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Snowglobe of Doom
Mar 30, 2012

sucks to be right

M_Sinistrari posted:

One of my forensics professors said a common one was people claiming to find a giant or bigfoot's hand bones but it was actually a skeletonized bear paw.

The Travel Channel's current bigfoot hunters reality TV show "Expedition Bigfoot" hand a skeletonized bear paw episode just a few weeks ago, it was dumb as hell. :v: :v:

The conversation went pretty much exactly:
"Wow, if you ignore the claws it looks exactly like a large hairy human hand!!"
"Are there any reports of bigfoots with claws??"
"Uhhhhhhhhhhh ........... yes a few???"
"OMG it's a bigfoot hand!!!!!"

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Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Phy posted:

As a total aside, I always thought the sole North American member of the giant salamander family was neat, but not neat enough to really merit its common name, "HELLBENDER" :black101:

I've always found it interesting that historically salamanders were considered fire spirits.

The reality is that they were just chilling out in old damp logs, but then when they're used for fire wood, out pops an amphibian, which should be the opposite of a fire spirit.

Casu Marzu
Oct 20, 2008

Oh hey, there's a semi-local cryptid in WI that I absolutely love.

Meet the Hodag:



In American folklore, the hodag is a fearsome critter resembling a large bull-horned carnivore with a row of thick, curved spines down its back. The hodag was said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen, as the incarnation of the accumulation of abuse the animals had suffered at the hands of their masters.



In 1893, newspapers reported the discovery of a hodag in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It had "the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end". The reports were instigated by well-known Wisconsin land surveyor, timber cruiser and prankster Eugene Shepard, who rounded up a group of local people to capture the animal. The group reported that they needed to use dynamite to kill the beast.

A photograph of the remains of the charred beast was released to the media. It was "the fiercest, strangest, most frightening monster ever to set razor sharp claws on the earth. It became extinct after its main food source, all white bulldogs, became scarce in the area.



:lol:


Nowadays this fella is the mascot for the city of Rhinelander and its high school.



He's also pretty fuckin adorable.



SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

You see this poo poo in cryptid and UFO/alien reports all the time. I remember one thread we had about UFOs and someone posted a well known story about a UFO that had flown over a US nuclear missile silo and caused a complete shut down of all their systems but when I went and tracked down the original reports the story was significantly less exciting than the popular version that was repeated on dozens of UFO websites.

The stuff I posted about Cripplefoot further up the page is another good example, I've seen photos of the footprints posted on a whole bunch of Bigfoot websites but all the peripheral details that indicate it was a dumb scam are almost always left out.

That highlights the main thing that distinguishes Bigfoot from the characters in earlier stories: that he exists as a collection of physical evidence, - as a subject of ‘scientific inquiry’.

Bigfoot is effectively made out of plaster casts and blurred photographs, which make a boogeyman appear as (un)real to the layman as a dinosaur known only through fossils. That’s a huge shift. Bigfoot didn’t exist before the authority of ‘Bigfoot researchers’. They generated him.

It’s as you note: the reason that Bigfoot succeeded, where the ‘mountain devil’ hype almost-immediately fizzled, is in how folks like Patterson were able to scrub strangeness from the record and present a standardized account.

(CDB Bryan’s “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” is a pretty good book about ufologist’s attempts at downplaying high strangeness. I’ll check out your rec too!)

Even plaster casts have fallen to the wayside, and Bigfoot is now pretty much exclusively a media character. If you check up on the Bigfoot enthusiasts, they’re no longer even really trying to prove the existence of Bigfoot anymore, but to prevent disproof of the Patterson footage (which remains the one ‘pure’ document, even if all else is corrupt).

SuperMechagodzilla has a new favorite as of 15:28 on Mar 8, 2021

Shellception
Oct 12, 2016

Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves.

The Turtle Moves.

Iron Crowned posted:

I've always found it interesting that historically salamanders were considered fire spirits.

The reality is that they were just chilling out in old damp logs, but then when they're used for fire wood, out pops an amphibian, which should be the opposite of a fire spirit.

Hey, it makes sort of sense. I once visited Postojna Cave in Slovenia, which is an awesome system of stalactite and stalagmite filled caves spawning several kilometers underground. Local legends talked about the caves being home to dragons.

