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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Here's a lesser known cryptid: The silky anteater I wish these were real
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# ? Apr 1, 2021 03:21 |
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# ? Apr 26, 2024 15:13 |
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There’s a few of those ‘realistic plush pretending to be a real animal’ ones that get posted around the Cute Internet* This is a real cryptid they found and identified as a new species a few years back, Corsica’s cat fox. *cuternet
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# ? Apr 1, 2021 11:33 |
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Here's a lesser known cryptid: The silky anteater 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.
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# ? Apr 1, 2021 12:00 |
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Blumhouse's new movie is relevant to this thread: https://twitter.com/blumhouse/status/1377518642351407108?s=20 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
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# ? Apr 1, 2021 18:14 |
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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 I stopped scrolling to watch it exactly at the point where this part of the post was just offscreen
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# ? Apr 1, 2021 19:23 |
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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.
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 01:08 |
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I was gonna say why would they reboot Species?
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 01:17 |
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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. Some companies have started using it as soft reveals for actual products to gauge customer reactions, such as ThinkGeek eventually selling a bunch of their "prank" listings like the Star War Tauntaun sleeping bag. A snack retailer here in Australia did it this year by announcing a 'fake' Hawaiian pizza-flavoured biscuit as an April Fools "prank" but it turns out they'd been developing the product for a while and it'll hit shelves in about 6 weeks
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 01:21 |
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Stumbled across an interesting YouTube about a cryptid, the Stellers Sea Ape: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_sea_ape Steller was a top notch naturalist, identified a load of other creatures, so the sea ape is a mystery: head like a dog, with long whiskers, trail like a shark, no forelimbs ... Suggestions have included misidentification, a malformed seal, etc. 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: https://youtu.be/gwZbMMaRLJc
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 13:12 |
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 15:03 |
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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: 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 ....
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 16:02 |
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Where's Waldo? but it's Bigfoot and there aren't any in the book.
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 16:31 |
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. reminds me of Jim Sullivan, who released an album called UFO, and in 1975 mysteriously vanished in the new mexico desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N__wplJkRTg 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] which also is a bit like the case of Granger Taylor. The Unsolved mysteries podcast just did a two part episode on him: https://unsolved.com/podcasts/the-sudden-departure-of-granger-taylor-part-one/
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# ? Apr 2, 2021 17:09 |
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:That's hilarious 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
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# ? Apr 3, 2021 11:00 |
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:I'm too vain to let this post get buried at the bottom of the last page. This thing is seriously from Earth? It looks like a Star Wars creature. I rate its cuteness at 10,000/10 and hope it makes either adorable noises or human-like screams.
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# ? Apr 3, 2021 12:07 |
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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. 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. Reminds me of something a friend posted on facebook recently about the Fuente Magna Bowl, supposedly a stone bowl discovered in Bolivia that has writing in two scripts inscribed on it, one from a local predecessor of the Tiwanaku civilization and the other, Sumerian cuneiform. Now, aside from the fact that it's an obvious forgery that looks like a prop from a low budget tv movie, the thing that really sticks out to me is the extreme nature of the claims being made about it. The civilizations of the Andes never developed writing, the idea that any script could be the predecessor to the Tiwanaku script is nonsense since there's no such thing as a Tiwanaku script and if the bowl were real the existence of any writing in the Andes before Columbus would be a massive deal. But the discovery of a new written language that would have meant the Andes joining Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, and possibly Egypt as the only places on earth to have independently developed writing apparently wasn't exciting enough for the people behind the forgery. They had to go bigger and claimed the existence of a 6500 year old transoceanic connection to the world's oldest civilization. Something that would have been mind blowing to a real archaeologist or historian gets glossed over by the pseudo-archaeologists in favor of the more romantic story. stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 13:27 on Apr 3, 2021 |
# ? Apr 3, 2021 12:55 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FUccwdB65s
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# ? Apr 3, 2021 13:35 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7QXdlSBGGY Edit: And also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLTcp6C__vM Sea monsters are real. One more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5cpDVsP2Sw Space Cadet Omoly has a new favorite as of 14:33 on Apr 3, 2021 |
# ? Apr 3, 2021 14:22 |
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stereobreadsticks posted:They had to go bigger and claimed the existence of a 6500 year old transoceanic connection to the world's oldest civilization. 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. 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.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 11:43 |
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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. Years ago a coworker told me I needed to watch an "amazing" video on youtube that exposed all kinds of weird conspiracies, most of them nonsense about Obama, or at least that's what he told me because the only part of it I watched was literally 20 minutes of "What you are about to see will blow your mind and the experts don't want you to know about it. You won't see this on mainstream news channels..." and on and on and on. The video was an hour long and at least the first third of it didn't even make any actual claims about anything but how amazing the video itself was. 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. 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.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 11:59 |
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stereobreadsticks posted:
I'm sure in the 300 episodes of Ancient Aliens there is one episode that talks about how the Norse Gods are aliens or Stonehenge was build by aliens but they focus almost entirely on non-white people. Its funny because the reason that these civilizations are less known because Europeans destroyed them without bothering to find out anything about them outside of their wealth. Not only that is that even when its pretty well understood the who what and why of things, they'll still act like its all a great mystery. Just because they didn't learn about it in grade school and they haven't bothered upgrading their knowlage, it must be aliens! Like how all their technological terms are from the 1960s.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 20:33 |
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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. Yeah, George M. Eberhart broke cryptids into ten different categories, most of which are somewhat mundane animals and not the bizarre creepy monsters that most people would associate with the term: quote:1. Distribution anomalies (known animals reported outside their normal range, e.g. the anomalous big cats of the U.K.) But he also included a requirement that there had to be en element of controversy - someone had to report a sighting, and someone else had to express skepticism about it. 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.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 20:58 |
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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. Definitely, otherwise they'd just be specialized (amateur) zoologists.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:06 |
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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
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:23 |
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drat that's a badass photo though, too bad it's wasted on an insane right wing nutjob.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:28 |
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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. That reminds me, there's a story about a group of U.S. soldiers encountering a giant in Afghanistan. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-s-special-forces-killed-a-giant-in-kandahar/
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:35 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:41 |
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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. That's bizarre, I grew up in an extremely Young Earth household with lots of views on how things were different back then thanks to water vapor and oxygen, but I don't think I ever heard of all people being huge rather than just giants existing too.
