Space Cadet Omoly posted:

Here's a lesser known cryptid: The silky anteater

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

Here's a lesser known cryptid: The silky anteater

As you can see someone clearly just stuck a stuffed animal in a tree and tried to convince the internet it's a living creature.

Believe it or not some people actually bought it, as if anything that cute could really exist.

It's so obviously just a muppet, I mean how gullible would you have to be?

April Fools! Silky Anteaters are real! They were real all along! Punked!

feedmyleg posted:

It's an April Fools prank, mostly using footage from other movies. But if it catches on I bet they'd actually put it into production

The_Doctor posted:

I have gotten really sick of the ‘here’s something you’d like! APRIL FOOLS I got your hopes up hahahaha’ April fools joke. Everybody does it now, and it’s long ceased being funny.

nonathlon posted:

The YouTube clip observes that the sea ape appears in Steller's notes but not his official report, he claimed to have shot at it, the full name he assigned to the creator translates as "Danish sea ape" ... It seems likely it's a thin parody of the captain of the ship he was on, who he never got along with:

Pastry of the Year posted:

stereobreadsticks posted:

On Villas Boas, obviously the sexual aspect of things gets the attention but when googling to find the dude's name I thought the reasons given by believers to defend his credibility were really interesting. At first, he was presented as a simple country bumpkin farmer, far too unsophisticated to have made something so extravagant up. Then later in his life it became apparent that he was rather upwardly mobile, even going to university and becoming a lawyer, so later accounts switched to claiming that his education made him too bourgeois and respectable to have made up such an outlandish story.

On Earth, Wind & Fire and George Clinton, they're great but the real alien come to earth is Sun Ra.



Also, there was an album put out by a "real" UFO abductee named Howard Menger that he claimed to consist of music channeled to him by the aliens. You'll be disappointed to hear that it's rather dull piano music, nowhere near as bizarre and out there as the story behind it would imply.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKNAT4rItko

quote:

Sullivan left Los Angeles on March 4, 1975, to drive to Nashville alone in his Volkswagen Beetle. The next day, after being cautioned by a highway patrol officer regarding his driving, he checked into the La Mesa Motel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Later reports suggest he did not sleep there, and left his key inside the room, and that he bought vodka at the town store. He was seen the following day about 26 miles (42 km) away, at a remote ranch owned by the Gennitti family. His car was later found abandoned at the ranch, and he was reportedly last seen walking away from it. The car contained Sullivan's money, papers, guitar, clothes, and a box of his unsold records.[4][5][7]

He was never seen again, and reports have variously attributed his disappearance to being murdered, becoming disoriented and lost, or, particularly in the light of the title of his first album, alien abduction. Search parties failed to find any trace of him. A decomposed body resembling Sullivan was later found in a remote area several miles away, but was determined not to be his.[4]

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

That's hilarious

So many cryptids have turned out to be weird jokes that credulous people bought into. The original 1958 bigfoot scare where loggers in Humboldt County, California found giant footprints around their camp was obviously a prank but the media got hold of it and the rest was history ....

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

I'm too vain to let this post get buried at the bottom of the last page.



Also, I posted it too early last night because I wasn't paying attention to the time. So I'm reposting it on April fools for real this time.

nonathlon posted:

Like Travis Walton's UFO "abduction", which so transparently looks like an awkwardly constructed attempt to cover up for poor work performance. But, throw in some credulous believers and a few decades of people repeating the story and it's a major case.

On the other hand, it's striking in cases like the Steller's Sea Ape, seeing all the attempts to explain it which are so reasonable. Makes you wonder if there are genuine observations of cryptids that we've explained away

Halloween Liker posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FUccwdB65s

stereobreadsticks posted:

They had to go bigger and claimed the existence of a 6500 year old transoceanic connection to the world's oldest civilization.

Cooked Auto posted:

Seems like a recurring theme from what I can tell. A friend of mine, with rather dubious beliefs sometimes, tried to make me watch a documentary a few years back about there being some ancient proto-civilization that spanned the Earth because of "conclusive" (read incredibly vague without zero backing) evidence and that historians were covering it up (I think) because they didn't want to answer their "hard hitting" (read bullshit) questions during interviews.
It was so atrociously bad that I told him to shut that thing off after like 20 minutes because it was obviously huffing its own farts about the whole thing.

quote:

There does seem to be a weird, most likely incredibly racist, idea that ancient civilizations weren't able to do things on their own and were all getting boosted or just stole from some lost forerunner super-civilization.
Weird way to knock on human ingenuity and creativity.

stereobreadsticks posted:

It's absolutely racist. You rarely hear about European cultures relying on intervention from aliens or ancient super-civilizations or any of that kind of thing. It's always African and Native American civilizations that people claim couldn't possibly have accomplished the things they actually accomplished.

stereobreadsticks posted:

I think it depends on what you mean by "cryptid." If you just mean species previously unknown to science, then yes, it's basically a certainty that previously unknown species have been misidentified as known species. Especially if you include things like the Tapanuli orangutan that were known populations that have only been identified as distinct species since the development of DNA analysis.

But the thing about that example is that it wasn't really a cryptid. It wasn't identified by cryptozoologists and in fact it barely rates a mention because cryptozoology is so focused on big, weird, charismatic creatures from folklore and romantic stories of brave adventurers wandering the forests in search of mystery that the actual discoveries of new species that happen all the time due to unromantic DNA analysis or studies of incredibly diverse but uncharismatic things like beetles and frogs just don't attract attention.