In reality, they are home to a particular species of blind cave salamander. Turns out that on heavy rain seasons, the underground caves would flood, and water came out of the caves, with the salamanders floating in it. The amphibians were thought to be the cave dragons' babies, and if there were babies, then...

They are heavily protected nowadays, with special areas given to them and a breeding program in place, and they have been growing in number :kimchi:.

M_Sinistrari
Sep 5, 2008

Do you like scary movies?



And I forgot to post my favorite cryptid, the dog headed men.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU4O9XCyJcA

Early depictions of St. Christopher show him as a dog headed man. I wish those were still around, but then I'm still thinking St. Guinefort got a raw deal.

Snowglobe of Doom
Mar 30, 2012

sucks to be right

M_Sinistrari posted:

I wish those were still around

Modern era dogmen have been pretty popular in cryptid circles for a while, including the classic Beast of Bray Road which was first seen in 1936 but had a bunch of reported sighting in the 80s and 90s, and the Michigan Dogman which was first reported in 1887 and allegedly keeps returning on a ten year cycle on years ending with the number 7.

The North American Dogman Project has a handy map of all the reported Dogman sightings: https://northamericandogmanproject.com/encounters

You know that they're SUPER SERIOUS because they've organised their chapters very strictly with clearly delineated borders and regional directors and have a bunch of specialist teams (field investigators, special response team, special investigation unit, etc) and have designed distinct logos and ordered cloth badges for all of the teams.

I especially love how this goober from the K9 tracking team had to photoshop a dog into his official photo and did such a godawful job of it:


Bless his cotton socks :allears:

Marcade
Jun 11, 2006


Who are you to glizzy gobble El Vago's marshmussy?

The mention of Weekly World News in the OP reminded me of the WWN article that scared me the most as a gullible child. There was an article about an alien head (no idea where they said it came from) that was re-growing its body and sending a signal out into space. I had nightmares about that for weeks. Cursory googling did not find any mention of it and I have no idea as to the specific year (I would guess early 90s) so I couldn't track it down to share.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 14 hours!
For me it was the article claiming that some mining operation had breached hell and you could hear screams coming from a bottomless pit.

CPL593H posted:

Pukwudgies are a gremlin like creature with long ears and fingers which appear in the folklore of the Wampanoags who were the tribe that lived in South Eastern Massachusetts. Pukwudgies were said by the Wampanoags to dangerous creatures to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes they played relatively harmless pranks. But much of the time they were actively hostile and among other things would lure people into the woods and kill them either with poison arrows or magic or steal children in the night.
That sounds very much like medieval European legends about "elf-shot."

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
I love ephemera, so I may or may not have some old WWN covers framed on my wall. I also have lots of old UFO newsletters from the 40s-60s that I may write up in here some time—very interesting reading early and later issues by the same author watching him go from bright-eyed optimist to cynical pessimist calling out the UFO community for being gross and super toxic, all within the span of a few years in the early 50s. Just another reminder that the community didn't only get problematic in recent years.

Speaking of local legends and print, is anyone a Weird NJ fan? I started reading it when I was a big Chris Gethard fan (he wrote for them for years) and then bought a bunch of back issues. I love their approach to urban legends, going hyper-local and presenting the legend without taking an editorial stance.

Halloween Jack posted:

For me it was the article claiming that some mining operation had breached hell and you could hear screams coming from a bottomless pit.

Skeptoid did a great episode on this. Dunning may be a bit too smug, and he did some sketchy financial stuff, but I really like his approach to research and storytelling.

feedmyleg has a new favorite as of 21:09 on Mar 8, 2021

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Marcade posted:

The mention of Weekly World News in the OP reminded me of the WWN article that scared me the most as a gullible child. There was an article about an alien head (no idea where they said it came from) that was re-growing its body and sending a signal out into space. I had nightmares about that for weeks. Cursory googling did not find any mention of it and I have no idea as to the specific year (I would guess early 90s) so I couldn't track it down to share.

One reason to distinguish Bigfoot from Sasquatch is that Sasquatches were originally said to be a tribe of tall, hairy "Indian" men living on and around Vancouver Island in Canada. Sasquatch narratives were a staple of men's pulp adventure magazines going back to at least the 1940s - tabloid articles along the lines of "weasels ripped my flesh!" in poo poo like SIR! and STAG and whatever.

