector" or "of COURSE this room's mysteriously cold, your couch is sitting on the heat vent". It's a blast and it's on Amazon Prime and probably youtube/etc.
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Jan 4, 2020 00:53
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Everyone should read about Great Zimbabwe, that poo poo owns.
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Jan 4, 2020 01:48
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Phy posted:I've heard similar suggested for protoceratops skeletons and griffins, and pygmy elephant skulls and cyclopes, but it's mostly at the level of speculation without a lot to back up the link. This always bothered me because, for some reason, “Let’s combine the two most awesome animals we know” and “You know, a dude with just one eye would be really unnerving” seems like a way more likely origin than “We heard from this guy who heard from this guy who saw the old-rear end skeleton of a thing with four legs and a beak” and “somehow we don’t know what an elephant skull looks like”.
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Jan 4, 2020 06:24
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Captain Hygiene posted:
Jenny Nicholson made a video about that show that's pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wG9m-eYNiM
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Jan 6, 2020 02:14
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Rahonavis posted:This always bothered me because, for some reason, “Let’s combine the two most awesome animals we know” and “You know, a dude with just one eye would be really unnerving” seems like a way more likely origin than “We heard from this guy who heard from this guy who saw the old-rear end skeleton of a thing with four legs and a beak” and “somehow we don’t know what an elephant skull looks like”. Somehow meaning "because we have never seen an elephant or a dead elephant that we knew was a dead elephant as we live somewhere elephants don't exist anymore"?
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Jan 6, 2020 02:56
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Youth Decay posted:Jenny Nicholson made a video about that show that's pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wG9m-eYNiM This is a good rundown. The show's weirdly addictive to sit through, it just feels so staggeringly awkward and poorly thought-out. It sorta feels like it came to life out of a weird joke concept or something. It's almost kinda endearing in its ineptness.
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Jan 6, 2020 03:18
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Jerry Cotton posted:Somehow meaning "because we have never seen an elephant or a dead elephant that we knew was a dead elephant as we live somewhere elephants don't exist anymore"? I googled it and the stories about cyclops go back to at least Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BC) but the earliest accounts of live elephants being brought into Europe was by Alexander the Great in 327 BC. The Greeks took to them pretty readily from that point, however. quote:The 20 elephants in the army of Pyrrhus of Epirus, which landed at Tarentum in 280 BC for the first Battle of Heraclea, recorded by Plutarch's (in Lives), Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Livy. "The most notable elephant in Greek history, called Victor, had long served in Pyrrhus's army, but on seeing its mahout dead before the city walls, it rushed to retrieve him: hoisting him defiantly on his tusks, it took wild and indiscriminate revenge for the man it loved, trampling more of its supporters than its enemies". 
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Jan 6, 2020 06:25
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Groke posted:Africa is diverse as hell in just about every way, so I have absolutely no problem believing that there could be multiple independent centers of ancient civilization. I wish I could remember what the empire's name was, but one of my history professors had mentioned that there was one in Africa that was able to intimidate the Roman Empire enough to keep its interests about as far as Egypt rather than extending deeper into Africa. One of my archaeology professors said finding proof of African civilizations beyond the main known ones was difficult due to the perishability of what materials they had along with what erasure the Afrikaaners have been doing for generations. To touch on the Chariots of the Gods stuff from earlier, even when I read that stuff back in the day it was just so ridiculous. I loved when my various history, anthropology, archaeology professors would go on a debunking lecture since that'd be when you'd hear the real stuff which was more fascinating than ancient aliens such as Native Americans did have the rudiments of hot air balloon technology which was enough to aid in designing their monuments and didn't see much of an application past that or Greeks and Romans had steam technology but only saw it as something for entertainment/toys.
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Jan 8, 2020 20:54
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M_Sinistrari posted:I wish I could remember what the empire's name was, but one of my history professors had mentioned that there was one in Africa that was able to intimidate the Roman Empire enough to keep its interests about as far as Egypt rather than extending deeper into Africa. One of my archaeology professors said finding proof of African civilizations beyond the main known ones was difficult due to the perishability of what materials they had along with what erasure the Afrikaaners have been doing for generations. It sounds like your professor might have been referring to the Kingdom of Aksum in the area of the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula, and were well known to the Romans. As for Roman steam technology or ancient balloon technology, it doesn't get mentioned enough just how much these kinds of development are limited by a relative lack of progress in materials science. The underlying principles aren't really complicated, but simply creating a vessel that was light enough and strong enough (for balloons) or just strong enough (for steam engines) to withstand useful pressures was far outside of their capability.
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Jan 8, 2020 22:02
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Romans had analog computers, advanced surgery techniques and industrialized flour mills powered by aqueduct. P rad
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Jan 9, 2020 00:01
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Perhaps not cryptids but a great look at how they come about is All Yesterdays. This article is good and has a link to buy the book: https://bogleech.com/allyesterdays.html It starts off showing how wrong or just clueless our interpretations of dinosaur fossils may be. Then transitions into interpreting modern critters as we do dinosaurs and other fossils- based overwhelmingly on their skeletal outlines. It's easy to see how familiar animals and fossils alike end up being scary cryptids when all the average human is familiar with is the outsides of a living specimen. swan  kitty 
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Jan 10, 2020 18:48
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:swan I always enjoyed those illustrations, but never really knew whether there was much truth to them or if they were just a neat idea.