This is pretty characteristic of all pseudo-science. Scientists put in the work, get excited about small discoveries and clarifications, and with a few exceptions don't get a lot of fame as a result. Cryptozoologists and others like them all want to be the one to discover the Loch Ness Monster, real scientists would be thrilled to find a new species of algae in the lake.

quote:

1. Distribution anomalies (known animals reported outside their normal range, e.g. the anomalous big cats of the U.K.)

2. Undescribed, unusual, or outsized variations of known species (e.g. the giant anacondas reported from Amazonia or the spotted lions of East Africa)

3. Survivals of recently extinct species (e.g. the ivory-billed woodpecker presumed extinct c. 1960, the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), declared extinct in 1936, or the Steller's sea cow presumed extinct c. 1768, all of which are occasionally claimed to have survived to the present)

4. Survivals of species known only from the fossil record into modern times (e.g. the mokele-mbembe of central Africa, sometimes described as a living dinosaur)

5. Lingerlings, or survivals of species known from the fossil record much later into historical times than currently thought (e.g. the woolly mammoth, presumed extinct c. 12,000 BCE but occasionally purported to have survived into later eras)

6. Animals not known from the fossil record but related to known species (e.g. the Andean wolf or the striped manta-ray reported by William Beebe in the 1930s)

7. Animals not known from the fossil record nor related to any known species (e.g. North America's Bigfoot or most sea serpents)

8. Mythical animals with a zoological basis (e.g. the griffin, partly inspired by dinosaur fossils of Central Asia)

9. Seemingly paranormal or supernatural entities with some animal-like characteristics (e.g. Mothman, black dogs, vampires or some fairies from folklore)

10. Known hoaxes or probable misidentifications (e.g. the jackalope, an antlered rabbit, a popular hoax in taxidermy)

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

It's pretty evident that the whole "proving the skeptics wrong" aspect of cryptozoology is just as important (if not even more important) than the scientific discovery aspect for most of the people who by into it.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1281016768178331652

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

If you spend a lot of time talking to cryptozoologists they often sound exactly the same as conspiracy theorists. There's also a whole bunch of conspiracies about how the forestry department has been systematically hiding evidence of bigfoot to protect the logging industry, or the Smithsonian has been hiding evidence of giant skeletons because they would disprove the theory of evolution. Young Earth Creationists have been jumping onto that bandwagon as well in recent times, and there's also been a new twist where the Smithsonian teamed up with the Vatican to destroy thousands of giant skeletons.

https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1281016768178331652

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

If you spend a lot of time talking to cryptozoologists they often sound exactly the same as conspiracy theorists. There's also a whole bunch of conspiracies about how the forestry department has been systematically hiding evidence of bigfoot to protect the logging industry, or the Smithsonian has been hiding evidence of giant skeletons because they would disprove the theory of evolution. Young Earth Creationists have been jumping onto that bandwagon as well in recent times, and there's also been a new twist where the Smithsonian teamed up with the Vatican to destroy thousands of giant skeletons.

https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1281016768178331652

Flying Zamboni posted:

The Creationist belief in giants is very weird when you dig into it. They believe that, per their interpretation of a verse in Genesis in which God "separated the water from the water," that the earth at it's creation was surrounded by a "water vapor canopy" that created a more oxygen rich environment that caused everything to be gigantic in size, meaning that humans and dinosaurs weren't that different in size and could easily live side by side until God flooded the earth by emptying the water canopy onto the planet.

stereobreadsticks posted:

It's absolutely racist. You rarely hear about European cultures relying on intervention from aliens or ancient super-civilizations or any of that kind of thing. It's always African and Native American civilizations that people claim couldn't possibly have accomplished the things they actually accomplished.

veni veni veni posted:

It's most certainly racist to some extent, but the pyramids do have this other worldly quality that you can't say about say, the Colosseum or something. Like, a lot of ruins of white civilization have some obvious practical function, while so much stuff in Africa, South America, Asia etc. was ceremonial and way more extravagant. I think it's harder for people to grasp why humans would put so much labor into something that is ultimately mostly for show.

Also, you look at something like the Rapa Nui heads and we don't know that much about them, they were buried underground...there's a lot of mystique to that. So while I won't discount that there is some racist element to it I think there is more to it than that.

Cooked Auto posted:

There does seem to be a weird, most likely incredibly racist, idea that ancient civilizations weren't able to do things on their own and were all getting boosted or just stole from some lost forerunner super-civilization.
Weird way to knock on human ingenuity and creativity.

veni veni veni posted:

I think it's harder for people to grasp why humans would put so much labor into something that is ultimately mostly for show.

M_Sinistrari posted:

Not really. I think if the ancient Egyptians had enough material, they'd've glammed up the pyramids in gold and silver. Humanity does have a tendency to lean towards the showy, it's just the era and society that decides what style's showy.

M_Sinistrari posted:

Not really. I think if the ancient Egyptians had enough material, they'd've glammed up the pyramids in gold and silver. Humanity does have a tendency to lean towards the showy, it's just the era and society that decides what style's showy.

M_Sinistrari posted:

One of my anthropology professors would go absolutely ballistic if anyone dared mention ancient aliens around her. Even if you mentioned you thought the concept was ridiculous, you'd at least get the stink eye.

Cooked Auto posted:

I can imagine that whole thing is extra annoying for people in the anthropology field so the reaction is understandable. Especially if you've had to deal with those kind of people who believe it in some fashion.

veni veni veni posted:

I didn't say humanity doesn't have this tendency. I said it's harder for people to wrap their heads around a mega structure that basically serves as a showpiece/tomb vs something that is the prototype for the modern stadium. If the pyramids had served as ancient apartment buildings or something I think it would leave less room for people to let their imaginations run wild with it.