These men's adventure stories are obscure and poorly archived because, again, who's going to bother? But the impact was obviously enormous. In the years leading up to the Wallace hoax, men's adventure magazines were capitalizing on (and stoking) the Yeti expedition phenomenon - partly by recycling old Sasquatch tales.

But the important thing is that, despite the hair, Sasquatch are entirely human. They speak, they use tools, they make fire... and they have a tendency to abduct young women to their well-furnished cave dwellings. A 1956 article in STAG - two years before Wallace - relates tales of how Sasquatches hunted with bows and arrows, and bartered with the locals.

I've noticed that abductions are no longer a thing in Bigfoot mythology; they were a remnant of the original Sasquatch mythology, that was quickly discarded.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
For reference from my men's magazine collection...



For those wondering, yes. Yes the story is about exactly what you think it is. The story claims that she gave birth to a hybrid child which was left with the tribe. It's, uh. An uncomfortable read.

e: Though worth noting in light of what SMG said, in this particular instance they are drawing a clear distinction between native peoples and the sasquatch.

feedmyleg has a new favorite as of 21:08 on Mar 8, 2021

M_Sinistrari
Sep 5, 2008

Do you like scary movies?



feedmyleg posted:


Speaking of local legends and print, is anyone a Weird NJ fan? I started reading it when I was a big Chris Gethard fan (he wrote for them for years) and then bought a bunch of back issues. I love yheir approach to urban legends, going hyper-local and presenting the legend without taking an editorial stance. It


I stumbled across the website when my son was a newborn and had trouble sleeping through the night. I'd rock him back to sleep while reading. That was where I read enough about strange locations to consider someday making a trip out there to see them in person.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
They also put out a bunch of books that I'd recommend, especially if you live in one of those states or are planning a road trip through one of them. Sadly my home state of Iowa is not spooky enough to have one and local legends weren't much of a thing when I was growing up there. But in all the state books I own there are so many cool interesting and spooky places and local legends.

Ambitious Spider
Feb 13, 2012



Lipstick Apathy

feedmyleg posted:

For reference from my men's magazine collection...



For those wondering, yes. Yes the story is about exactly what you think it is. The story claims that she gave birth to a hybrid child which was left with the tribe. It's, uh. An uncomfortable read.

e: Though worth noting in light of what SMG said, in this particular instance they are drawing a clear distinction between native peoples and the sasquatch.

I have a collection of pa folklore, that has a gender swapped version of that story. It's a hairy woman/sasquatch who saves the man lost in the woods, he lives with her for a while, they have a kid, I can't remember if he returns to society or people just see the family in the woods.

EasilyConfused
Nov 21, 2009


one strong toad
Have any cryptids actually been discovered to be real since the term cryptozoology has been in use (1950s, according to my cursory wikipedia search)?

Edit: I ask since the examples I always see are pre-20th century.

Edit2: Maybe a better question is when is the last time a cryptid or supposedly mythical animal turned out to be real?

EasilyConfused has a new favorite as of 22:14 on Mar 8, 2021

Space Cadet Omoly
Jan 15, 2014

~Groovy~


Casu Marzu posted:

Oh hey, there's a semi-local cryptid in WI that I absolutely love.

Meet the Hodag:



In American folklore, the hodag is a fearsome critter resembling a large bull-horned carnivore with a row of thick, curved spines down its back. The hodag was said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen, as the incarnation of the accumulation of abuse the animals had suffered at the hands of their masters.



In 1893, newspapers reported the discovery of a hodag in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It had "the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end". The reports were instigated by well-known Wisconsin land surveyor, timber cruiser and prankster Eugene Shepard, who rounded up a group of local people to capture the animal. The group reported that they needed to use dynamite to kill the beast.

A photograph of the remains of the charred beast was released to the media. It was "the fiercest, strangest, most frightening monster ever to set razor sharp claws on the earth. It became extinct after its main food source, all white bulldogs, became scarce in the area.



:lol:


Nowadays this fella is the mascot for the city of Rhinelander and its high school.



He's also pretty fuckin adorable.





Oh my God, I just met Hodag and I already love him.

