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Just found this thread and I was struck by the Fresno Nightstalkers: https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Fresno_Nightcrawler They're an interesting cryptid. There's only a handful of reports, their appearance is striking to say the least, there's no simple case for misidentification. A TV team tried to replicate the footage and failed. Quick googling doesn't reveal any debunking. So what is that, or how was it done? There's some talk of someone duplicating the footage by digitally editing and effects but a much simpler explanation is stuck away deep in the google results: https://youtu.be/xvIPNYTzGuA In summary: run a fishing line across the scene, attach pyjama pants to them, then film them being pulled along in poor light. Almost absurdly simple and it explains the weird stilted walk of the cryptids. Similarly, love to know how that Mexican dwarf footage was done.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2021 18:54 |
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 21:14 |
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Darren Naish had done some top stuff to do with marine life and sea monsters. Which brings to mind another piece of Nessie "evidence", the so-called Surgeons Photo: https://www.donttakepictures.com/dtp-blog/2017/4/19/the-loch-ness-monster-turns-83-the-story-of-the-surgeons-photograph Which doesn't seem very impressive but caused a stir at the time and a lot was put on the reliability and impeccability of the witness. Belatedly a wider crop of the image became available, making the picture look a lot like that of a model and the reliable witness less so.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2021 08:44 |
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One of the early ones is maybe someone in a sheet, but the quality is so low that who knows. The later ones are more impressive and look like the legs are swinging from all the way up. It's that walking that looks puppet-like to me, as if it's not load bearing and the feet are being placed into position. That's what the reproduction captures.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2021 16:29 |
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It is a fun prank. Like, you can hear the creator thinking, what will people make of THIS ... It's weird the cryptids and conspiracies that take off and capture people's imagination. I remember reading the first Black Eyed Children report back in the day and now they have their own Wikipedia page, despite it all being from one guys tall tale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-eyed_children On the other hand, I've heard that UFOsp sightings are now badly out of fashion.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2021 18:56 |
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:It's obviously a person caught halfway through standing up which is causing motion blur, making the hands look extended and claw-like. The 'horns' are just their eyes or possibly even glasses. Is it? I haven't seen any blurred figure like that before. The cloudy texture is weird - is that an artefact of certain cameras - maybe a low frame rate and low light?
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2021 14:07 |
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stereobreadsticks posted:It's simultaneously really fascinating and really frustrating to see the development of things like the black eyed kids and slenderman. Fascinating because it's a case of new folklore developing before our eyes, which is quite a rare thing to be able to witness, but frustrating because as a far-too-online 30-something guy I saw the explicitly fictional origins when they were first posted so all I can do is roll my eyes when I hear people taking them seriously. Like, with bigfoot or sea monsters or UFOs or something like that, I can look at specific cases or pieces of evidence and see how clearly fake they are but the idea has been around long enough and the origin is murky enough that if I'm feeling particularly charitable I can suspend my disbelief for a while. Point well made. I think that Nessie was basically concocted out of thin air in the day, but it's been long forgotten. There was basically no history of a monster in the loch before the 1930s and people posthoc pulled in a bunch of vaguely appropriate legends and distant incidents. Similarly, I once had a friend who was doing a thesis on cultural images of UFOs, noting how they changed through the ages, with shifting ideas of what was a plausible sighting. Humans in silver suits to bug-eyed Greys. Those ideas came from somewhere, but we've largely lost sight of them.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2021 14:15 |
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M_Sinistrari posted:Does anyone know offhand when orbs became a thing? When I was a kid as well as in my teens, I don't remember anyone bringing up ghost orbs, but when I got back into reading up on ghosts in my 30s, it was 'ghost orbs EVERYWHERE!'. Was there a drought in decent enough ghost photos that people jumped on orbs or what? I'm fairly sure it was the 90s with the advent of digital cameras (and then phones in cameras). People started taking a lot more photos, were more likely to have their cameras on them. I think there might be something about digital cameras that also makes them more likely to pick up orbs.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2021 11:57 |
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Karl Shuker wrote a very long blog post where he argues that the second photo is proof that the object in the photos can't have been a rigid fake model because of its different shape and orientation. drat - Shuker always seemed like he was a smart guy that applied the appropriate amount of scepticism. But that wider photo is damning and tells you how much framing and composition shapes how you interpret a picture.