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Jan 10, 2020 19:07
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Lovin' this thread, as always! It inspired me to see if my area had any weird critters/legends/fringy stuff I didn't know about. GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU THE SNALLYGASTER  quote:As far back as the 1700s, Virginia residents claimed a giant reptilian bird would appear in the sky, and swoop down to attack pets, game, livestock, and sometimes children. Eyewitness descriptions of the Snallygaster sound like that of a pterosaur; an enormous flying monster with a wingspan of twenty-five to thirty feet, a long beak, and leathery skin that looks like a reptile. However, the Snallygaster also has tentacles, talons of steel, and carries with it the pungent scent of death. Its shriek resembles a train whistle. Last sighting was in 1973. Apparently there's one in Fallout 76, and it's also the name for a big-rear end beer festival in DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snallygaster Now I really want a sick Snallygaster tattoo. JacquelineDempsey has a new favorite as of 19:12 on Jan 10, 2020 |
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Jan 10, 2020 19:09
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's easy to see how familiar animals and fossils alike end up being scary cryptids when all the average human is familiar with is the outsides of a living specimen. There's actual real world examples of "shrinkwrapped" versions of modern animals being confused for weird monsters, like the infamous Montauk Monster:   It inspired lots of fanart and even a really inaccurate fake display in a cryptozoology museum!     
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Jan 10, 2020 19:29
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JacquelineDempsey posted:
At the risk of being labeled "that moron that plays Fallout 76" there's a bunch of cryptids in Fallout 76. The Mothman has his own cult and it's going to be a faction in the next update. One of the updates last year was focused on cryptids. There's the Flatwoods Monster as well, but imho she's a bit of a disappointment cause she's just your typical grey alien in a spacesuit and not the green skinned nun monster of my imagination. Oh, there's the Grafton Monster as well, which is so obscure that I had never even heard of it before the game and I'm a slut for monsters. It hasn't even got it's own Wikipedia page nor even a mention on the page for the city of Grafton. It's gimmick is that it ain't got no head. https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Grafton_Monster
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Jan 10, 2020 20:18
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Perhaps not cryptids but a great look at how they come about is All Yesterdays. This article is good and has a link to buy the book: https://bogleech.com/allyesterdays.html Did Archaeopteryx have feathers? The world may never know.
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Jan 10, 2020 20:27
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There's another book i remember excerpts from that had had a lady wearing a toilet seat and there was an explanation of how it must've been a ceremonial head dress.
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Jan 10, 2020 23:23
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Wasabi the J posted:There's another book i remember excerpts from that had had a lady wearing a toilet seat and there was an explanation of how it must've been a ceremonial head dress. Motel of the Mysteries
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Jan 11, 2020 00:13
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Captain Hygiene posted:I always enjoyed those illustrations, but never really knew whether there was much truth to them or if they were just a neat idea. More contemporary dinosaur illustrations have padding from fat and feathers and stuff. As an example, it is unlikely you’d be able to see the teeth of a trex with a closed mouth, as the teeth would be covered with muscle, fat, cartilage, skin, maybe feathers, etc . Same thing with sabertooth cats, for another toothy example. Jurassic Park is almost solely responsible for the layman’s perception of what dinosaurs looked like. Pvt.Scott has a new favorite as of 00:46 on Jan 11, 2020 |
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Jan 11, 2020 00:43
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:There's actual real world examples of "shrinkwrapped" versions of modern animals being confused for weird monsters, like the infamous Montauk Monster: My archaeology professors said people seeing the bones of a bear paw could've been a contributing factor to the stories of giants because they're similar enough to human handbones. I also remember that picture that was going around a few years ago of what turned out to be a bear with severe mange but had people wondering if it was a cryptid.
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Jan 11, 2020 13:57
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How about cryptids/ghosts spotted...in movies? Certainly creeps me out a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7-GKHM5HZ8
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Jan 11, 2020 17:15
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Pvt.Scott posted:More contemporary dinosaur illustrations have padding from fat and feathers and stuff. As an example, it is unlikely you’d be able to see the teeth of a trex with a closed mouth, as the teeth would be covered with muscle, fat, cartilage, skin, maybe feathers, etc . Same thing with sabertooth cats, for another toothy example. True, good points (except for feathers, dinosaurs having feathers was Satan's true archeological hoax  )
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Jan 11, 2020 20:25
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Captain Hygiene posted:True, good points (except for feathers, dinosaurs having feathers was Satan's true archeological hoax Okay but what about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dcQO6Zb8Eg
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Jan 12, 2020 02:31
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married but discreet posted:How about cryptids/ghosts spotted...in movies? Certainly creeps me out a bit. It really just looks like something that helps the blood flow direction
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Jan 12, 2020 02:36
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Facebook Aunt posted:Okay but what about Birds cosplaying as dinos
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Jan 12, 2020 02:43
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Len posted:It really just looks like something that helps the blood flow direction Its probably just a small dummy/doll. the sourced of all that blood.
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Jan 13, 2020 15:18
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