I feel like cryptology is more of a study of history than of science. Where did these creatures come from? What's the mythology behind them? What might the rational explanation for them be? Do they enjoy golf? These are the big questions.

I think the closest thing I've ever had to a personal IRL life cryptid sighting is the time I was out biking and came across a really big pig. I wasn't near a farm or anything, and I had never seen pigs in that area before and never have again. It was a hella huge pig too, maybe it was a former pet that someone released into the wild because it got too big?

M_Sinistrari
Sep 5, 2008

Do you like scary movies?



I'm kinda surprised the Merrylin Cryptid Museum hasn't been posted yet. It's an art site, but often pictures from it end up on the various paranormal sites as 'real' evidence.

http://www.merrylinmuseum.com/

Phy
Jun 27, 2008



Fun Shoe
I doubt it was ever a concept intended to be taken seriously, unlike Sasquatch (or Bigfoot) or the Jersey Devil, but I always liked the Hidebehind, whose traits were essentially "being fast, quiet, and real fuckin' creepy". A big ol' thing that preyed upon lumberjacks, the Hidebehind could, well, hide behind things as quick as you could turn your head, so you never got to actually see it. If it couldn't hide behind a tree or a rock or a hillside, it'd dance around behind you. It apparently didn't like the smell of liquor, so, getting riotously drunk was your best defense. One presumes the Hidebehind was trotted out as an excuse to naive young crew hands who asked why you were breaking out the whiskey while on the job.

Space Cadet Omoly
Jan 15, 2014

~Groovy~


Phy posted:

I doubt it was ever a concept intended to be taken seriously, unlike Sasquatch (or Bigfoot) or the Jersey Devil, but I always liked the Hidebehind, whose traits were essentially "being fast, quiet, and real fuckin' creepy". A big ol' thing that preyed upon lumberjacks, the Hidebehind could, well, hide behind things as quick as you could turn your head, so you never got to actually see it. If it couldn't hide behind a tree or a rock or a hillside, it'd dance around behind you. It apparently didn't like the smell of liquor, so, getting riotously drunk was your best defense. One presumes the Hidebehind was trotted out as an excuse to naive young crew hands who asked why you were breaking out the whiskey while on the job.

Oh Hey! Gravity Falls did a short on that guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJJgybKQyT8

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

feedmyleg posted:

For reference from my men's magazine collection...



For those wondering, yes. Yes the story is about exactly what you think it is. The story claims that she gave birth to a hybrid child which was left with the tribe. It's, uh. An uncomfortable read.

e: Though worth noting in light of what SMG said, in this particular instance they are drawing a clear distinction between native peoples and the sasquatch.

To be clear, when the Sasquatch are described as a tribe of hairy, cave-dwelling aboriginals, it is pretty much always as a contrast to the ‘normal Indians’ (who are said to hold a healthy fear and respect for the Sasquatch tribe that the white man just doesn’t ‘get’).

A recurring ‘trope’ in Sasquatch stories is the native guide saying “stay away from that area”, so the white guy blunders on anyways and gets spooked by noises or something. In Fred Beck’s retelling of Ape Canyon, the guide is a full-bodied Native American spirit-god apparition who serves as a contrast to the ‘less-developed devil spirits’.

But, with the question of ‘is it man or beast??’, these early Sasquatch stories fall pretty firmly onto the ‘man’ side of the spectrum. You do get odd speculations about them being a distinct species of ape, but that’s way less common than references to them as ‘naked men’ or ‘a race of giants’ and so-forth.

With Bigfoot, “man or beast??” isn’t even a question. Bigfoot’s some kind of tall gorilla or orangutan.

SuperMechagodzilla has a new favorite as of 00:15 on Mar 9, 2021

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 273 days!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

To be clear, when the Sasquatch are described as a tribe of hairy, cave-dwelling aboriginals, it is pretty much always as a contrast to the ‘normal Indians’ (who are said to hold a healthy fear and respect for the Sasquatch tribe that the white man just doesn’t ‘get’).

A recurring ‘trope’ in Sasquatch stories is the native guide saying “stay away from that area”, so the white guy blunders on anyways and gets spooked by noises or something. In Fred Beck’s retelling of Ape Canyon, the guide is a full-bodied Native American spirit-god apparition who serves as a contrast to the ‘less-developed devil spirits’.