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# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 19:11 |
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Not a cryptid hoax but a couple of guys I went to school with back in the 90s created crop circles that gained a lot of attention in the local press and had loons coming in from across Ireland and the UK to commune with the visitors. A few years later they went on a TV show called Simon Mayo's Confessions. Simon was a popular BBC DJ at the time and it was a light comedy show where the audience confessed to harmless poo poo they'd done. Sadly I can't find the video online. There's a great book called "Round in Circles" by Jim Schnabel that's all about the history of crop circles, from earliest reports right up until to the modern craze. It reports it fairly straight, just taking people at their word, listening to everyone's theories, without expressing much of an opinion ... Until the final chapters where the author reveals he was one of the most prolific crop circle hoaxers. He started out as a genuine investigator but at some point became aware of groups of pranksters hanging around the scene, made contact, learnt the trade and got addicted to making crop circles. He ends up being fairly scathing of how people allow themselves to be tricked.
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# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 13:26 |
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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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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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On other matters, I saw a talk some years ago from a guy who was studying reports of "megafoot", like bigfoot but much taller, like 12 ft or higher. He had an interesting take, along the lines that megafoot was ridiculous (how could a 15 ft tall ape escape detection, what would it eat, is it even anatomically possible) but there were still a sizeable number of plausible reports by reputable people. So, what does this tell you about observation - are our senses that easily fooled? The Fortean Times sometimes talks about "outer space" and "inner space" explanations, wondering if inner states are a better explanation for a lot of Forteana.
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# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 11:10 |
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Short piece I found on a revived urban legend: Phantom Social Workers http://subscribe.forteantimes.com/blog/return-of-the-bogus-social-workers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_social_workers Basically, they show up at your door, flash some identification and demand to see your children, then act threatening or try to make off with your kids. However, their identity cannot be confirmed and local authorities know nothing of them. There was a rash of sightings in the 90s but apparently, they're back. Police investigations have repeatedly explained them away as rumours, misidentification, hysteria, and sometimes even genuine social workers. However a few genuine ones remain which "may have involved self-appointed child abuse investigators, or individuals seeking to make false accusations, rather than child sexual abusers." But "no arrests were made". And there's folkloric elements to it where people report the PSWs are looking or acting weird, wearing sunglasses or obvious wigs, almost like Men in Black.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 13:06 |
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bandaid.friend posted:
Wasn't a Incan carving of an "astronaut" trotted out by Von Daniken? A lot of these fringe experts seem to reuse or repurpose each others ideas. Which reminds me of something I read years ago about Von Daniken. A long time ago he was interviewed and asked directly about the truth of his work and research. He gave this slightly cagey answer that there was a tradition in German literature of tall tales, and presenting them straightfaced and with supporting "evidence". He didn't say he was doing that, but ... Makes you wonder if it all started as some sort of unspoken joke and went from there.
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 12:46 |
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I think that may have been Barely Socialable and/or Lemimo. They both seem to do a lot of "here's a weird website / reddit user, detail, detail, detail, probably an ARG"
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# ¿ Apr 13, 2021 21:08 |
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Like a lot of these legends, chupucabra can now look like almost anything, their description having mutated. The picture in Wikipedia looks like a bipedal lizard from a 50s movie, while others have described it as a dog or alien. Charitably, if we were dealing with a real thing, people would make mistakes and misreport or try and make sense of it as like something.
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 15:04 |
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twistedmentat posted:Talking about these channels, i found out the Wyoming Incident never happened, it is an ARG but people report the video aspect as something that happened along with the Ashtar hijack or the Max headroom incident. I suspect this happens a lot. A lot of paranormal or Fortran tales seem to get picked up, put into print or on the web, where the next author or blogger picks them up without looking at primary sources, and repeat. People "research" mainly by reading other dubious researchers. There's a bunch of classic mysterious events that don't seem to have happened at all: e.g. the disappearance of David Lang http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disappearance_of_david_lang/
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# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 15:13 |
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twistedmentat posted:
I think that there was a novel that the movie was based in part upon and then the wider legend started up. I have a dim memory of reading it, and being confused when people started saying it was a real story ...
