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I've said this before, but so many of the classic cryptid / fortean stories just evaporate when you look into them. Oak Island? There is no original discovery, no ancient clues or mystery, it's all a stack of rumor and idle speculation. Gef the talking mongoose? No one saw him but the immediate family, save for one unconvincing photo. The missing Jamestown colonists? They left a message saying where they'd gone. The Kenneth Arnold sighting of "flying saucers" that kicked off the modern UFO craze? They didn't look like flying saucers and didn't behave like the modern idea of a UFO. Jack the Ripper? We're not really sure which killings to attribute to him and some basic details are in doubt
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Feb 1, 2022 11:42
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Knormal posted:Oak Island is always so bizarre to me because it seems to hinge on the idea that this single pirate ship would somehow have the time and resources to set up this incredibly complex booby trap system. And apparently do so in a way that it would be impossible for even them to get the treasure back later? Like, why would they need do anything more than bury a treasure chest 3 feet underground? No one else is going to stumble across it on this random North Atlantic island in the 1700's. I guess maybe Native Americans, I'm not sure of what their status was in that region at the time, but I'm guessing it wasn't great. I think the most recent "theory" about Oak Island attributes it to the Templars, which mostly just adds another level of handwaving over an already vague mystery
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Feb 1, 2022 11:44
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Borderlands by Mike Dash is a great book. Actually anything by Mike Dash is good, but this is about general forteana and the why question? Why do people see UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts etc. Round in Circles and other books by Jim Schnabel are a similar take on ufos, less on what they are and more on just recounting stories and asking why people see them.
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Feb 10, 2022 00:04
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BrownPepper posted:
Loren Coleman is an energetic and, I think, sincere guy but very credulous and perhaps not as smart as he thinks. I saw a talk of his once that completely fell apart 5 minutes into question time when Coleman didn't know some basic biology about his topic. Podcast-wise I always liked Thinking Sideways, which has now finished but there's a huge backlog of episodes. The presenters are sceptical but hardcore debunkers and while they have some irritating tics, these don't overwhelm the show
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Feb 13, 2022 23:46
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BrownPepper posted:Being a UFO guy in the 60/70s was probably so cool. But I wonder about Keel was he faking it or did he really believe in all that wild stuff. That is a really interesting question. Earlier in his life, Keel wrote a number of books along the lines of "young man adventures to far exotic location". Pulpy but they got decent recognition and the material within appears to be essentially correct. So if Keel was telling the truth about Rajasthan and Marrakesh, why would he start making up lies about New Jersey? Or did he lose his mind and credulity? Similar questions could be asked about Wilhelm Reich - always a fraud, an accomplished person who strayed into incompetence, or something else? Perhaps the number of Nobel Prize winners who have strayed into psuedoscience is a clue.
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Feb 17, 2022 09:41
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On the conspiracy front, Netflix recently An Unlikely Murderer, a drama about the supposedly assassin of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. It's a well put together, well acted show ... that I ultimately can't recommend because even the story told within the show is thin and implausible. The Swedish police have essentially said "this is the guy, case closed" to an outcry of disbelief. Which leaves us with the unpalatable idea that someone killed a head of state in plain sight, got away and we still don't know who they are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_Engstr%C3%B6m_(suspected_murderer)
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Mar 4, 2022 15:10
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Dunno that FT isn't being sceptical, it reads like their standard straightfaced reporting on what's in the news. Like X _said_ they saw a Bigfoot / UFO / ghost, here's what they said, here's the sources.
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Mar 27, 2022 11:46
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That gets bought up regularly on true crime boards, Reddit etc. Thankfully, and unusually for those places which aren't the most critical audiences, there's few true believers and it gets a lot of pushback. Like you say, young male colleague students, drunk and near cold water ... there's nothing that needs a serial killer to explain these. A related one is a large number of cases that involve someone driving off and disappearing, possibly intoxicated, at night, in a remote area where there are difficult roads. Last few years a lot of cars have been found submerged in rivers, some by researchers who deliberately search for such lost vehicles. It's surprisingly easy for careless drivers to leave the road, end up in the water and just sink.
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Mar 28, 2022 08:18
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twistedmentat posted:Yea that's exactly it. Cults are imagined to be these things shrouded in secrecy and full of esoteric practices, doing unspeakable things in the name of evil gods, reading from ancient books bound in human skin and written in blood all while wearing robes and mask, and either being rich and powerful people or degenerates driven to madness by the practices they have preformed. Same with serial killers. People think they're all the Zodiac, that they leave clues, taunt the police, have some kind of ritual with every kill and that they're cackling madmen who have evidence dungeons in their basements. And that the reason they haven't been caught is because they're super geniuses. When in reality, its much much more mundane than that, rarely do they have some kind of predictable pattern or special method, and its more the cops are dumb and lazy is the reason they haven't been caught than anything else. One (just one) of the many frustrating things about reading true crime forums is the utter mythology surrounding serial killers, all the way from supposed behaviour patterns, their supposed ubiquity, profiling, through to the superpowers attributed to them which verge on the supernatural. They're nearly supervillain figures from a comic. But if I recall, studies show that many serial killers have low IQs and are highly socially awkward, resulting from childhood abuse or brain damage. But that doesn't cut such a romantic figure.