But, with the question of ‘is it man or beast??’, these early Sasquatch stories fall pretty firmly onto the ‘man’ side of the spectrum. You do get odd speculations about them being a distinct species of ape, but that’s way less common than references to them as ‘naked men’ or ‘a race of giants’ and so-forth.

With Bigfoot, “man or beast??” isn’t even a question. Bigfoot’s some kind of tall gorilla or orangutan.

or an alien, complete with UFOs and/or hidden ships, although that one was applied to the sasquatch as well by one of the first white 'researchers' of the topic. which could be a flipping of the script back to the 'sasquatch being the spirit/god apparition.

the whole 'stay away from those noises in the woods' angle calls mind the fact that the potlatch was banned for quite awhile around here and would often be done in secret

Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 01:22 on Mar 9, 2021

stereobreadsticks
Feb 28, 2008
On the subject of the Hodag and Hidebehind, I believe they're both from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearsome_Creatures_of_the_Lumberwoods%2C_With_a_Few_Desert_and_Mountain_Beasts

My understanding is that the creatures in the book aren't, strictly speaking, cryptids because nobody really believes in them, at any rate it's a fun read. It's formatted like a field guide and very tongue-in-cheek. It's also in the public domain so it should be easy to find online.

BrigadierSensible
Feb 16, 2012

I've got a pocket full of cheese🧀, and a garden full of trees🌴.

Do Drop-Bears count as a cryptid?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Ambitious Spider posted:

I have a collection of pa folklore, that has a gender swapped version of that story. It's a hairy woman/sasquatch who saves the man lost in the woods, he lives with her for a while, they have a kid, I can't remember if he returns to society or people just see the family in the woods.

I don’t recall that specific case, but that does bring us back to the main question: why does Patty have massive fuckin’ gorilla tits?

It’s not a long story, but kind of a complicated one.

As we’ve established earlier, Patterson shot the famous Patterson footage while was working on what would eventually become the movie Sasquatch: The Legend Of Bigfoot. If you watch the movie (which I recommend, even though it’s a bit of a slog), it’s an entirely fictional story but includes ‘re-enactments’ of various famous Sasquatch tales (like, for example, the 1924 Ape Canyon incident). So, while it’s fairly well-known that Patterson had a camera with him in 1967 because he was shooting a documentary, he appears to have been specifically shooting re-enactments. And It just so happens that the Patterson footage is a pretty exact recreation of William Roe’s story.

Who’s William Roe?

Well, the story is that Roe swore before the city of Edmonton, Alberta - under oath! - that he saw a Sasquatch in 1955. Copies of the sworn affidavit, dated 1957, are still circulated in the Bigfoot community. Roe’s affidavit describes a nude, female “hairy Indian”, with the facial features of a “negro”. Although he waffles back and forth of the question of ‘man or beast???’, he ultimately states that the “creature” was human. She smiled to him, and apparently spoke a language he didn’t understand. Given this information, and the context of racial-themed Sasquatch erotica, it’s not too surprising that Roe’s “hairy Indian” has huge breasts.

Anyways, Roe specifically describes how this “hairy Indian” walked away from him, into the woods, turning her head back once. That’s the moment Patterson reenacted.

I should note that I’ve yet to find any copy of the affadavit from before 1960, and there’s no easy way to check if and when it actually happened. But if the 1957 date is accurate, then Roe’s story predates the Wallace Hoax by one year, and can be regarded as a sort of ‘transitional form’ between the Sasquatch myth and the Bigfoot myth.

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

Phy posted:

I doubt it was ever a concept intended to be taken seriously, unlike Sasquatch (or Bigfoot) or the Jersey Devil, but I always liked the Hidebehind, whose traits were essentially "being fast, quiet, and real fuckin' creepy". A big ol' thing that preyed upon lumberjacks, the Hidebehind could, well, hide behind things as quick as you could turn your head, so you never got to actually see it. If it couldn't hide behind a tree or a rock or a hillside, it'd dance around behind you. It apparently didn't like the smell of liquor, so, getting riotously drunk was your best defense. One presumes the Hidebehind was trotted out as an excuse to naive young crew hands who asked why you were breaking out the whiskey while on the job.

I love that this one's entire deal is that it's just really good at standing behind poo poo.