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# ¿ Apr 15, 2021 00:24 |
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My memory wasn't completely off course, Wikipedia has the receipts. The original story is from 1955 but it seems few people believed it. It got picked up by the Fortean literature but really took of when Charles Berlitz wrote an expose in 1978:quote:Berlitz's and Moore's account of the story (The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility) claimed to include factual information, such as transcripts of an interview with a scientist involved in the experiment, but their work has also been criticized for plagiarising key story elements from the novel Thin Air which was published a year earlier.
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# ¿ Apr 15, 2021 21:40 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:That one still bugs me to this day. I know there's a lot that can be covered by meteorological optical phenomena but that never feels like it covers everything. Like, I don't think there was an actual spaceship battle going on or anything, I'm just always driven crazy out of curiosity over what freaked people out. It is a good one. Ultimately you just have to shrug and wonder. It irritates me when sceptics try to dispose of weird cases like this. Yes, it's almost certainly not aliens / ghosts / bigfoot but what was it?
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2021 07:42 |
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Nuggan posted:If you guys havent seen it, you might enjoy Hellier. Its free on YouTube or on Amazon Prime. Isn't Heller a mockumentary? Or fiction in the style of a documentary? That's what I heard but if so, it never blinks or tips it's hand.
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2021 16:29 |
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twistedmentat posted:How much of that overlays with meth usages in the US? Also I love that these sightings are all in fairly well populated areas. Of course that's where people who are going to see something live but also bigfoots hanging around major metro areas when there's a lot of very empty land in the US. There was a study of Bigfoot that established what it's ecology was (the habitat and landscape, from where it was seen) and then pointed out this was the same as bears.
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2021 00:04 |
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Oak Island is an incredible and alluring story, when you first hear of it. After you find out that the foundational facts and origin story are nothing more than rumours and urban legend - less so.
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 14:44 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:Watching another one about the lost Roanoke colony, I'm amazed at the number of accounts I've read of the mysterious CROATOAN carving that failed to mention that the Roanoke folks had a predetermined plan to leave a notice if they had to move somewhere else, and that there was a nearby Croatoan island Here it is again - it's a great story until you learn about the above. And then it's no mystery at all. Regarding the Bermuda Triangle, I believe the correct statement is that the Triangle has about about as many disappearances, shipwrecks etc. as you'd expect for an area with that much traffic. It's a fairly busy set of sealanes, lots of flights passing over, and lots of civilian and recreational traffic. Coupled with storms and the tendency of investigators to pull in cases that are even lightly connected*, there's not a lot of mystery**. * Recall there was a study that looked at where some classic BT cases actually occurred and a lot of them were planes or ships that passed through the area or were due to, but came to a bad end elsewhere. One case was even a child that disappeared in Canada. ** There's still odd things that we can't explain or have to speculate about, as you'd expect. Submarine earthquakes, rogue waves, or wacky but plausible things like Flight 19, who may have lost their bearings and ended up flying upside down ... nonathlon has a new favorite as of 13:05 on Apr 27, 2021 |
# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 08:00 |
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Quid posted:Water erosion on the sphinx proves it was built in 10,000 bce or older That's an interesting one. The erosion damage is controversial (the Sphinx was carved in place, so it's made of different types of rocks) but there's no records of its construction and even the late Egyptians were mystified by it.