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# ? Apr 4, 2021 21:45 |
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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. 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. veni veni veni has a new favorite as of 04:00 on Apr 5, 2021 |
# ? Apr 5, 2021 03:55 |
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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 for most of those civilizations there wasn't much of a written record left behind and that makes their remaining ruins seem even more mysterious. We've got LOTS of written records for ancient Egypt though, including accounts of the pyramid workers and everything. People who still think the Egyptian pyramids must have been made by aliens have got no excuse.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 04:07 |
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Also also, Stonehenge aside all the famous monuments in Europe are built with traditional building techniques of stacking a shitload of small stones and it's easy to see how people built them. There's nothing in Europe you could really claim aliens built without implying the aliens are just basic-rear end masonworkers. The structure in Europe built with the biggest stones I think of is the Mycenaean Lion's Gate, and it's stones are tiny compared to the big stones in the Pyramids. Though it's worth noting as a sidenote the Classical Greeks couldn't imagine how regular people could have built such a building and decided it must have been built by Cyclopes, so Europeans have been underestimating people's building skills for thousands of years. To bring in some more questionably-racist claims from Europeans, you guys know who built the biggest pyramid in the world? Why the ancient Bosnians of course! It's just that it's so old and so big it's been covered with dirt and is overgrown with trees so it looks like a mountain, but if you did under that dirt there's stone under there so obviously it's a manmade pyramid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramid_claims
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 04:35 |
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But Bosniaks are like 50% Muslims ergo they couldn't have built pyramids must've been saucermen from planet X. : Wait they probably weren't Muslim back then so maybe they did build those pyramids and cleverly disguise them as hills.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 05:16 |
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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. 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. When I was younger I'd read some of the ancient aliens books and even then they seemed a bit off. It didn't fit that if we're not seeing aliens now, why the hell would they be interested in us when we're working with sticks and stones? I did revisit some of those books when I was taking archaeology/anthropology classes and it was just more glaring how head up the rear end it is. No one going the ancient aliens route never seemed to think how perishable wood and leather is, or thinks that an older culture had a different idea how to use something. Case in point, the Roman Empire and the ancient Greeks did have steam technology but didn't think of a use beyond toys or temple tricks, or the indigenous tribes in the Americas using hot air balloon tech of wood and skins in designing geoglyphs. 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. 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.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 05:43 |
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. The white stone was taken but the Pyramids-in-general were just too huge for them to manage it, I guess. It seems like sometimes these things can't help but stack on top of each other, so you get what seem like reasonable possibilities (very limited exchange of Phoenician ship trade with northern South America, or Chinese treasure ships reaching the west coast of the Americas) and they all gotta turn into some kind of world-engulfing madness that THEY! don't want you to know about.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 06:02 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 06:30 |
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I think a lot of the ancient alien stuff comes from people assuming a practical purpose for things that are actually for ritual or decorative purposes. That and a tendency of people to assume that belief in things we don't personally believe in to be insincere. Modern Western people generally believe in either one God or no gods at all, so when faced with people who built monumental structures in honor of other gods they must have been aliens. Take the Nazca Lines for example. Yeah, you can really only see the designs from above and people think "well, they must have been trying to communicate with something in the sky." And yeah, maybe that's true but why couldn't that "something in the sky" be gods or other mythological beings instead of aliens? Things don't have to be real for people to feel a desire to reach out to them and just because modern people don't believe in them anymore doesn't mean the beliefs of ancient people were any less sincere. stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 07:36 on Apr 5, 2021 |
# ? Apr 5, 2021 07:30 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 11:26 |
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. There was some youtube videoI watched of one going through a Graham Hancock video, and the constant refrain was "Yes, that actually is interesting, because people did it, but it's not so advanced as you think, and certainly not taught to them by ascended masters from an advanced precursor civilization, who might be aliens"
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 11:30 |
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. I mean, six of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world were purely decorative. Two were temples to gods, two were tombs for kings, one was a fancy wedding present, and one was the Ancient Statue of Liberty. Pretty much only the Pharos Lighthouse actually served a pragmatic function. Nobody ever says THOSE were built by aliens except for the Pyramids.
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 13:19 |
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# ? Apr 26, 2024 15:13 |
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I had never heard of the Pharaohs Lighthouse before, and drat, that is some brutalist architecture, must have been done by time travelers from the 1950's
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# ? Apr 5, 2021 13:32 |