Snowglobe of Doom
Mar 30, 2012

sucks to be right

feedmyleg posted:

I love ephemera, so I may or may not have some old WWN covers framed on my wall. I also have lots of old UFO newsletters from the 40s-60s that I may write up in here some time—very interesting reading early and later issues by the same author watching him go from bright-eyed optimist to cynical pessimist calling out the UFO community for being gross and super toxic, all within the span of a few years in the early 50s. Just another reminder that the community didn't only get problematic in recent years.
I read a news article on the latest thylacine sighting dumbassery here in Australia last month and they interviewed a rival thylacine hunter who flat out said he'd be annoyed if anyone else found proof of their existence before he did, his goal was to be the person who made the big discovery. This really ties into the metaphysical/psychoanalytical aspects of cryptozoology we were talking about earlier, people really incorporate this stuff into their sense of self.
Years and years ago when I used to be more interested in 'culture jamming' and loving with the mass media I tried to trick the local newspapers into posting fake ghost photos I'd created and never had any success, and I was really tempted to try and create some fake cryptid photos, or even making a cryptid costume and tricking some random person into photographing me. What stopped me in the end was the realisation that if I actually fooled anyone out there I might actually derail their life for several years.


SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I've noticed that abductions are no longer a thing in Bigfoot mythology; they were a remnant of the original Sasquatch mythology, that was quickly discarded.
They still crop up in fictionalized bigfoot movies, Bobcat Goldthwaite's 2013 flick Willow Creek had a whole "forest bride" subplot


Ambitious Spider posted:

I have a collection of pa folklore, that has a gender swapped version of that story. It's a hairy woman/sasquatch who saves the man lost in the woods, he lives with her for a while, they have a kid, I can't remember if he returns to society or people just see the family in the woods.
There was an alleged incident here in Australia where a guy was driving across the Nullarbor and when his car broke down a big hairy female thing abducted him back to her cave, but the implication was that she was going to murder him. Apparently she had a trophy wall of pairs of men's legs from her previous victims but they were all bandy legs and this guy's legs weren't bandy enough so he managed to escape, and he was so traumatized he ended up in a mental asylum. He used to call into a late night radio show and tell them about it but I can't find the link. :(

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 273 days!

CPL593H posted:

I love that this one's entire deal is that it's just really good at standing behind poo poo.

cryptozoologist: oh, it's just a box

the hunt for the legendary cryptid "solid snake" continues...

Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 04:53 on Mar 9, 2021

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 273 days!

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

I read a news article on the latest thylacine sighting dumbassery here in Australia last month and they interviewed a rival thylacine hunter who flat out said he'd be annoyed if anyone else found proof of their existence before he did, his goal was to be the person who made the big discovery. This really ties into the metaphysical/psychoanalytical aspects of cryptozoology we were talking about earlier, people really incorporate this stuff into their sense of self.
Years and years ago when I used to be more interested in 'culture jamming' and loving with the mass media I tried to trick the local newspapers into posting fake ghost photos I'd created and never had any success, and I was really tempted to try and create some fake cryptid photos, or even making a cryptid costume and tricking some random person into photographing me. What stopped me in the end was the realisation that if I actually fooled anyone out there I might actually derail their life for several years.

is it derailing their life, or giving them a dream worth living?

would be a bad idea in america because you would probably get shot with a gun instead of a camera

quote:

They still crop up in fictionalized bigfoot movies, Bobcat Goldthwaite's 2013 flick Willow Creek had a whole "forest bride" subplot

this one is interesting; my read is that the bigfoots (bigfeet?) are the manifestation of the female lead's fear that her husband will absorb the toxicity of the subculture and 'go native,' becoming abusive and reducing her to a battered and dehumanized object

Hodgepodge has a new favorite as of 05:07 on Mar 9, 2021

M_Sinistrari
Sep 5, 2008

Do you like scary movies?



Snowglobe of Doom posted:

I read a news article on the latest thylacine sighting dumbassery here in Australia last month and they interviewed a rival thylacine hunter who flat out said he'd be annoyed if anyone else found proof of their existence before he did, his goal was to be the person who made the big discovery.