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 08:18 |
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DeimosRising posted:It’s really, really unlikely that there were earlier “forgotten” periods of plant domestication or pottery generation before the Neolithic revolution. For one thing the climate of the earth in the Paleolithic wasn’t well suited to agriculture, and it was very well suited for big game hunting and gathering. Human populations were low enough that people didn’t need, by and large, to live in marginal areas, and initial agriculture is usually an adaptation to marginal zones where hunting and gathering is a hassle. Pottery preserves very well and is really easy to date. There’s no known instance of a population developing agriculture and then abandoning in total it for any reason. Domestication of plants would would be discernible in the genetic evidence, I’m not aware of any such evidence. Farming is a huge competitive advantage because it allows for high population densities and occupational specialization, the prerequisites of forming “armies” as such. You can keep going like this all day but basically, it didn’t happen You make good points but: * Like paleontology, a lot of what we dig up is down to chance. Is there a site where remains will be preserved and be found again? There are several early civilizations in Africa that we know next to nothing about - it's hard to access, far away, and deep in the jungle or desert, it might never be found. * There's a strand of anthropological thought that absolutely holds with independent parallel invention of key innovations. If fire / pottery / etc. can be discovered and rediscovered multiple times, why couldn't one of those times be much earlier? (I'm not utterly convinced by this idea that "suddenly everyone discovered fire" but it's an article of faith amongst some experts.) * The abandonment of agriculture and collapse of proto-cities seems to have occurred - it took humans several goes to get agriculture right. Exactly why is still up for discussion, but it's far from a Jared Diamond case that "agriculture is obviously good and useful". All this is complicated by arguments as to what constitutes "agriculture": https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-farming-almost-destroyed-human-civilization-1659734601 https://environment.yale.edu/envy/stories/when-civilizations-collaps https://www.seeker.com/how-farming-almost-destroyed-ancient-human-civilization-1769295252.html Is there some super-civilization in the ancient past? Probably not, for the reasons you suggest. But were there slightly earlier civilizations that fell, were forgotten, got absorbed? Seems likely but also probably unknowable.
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 16:11 |
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So, back to mysteries: the Plain of Jars: https://www.livescience.com/plain-of-jars-burial-site-true-age.htmlquote:The mysterious Plain of Jars in northern Laos — a landscape dotted with massive stone jars hewn from sandstone thousands of years ago — was likely used as a burial site for much longer than previously suspected, and perhaps for up to 2,000 years, according to new research. It's a bit of an Easter island-like mystery - large stone jars appear to have been dragged some miles and then sat on the plain before, perhaps 1000 years later, someone uses them for burial. Two mysteries for the price of one.
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 16:25 |
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Corliss did some fascinating work. I recall that he rated phenomena according to how likely they were to be true and how much they would cause science to change. There were a few very likely and very impactful examples ...
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2021 07:13 |
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An interesting video but yes, after looking at it for a while you stop seeing the triangle as in front of the clouds and instead see the clouds in front of whatever, you think of looking horizontally, not up ... and it start to look a lot like clouds parting in front of a building. Shanghai has really bad pollution, right?
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# ¿ Jun 22, 2021 22:45 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:The view is so obscured and disorienting I can't even get a good sense of it in my mind to think of what it might be. If aliens are real, they're taking cues from the best movie CGI directors in terms of keeping things understated and mysterious. Which puts me in mind of the infamous alien autopsy film: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_autopsy For those who haven't seen it, it's a long (17 minutes) video, supposedly showing two military doctors examining a classic Grey alien. No crude fake, someone went to a lot of effort here. There's a special (inevitably hosted by Jonathan Frakes) where experts including pathologists, military, biologists go backwards and forwards arguing about the details of the autopsy, clothing, down to whether a light switch is period-appropriate. But the really striking commentary was from a horror movie director. He praised the film for being "a really good fake but definitely a fake" as you kept thinking that you saw more than you actually did. Everytime you were just about to get a closeup of the alien, or look inside it, etc. something would get in the way, the doctors would be interrupted and so on. It was put together like a horror film. More info on the wiki page, inclined the films eventual fate, but there's an important lesson here about perception and presentation.