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Mar 30, 2022 13:13
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One More Fat Nerd posted:So this came up in another thread, and I figured I'd check in here. Tricky. About 20 years ago, the Fortean Times covered the flat movement, in a style like "we can't believe there are still flatearthers", protraying the movement as an aging bunch of crazies. Which would favour most current adherents being insincere trolls. But it doesn't feel like that to me. They seem a lot like antivaxxers, deliberately contrarian, priding themselves on thinking differently.
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Jun 9, 2022 23:05
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Gaius Marius posted:Oh she also believes the election is stolen, Covid is fake but also designed by the democrats, that Russia is shutting down Ukrainian biolabs and other such things. This. It seems that once you get in on one conspiracy, soon you'll start accepting them all. I know a few people who went down the new age / wellness route to full-on wingnut, pro-Russia, pro-Trump, "Hilary is the real threat", can't have a conversation with them. Which is a tough pill to swallow. We should be sceptical, governments do lie to us, there are actual conspiracies in history. But that doesn't mean the world is flat.
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Jun 10, 2022 09:54
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Captain Hygiene posted:That's a neat map. I knew things were really US-centric, but that really makes it pop out. I have no idea what aliens' fascination with the midwest is, though, I'm from there and it ain't that great. You could some reasonable and plausible criticisms of the map: reporting and literature is very US-centric (or Western-centric). Cultural interpretations of UFO sighting could shape how (and whether) people report and phrase sightings. Population density will have an effect. Conversely, compare UK and Western Europe to the US and UFOs look like a very American idea.
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Dec 17, 2022 23:33
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Lord Hydronium posted:I believe that Roswell was actually pretty obscure at the time and only got hyped up later as the big canonical UFO event. The big thing in 1947 was the Kenneth Arnold sighting, which invented the term "flying saucer" and basically started the UFO craze. That's my recollection too. And didn't Arnolds sighting get changed or published such that it created the canonical idea of a UFO - i.e. what he actually reported is different to what the classic story now says I once knew someone doing a thesis on how popular culture shapes individual UFO reports and what people say / think they saw, e.g. greys, little green men, robots, benevolent Nordics. But it would have to be very difficult to pick those effects apart.
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Dec 18, 2022 10:31
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Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:Arnold's craft were crescent shaped and moved "like skipping saucers" which got garbled into flying saucers That's it. I think someone also did calculations on what Arnold judged to be the size and distance of the objects and found they were incompatible. He couldn't have seen something of that size at that distance. Which is not to say that he was dishonest but that pilots aren't foolproof observers. Roswell, and the English version in Rendlesham, are frustrating in that there's so little to them and they've been thoroughly debunked but fans keep coming back to them and endlessly resucitate the cases. Hesdalen valley is interesting, the Cash-Landrum incident is interesting. But instead they conjure up hazy conspiracies and unprovable testimony to bolster creaky cases.
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Dec 18, 2022 17:28
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Chairman Capone posted:Loren is still around, but I know he’s had some health issues recently and is busy relocating his museum. He is by all accounts a lovely guy and isn't a grandstanding nutter like a lot of the field. But I saw him give a talk once that got totally destroyed in the Q&A. It was just disappointing and careless.
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Jan 16, 2023 15:43
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FreudianSlippers posted:A bit tangentially related to the topic but I recently read some account about the haunting of a small stone hut in the Icelandic highlands called Sæluhús á Jökulsá á fjöllum (e. Resting place by the Glacial River in the mountains). Though most of the accounts are about things literally going bump in the night. there are two stories that feature an actual seemingly physical creature. Probably doesn't quite qualify as a cryptid as it's explicitly supernatural but I found it interesting. Thanks, real interesting. Especially as they seem like very organic tales, not "I saw Bigfoot / famous cryptid / alien". It's these weird stories that don't fit a pattern that are the most fascinating.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:07
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Chairman Capone posted:I was listening to the most recent episode of the Wetwired podcast where they were discussing Graham Hancock, and the host mentioned a study whose conclusions were that engineers tended to be over-represented among conspiracy theorists by occupation. He didn't provide a link to it in the episode notes though, and a few minutes on Google isn't turning up anything that stands out. Might anyone here be familiar with that (or some comparable study)? I would be really interested to read it. I've heard of that study and a related one that asserts engineers are overrepresented among terrorists. I can't track them down right now, but from memory there were some ideas about how engineering is the default technical career path, emphasizes a narrow set of skills, with exact answers and "the right way to do it". Added: the terrorism link appears in Engineers of Jihad – The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education Hardcover – by Gambetta, Hertog which looks to be the evolution of a paper you can goggle for. It makes for an interesting read for some correlations different to what I remembered
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Feb 5, 2023 17:29
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Bogart posted:anyway. Crop circles are almost definitely fake (...unless?) but man they look cool. This is another of my periodic recommendations of Jim Schnabel's "Round in Circles" for a great rundown of crop circles and the crop circle community. He listens to all views, talks to everyone involved, entertains and examines all theories. And then, two chapters before the end, there's a massive mic-drop moment. A very Fortean book.