Sometimes the rivalries between cryptid/paranormal hunters is just as fascinating as what they hunt. My fave's the kerfluffle between two vampire hunters over the Highgate Vampire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highgate_Vampire

Snowglobe of Doom
Mar 30, 2012

sucks to be right

EasilyConfused posted:

Have any cryptids actually been discovered to be real since the term cryptozoology has been in use (1950s, according to my cursory wikipedia search)?

Edit: I ask since the examples I always see are pre-20th century.

Edit2: Maybe a better question is when is the last time a cryptid or supposedly mythical animal turned out to be real?

One recent one is the Indonesian bondegezou which cryptozoology sites used to list as a tiny 3' tall bigfoot-like creature with patchy black and white fur and was always included in lists of "Bigfoot creatures from other countries" alongside the yeti and the orang-pendek and the yeren and all the rest but in the mid 90s a scientist actually got hold of one and discovered it was a tree kangaroo.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

There was an alleged incident here in Australia where a guy was driving across the Nullarbor and when his car broke down a big hairy female thing abducted him back to her cave, but the implication was that she was going to murder him. Apparently she had a trophy wall of pairs of men's legs from her previous victims but they were all bandy legs and this guy's legs weren't bandy enough so he managed to escape, and he was so traumatized he ended up in a mental asylum. He used to call into a late night radio show and tell them about it but I can't find the link. :(

There are really a lot of Sasquatch abduction tales, going back to at least 1840.

For example, there's the abduction of 'Muchalat Harry' in 1928. In the story, related thirdhand, Harry was kidnapped by a Sasquatch man and dropped off in a camp of 20-odd Sasquatch people - who (as is actually kinda typical for these stories) did little but stare at him until they got bored and he ran off. As in your example, Harry supposedly saw piles of bones in the camp, and was driven somewhat mad by the experience.

Dr. Jerrold Coe
Feb 6, 2021

Is it me?

feedmyleg posted:

For reference from my men's magazine collection...



For those wondering, yes. Yes the story is about exactly what you think it is. The story claims that she gave birth to a hybrid child which was left with the tribe. It's, uh. An uncomfortable read.

e: Though worth noting in light of what SMG said, in this particular instance they are drawing a clear distinction between native peoples and the sasquatch.

The Men's Adventure angle is completely new to me, thanks for posting that! I've been reading some of the 60s Bigfoot/Sasquatch paperbacks by Brad Steiger and Warren Smith, two working hack writers who published reams of paranormal paperbacks, much of it recycled and self plagiarized. They occasionally collaborated and shared a pseudonym, Eric Norman. Their Bigfoot works are more of the same, with some occasional tweaks to the stories within.









Here an apocryphal story of a jungle sentry attacked by a "Mouth Man" Bigfoot is recycled and altered, starting with its appearance in Steiger's work (as Eric Norman) and adapted by Smith for subsequent books. Stuff like the bloodthirsty SE Asian Bigfoots (different from the peaceful Orang Pendak) and the focus on Almasty/Neanderthals in the Caucauses would fall away in later decades.

Another wild and woolly volume, Ivan T. Sanderson's Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life, yielded these treasures to me folded inside a used copy:







Cheers all and thanks for the awesome thread!

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 273 days!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

There are really a lot of Sasquatch abduction tales, going back to at least 1840.

For example, there's the abduction of 'Muchalat Harry' in 1928. In the story, related thirdhand, Harry was kidnapped by a Sasquatch man and dropped off in a camp of 20-odd Sasquatch people - who (as is actually kinda typical for these stories) did little but stare at him until they got bored and he ran off. As in your example, Harry supposedly saw piles of bones in the camp, and was driven somewhat mad by the experience.

abducted and subjected to the gaze of the other

Snowglobe of Doom
Mar 30, 2012

sucks to be right
I found that radio interview I was talking about earlier with the guy who was abducted by a Yowie. Turns out it happened in the Pillaga region and not the Nullarbor, no wonder it was having trouble finding it. :v: It also turns out that the dude is mostly sure it was a male creature although he does say "If it was a she ... there's something wrong in the world!!"

If he's actually in a mental asylum then he's obviously not a credible witness, but if he's a hoaxer and he's just making the entire thing up he's real drat good at faking an anxiety attack. I don't find this video convincing but it's suuuuuper creepy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsgd6FmdH1Y

twistedmentat
Nov 21, 2003

Its my party
and I'll die if
I want to
I have a really good book called Abominable Science that's a, I think the best word to discribe it as a historiography look into cryptids. Looking at what actually makes the legend, how they came to be from all the mythology and folklore that is part of it.