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# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 07:27 |
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a kitten posted:Oh wow, i had no idea the alien autopsy guys actually came out and said it was a "reconstruction" of a film he had definitely actually seen, but that there's totally some random real frames in it, somewhere Insane, right? "Oh there's genuine footage. In there. You know." (waves vaguely at footage)
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# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 21:04 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:I hadn't heard any new information in quite some time, that's an interesting read. If it's credible, that additional flight path info seems like the big piece of evidence that would finally remove most of the overall mystery. There was a long running series of articles about MH in Wired, I think, that may have been written by a pilot. The final of them outright stated "everyone including the Malaysian government knows what happened" and pointed out all the evidence in favour, making a strong - although not waterproof - case. Worth chasing up.
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# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 16:17 |
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Groovelord Neato posted:Even before the new evidence it's the only theory that ever made any sense. Well, yes. Or rather, it's the only theory that had any positive evidence to its credit, rather than crazy ideas like Saddest Rhino posted, that had to somehow sneak into the spaces in between the facts. Literally in some cases, like the idea the plane was hijacked and flown to Uzbekistan, flying between the gaps in radar coverage.
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 13:28 |
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Jetto Jagga posted:The theory I've seen accounting for Great Britain specifically is that the passage of the 1976 "Dangerous Wild Animals Act" lead to some people releasing their exotic big cats: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-19397320 It's odd in the UK, that the whole mystery "are there big cats prowling the countryside?" is not really a mystery. Exotic cats have been caught, it's more a question of individual sightings. Likewise there are apparently kangaroos on the loose in scotland and elsewhere in the world.
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2021 09:48 |
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Alhazred posted:It's says a lot about the british mind that the most imaginative cryptid they can come up with is "a somewhat large cat". This is unbelievably funny to me, probably because it's true. The UK - land of lowered expectations
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# ¿ Oct 11, 2021 11:47 |
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There was an old In Search Of episode that terrified me as a kid, that seemed to suggest there was something like Frankenstein's monster roving around out there. It featured a reenactment where a girl was watching TV alone at night and the monster just suddenly crashes through the windows to menace her. You have to admire how ISO was just so catholic in their choice of stories: the Loch Ness monster, aliens, Frankenstein.
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# ¿ Nov 1, 2021 08:33 |
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Yeah it was pretty clearly just a weird hoax/prank by the family's young daughter but the media of the day were more than happy to print stories about it and a whole bunch of paranormal investigators and psychical researchers and scientists got dragged into it, and 90 years later people are still talking about it. Gef is such a weird story that looms so large in the the Fortean canon, then you find out that it was only seen a few times, in unconvincing circumstances, that it's so obviously a prank ... and yet investigators are still reporting on it.
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# ¿ Nov 7, 2021 23:42 |
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Captain Hygiene posted:I kept getting aggravated because pretty much every report went down the same path of (a) mistrusting scientists he interviewed because they were either under government control or out for their own ends, and (b) putting implicit trust in all the regular folks he interviewed, constantly falling back on the "Well John Q Public has nothing to gain from lying, therefore this testimony must be believed" mindset. It's a striking observation. I recollect the case where strange footprints appeared on a Florida beach, running for miles, and one of the arguements was that no one would have forged them, why would they? And it turned out that was exactly what had happened, some nobody did them for a lark. Likewise the early crop circles which were done by two friends regularly after their drunken pub sessions. Regular folk lie for all sorts of reasons.
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 09:52 |
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stereobreadsticks posted:
Not cryptids, but there's been several observations that UFO / alien sightings go through fads and fashions about how they're depicted - lights in the sky, blonde Nordics imparting wisdom, greys kidnapping people. These show up in movies and TV, and so could influence people's ideas but are also a product of culture themselves.
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# ¿ Dec 1, 2021 09:30 |
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 21:14 |
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Knormal posted:Yeah, those are interesting. In most cases when people claimed to have interactions with the occupants they were just supposed to be mad scientists or strange foreigners or something, but I didn't realize a few of them actually claimed the airships were piloted by Martians. I also didn't realize the first sighting was in my hometown. That is weird. Most of the sightings are of their time - wooden craft with rudders, mad inventors, talk of the enemies and concerns of the day - but there's that small number that could come from a century later, with metallic spaceships and aliens. It demands explanation but what kind of explanation, I'm not sure.
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# ¿ Dec 2, 2021 10:50 |