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Feb 28, 2023 18:16
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Slightly cheating, but an interesting Reddit thread about people seeing anomalous, absurd or even fictional things: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/11h4hwc/sightings_of_fictional_characters/ Including reports of setting Santa Claus: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/12/23/saw-paranormal-santa-claus/4HNUxlrZLFvo3T46VNTSJL/story.html These cases are interesting, but less for "what did they see" and more for "why did they it". You can easily handwave away a lot of Fortean cases by asserting that witnesses are lying / crazy / stupid but that's always seemed like a lazy explanation to me. Mike Dash explored this a bit in Borderlands with his inner space hypothesis, that maybe cryptids etc. are more to do with psychology, perception and memory.
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Mar 5, 2023 16:52
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:I ordered this on the thread's recommendation and just got around to reading it and it does indeed rule. STRONGLY recommended for anyone who reads this thread. Schnabel's next book Dark White is about UFO abductions and it's arguably not as good but still very good. The late "plot twist" like Round in Circles obviously doesn't happen but there is a similar plot arc.
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Mar 22, 2023 10:29
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EasilyConfused posted:I think this came up in one of the Ukraine War threads oddly enough. IIRC, some weirdo fringe Finnish politician who was a believer in it got arrested as a Russian spy. Which just reminded me that during the breakup of Yugoslavia, there were similar local stories of underground tunnels full of tanks and battles raging beneath the surface. I think it was tired in with nationalisation, i.e. our side may seem to be losing but down below, we're actually winning
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Jun 27, 2023 07:57
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The_Doctor posted:Ok that looks terrible, but a bunch of fun. Simon Pegg doing his best Christophe Waltz impression! Christopher Lloyd! Neil Gaiman?! Exactly. It's such a lazy, low energy fraud. And it's not like Gef had any inspirational or clever message to impart, had a dramatic story, or aligned with any appealling beliefs. It's an unconvincing mongoose that talks rubbish. Why this case embedded itself in forteana is a mystery.
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Jul 21, 2023 09:10
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I've sometimes said that a particular event is a mystery but not mysterious. Roanoke? The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa? The death of Elisa Lam? The Flannan Isle lighthouse keepers? Mysteries - we don't know exactly what happened, but plausible explanations are possible that are probably correct. There's far fewer cases that are really mysterious, where you struggle to make any sense or explanation. To pick an example, the Fausto disappearance.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:34
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EasilyConfused posted:What's the Fausto disappearance? You can get the story from that Reddit link or several other sites on the web - a Spanish fishing boat that disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again, reappeared and then disappeared forever. I gave it as an example of something that's mysterious, not to suggest that it's paranormal etc. but that despite being well documented and verified, the facts we have make little sense, no theory really fits, and it can't be explained away by the usual broad "it was a hoax / mistaken observation / misreporting ...". As distinct from mysteries where we don't know the full story but there's a prosaic theory that although unproven could explain just about everything, e.g. Roanoke. nonathlon has a new favorite as of 00:30 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 00:19
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Snooze Cruise posted:Julio is the strangest part of that Fausto story. I don't get what compels him to stay on the boat. Like the only thing i can imagine is someone going through that experience and feeling like you bonded with these people and wanting to finish it out with them, I guess? Right - if you subtracted him from the story, it would be easier to believe in some joint misadventure by the crew. They were drug smuggling, decided to run away to South America, etc. But he's there - so you instead have to ask what happened to them.
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Aug 30, 2023 05:08
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Kabatic wind and slab avalanches have been suggested before, as well as various other natural phenomena, with the proponents of each announcing the answer is obvious and they've solved it. Credit to the article, at least they only pitch it as a possible solution.
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Dec 28, 2023 11:53
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Here's a similar graphic, with dates & locations Interesting because it's a lot more diverse than I expected. I assumed that the type or form of alien would trend, with some types coming into or out of fashion. Then again, some ufologists have played their universes with multiple species so 🤷♀️
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Mar 22, 2024 20:26
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Gaius Marius posted:There's some obscure underwater cryptids that are probably legit. Mothman is also objectively real Some biologist (Darren Naish?) did an ecological and discovery analysis of marine animals once and concluded there were probably some sizeable marine animals yet to be discovered. Hell, we're still discovering land mammals albeit usually small ones.
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Apr 9, 2024 17:22
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