The part on Bigfoot talks about how they always say "Well the First Nations people have legends of Bigfoot" when its not really the same thing. Their legends that people use to justify Bigfoot are your basic legends about giants and stuff that pretty much every culture has. And even then, the fact most cultures have legends of giants isn't proof giants existed, having a monster that's "people, but big" isn't really a stretch.

One of the big problems with Cryptozoology is that its been largely taken over by Young Earth Creationists who seem to think that if Bigfoot exists or there are living Dinosaurs, that means all of science is wrong and the bible is 100% true. Even though that's not how science works, they still keep seeking cryptids out. Flat Earth has a lot of this too, if the world is flat, God is real. This is probably why a lot of Flat Earthers are now Qanon people.

Captain Jesus
Feb 26, 2009

What's wrong with you? You don't even have your beer goggles on!!
I'm having my own little Mandela effect moment, because although I've seen the Patterson-Gimlin film numerous time and read the wikipedia article before, I never noticed that the Bigfoot was so prominently female.

EasilyConfused
Nov 21, 2009


one strong toad

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

One recent one is the Indonesian bondegezou which cryptozoology sites used to list as a tiny 3' tall bigfoot-like creature with patchy black and white fur and was always included in lists of "Bigfoot creatures from other countries" alongside the yeti and the orang-pendek and the yeren and all the rest but in the mid 90s a scientist actually got hold of one and discovered it was a tree kangaroo.


Cool, thanks! Personally, I find this kind of thing more interesting than the nonsensical Bigfoot/Nessie type of creature. Although those are still interesting for the light they shed on how people construct belief systems.

stereobreadsticks
Feb 28, 2008

twistedmentat posted:

One of the big problems with Cryptozoology is that its been largely taken over by Young Earth Creationists who seem to think that if Bigfoot exists or there are living Dinosaurs, that means all of science is wrong and the bible is 100% true. Even though that's not how science works, they still keep seeking cryptids out. Flat Earth has a lot of this too, if the world is flat, God is real. This is probably why a lot of Flat Earthers are now Qanon people.

My understanding was that young earth creationists mostly avoid Bigfoot when they get into crytozoology because he seems a little too close to an intermediary form between apes and humans. They somehow think that surviving dinosaurs would be evidence that evolution or an old earth or both are untrue (as opposed to just evidence that an animal we previously thought went extinct hadn't), but if bigfoot is real then that's potentially evidence of a link between humans and non-human primates and they don't want that. What really confuses me is the young earthers embracing the chupacabra. If chupacabra then young earth seems like even more of a stretch than the dinosaurs.

By the way, young earthers aren't the first problematic pseudo-science practitioners to get into cryptozoology for terrible reasons. De Loy's Ape is a well known cryptozoological fraud (and genuinely creepy image) where a dead spider monkey was posed in such a way that it looked like a human sized ape. The image, and the fact that it's fake, are relatively well known but what's not quite as well known is that at least part of the motivation for the fraud was the promotion of the incredibly racist theory of multiple evolutionary origins for humanity. The gist of the idea being that the races of man evolved independently from separate ape-like ancestors. The lack of anthropoid apes in the New World was a problem for the theory because it would mean that at the very least Native Americans had to have a common evolutionary ancestor with at least one Old World race. De Loy, in faking the image, hoped to prop up the idea.

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DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.

EasilyConfused posted:

Have any cryptids actually been discovered to be real since the term cryptozoology has been in use (1950s, according to my cursory wikipedia search)?

Edit: I ask since the examples I always see are pre-20th century.

Edit2: Maybe a better question is when is the last time a cryptid or supposedly mythical animal turned out to be real?

Best I can think of is "The Kraken" i.e. giant and colossal squids. Though still not as large as most kraken myths, and I'm pretty sure they never attacked boats, but certainly parts of them washed on shore or where caught in nets and fishing lines before they were "confirmed" as real.

Giant squids I think were more or less confirmed in the 19th century, so not quite qualifying for your first edit, but colossal were more recent I believe.

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