Snooze Cruise posted:

I think they all still have one last ride in them :')

stereobreadsticks posted:

Also, obviously a lot of these topics are inherently conspiratorial, but I think there's a substantial difference in tone between "maybe there are a few secrets that we don't know about" and "all mainstream governmental, media, and academic sources are lying to you!" The former, more speculative tone can be fun to entertain, the latter is just infuriating in the era of Trump and QAnon, and I think even topics that aren't inherently political like ghosts and bigfoot have a tendency these days to get poisoned by that tone.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Weirdly enough the UK equivalent of Mothman was called Owlman and the first few sightings probably weren't owls, given that its origin was via interviews conducted by Tony 'Doc' Shiels, a noted hoaxer. (Sightings in later years might possibly have been large owls)

Here's some of the original eyewitness sketches, it's extremely Mothman-like

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

I went and looked up Bray Road Elkhorn WI on google maps to see where the Beast of Bray Road hangs out. It's farmland just outside of town with a few small tufts of managed woodlands:




...... oh wait, what's that right next to Bray Road?



Huh, I wonder what kind of animals they have at the petting zoo



Oh, a huge shaggy black creature with pointed ears and a vaguely dog-shaped head which will chase after every person it sees for snacks. Huh, how about that.

Snooze Cruise posted:

I am a big fan of small town monsters, the beast of bray road one is a classic

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Here's a trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNP9b0qjQws

You can rent it for $4 via YouTube Movies & TV

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Honestly, there isn’t any ‘apolitical’ crypto media. The ‘gentler’ just-asking-questions stuff is related and supplementary to the explicitly right-wing stuff.

As gone over earlier in the thread, Sasquatch has been hugely political from the very beginning, with the very first ‘Bigfoot sighting’ being a fantasy of a “negroid” first nations woman. The Patterson Footage was a reenactment of that story for a throwback “jungle expedition” movie, where a bunch of cowboys form a posse to hunt and capture what’s essentially a human being.

The shift from Sasquatch (‘subhuman cave-dwelling aboriginals’) to Bigfoot (‘a new species of ape’) in the wake of the Patterson Footage is simply an update of the racist imagery. But absolutely nobody is interested in Bigfoot because it might be another orangutan - as if crypto guys just love chimps and bonobos sooo much. The entire appeal is the promise of a man-animal. Even for liberal hippies, Bigfoot enthusiasm is a ‘reverse-racist’ fantasy of noble savagery.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t watch this stuff, of course. But, you do need to be extremely critical, whatever you watch - and perhaps especially critical of the pleasant, gentle stuff that normalizes these ideologies.

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

This makes me think of the Bigfoot larpers you find on reddit, there's one guy in particular who kept finding "stick structures" in suburban parks, his last one I remember was a Bigfoot fish trap and then some other poster called him out based on the ADA accessible ramp in the photo and named the park. Something really sad about it imo, like this is the "wildest" place you can access or imagine, and also of course the deal where Bigfoot is both a secretive and rare animal and also seen by everyone everywhere, and both extremes are proof that she's real. The OP's rebuttal was that the Bigfoot are truly all around us all the time but would never reveal themselves to negative persons.

There was another "stick structure" in view of a boardwalk in a park, and posters were saying okay sure the city built an overlook here but how many KIDS TODAY will actually walk ALL THE WAY out to it? They are too busy looking at their SCREENS with POKEMON GO! Truly the heart of darkness out in Deerfield.

Knormal posted:

My personal "Yeah this is bullshit" moment for Nessie came when I actually visited Loch Ness like 20 years ago. All the documentaries like to play it up like some remote mountain lake but there's a massive (well, massive by Northern Scotland standards) highway running right alongside it. Not to mention the constant tourboats criss-crossing it. There's no way anything that surfaces at all could ever remain unidentified nowadays, there's got to be thousands of eyes on that lake at all times.

Kith posted:

https://i.imgur.com/NTJWT0X.mp4

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

His Facebook page has a huge number of photos of the 'evidence' he'd collected over the decades and it's just some of the dumbest poo poo, mixed in with obviously recent sculptures that he apparently assumed were proof of ancient cultures.

MacheteZombie posted:

Did you ever watch Hickory Never Bleeds? What was your take?

Snooze Cruise posted:

That can't be the real explanation because every cryptid is actually just an owl, including the lake ones.

quote:

A “mystery animal” spotted in the Rio Grande Valley left Texas park officials — and the general public — stumped.

Officials with the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, with Texas Parks and Wildlife, sought social media users’ help when they posted a photo of a strange-looking — and apparently not easily identifiable — animal on the park’s Facebook page last week.

The furry, short and stout, four-legged creature was caught on footage from the trail cam of a park visitor while walking at night in the Rio Grande Valley.

Alhazred posted:

Fun Fact: There's always a badger right behind you. And he's not happy.

stereobreadsticks posted:

Clearly a badger but my first thought when I saw the picture was that it looked a bit like a hippo, which naturally got me thinking about Pablo Escobar's hippos. That's not a cryptid story but it's almost as weird as one. I've seen numbers ranging from 70 to 130 for the current population of free-roaming hippos in Colombia descended from the 4 that Pablo Escobar bought at the height of his power.

Ror posted:

Just want to thank this thread for introducing me to Strong Toad, who I think about constantly.

Knormal posted:

My personal "Yeah this is bullshit" moment for Nessie came when I actually visited Loch Ness like 20 years ago. All the documentaries like to play it up like some remote mountain lake but there's a massive (well, massive by Northern Scotland standards) highway running right alongside it. Not to mention the constant tourboats criss-crossing it. There's no way anything that surfaces at all could ever remain unidentified nowadays, there's got to be thousands of eyes on that lake at all times.

uber_stoat posted:

i read about this guy as a kid. seems like a badass.

stereobreadsticks posted:

This charming fellow is speculated by some to be a surviving giant ground sloth.


Not sure where the mouth in the stomach is meant to come from..

quote:

By Laurie Goering and Tribune Staff Writer
Chicago Tribune
•
Jan 08, 1995 at 12:00 am

To rubber tappers and Indians in the forest's remote western fringe, the creature is the Mapinguari, the Amazon's version of the legendary Bigfoot. No scientist has ever seen it, but Oren may be on the verge of proving the mythological animal actually exists.

Scientists in the U.S. and Germany this month are performing DNA tests on hair and feces Oren collected in Brazil's remote Acre state. And if his suspicions are correct, the tests will reveal a biological shocker: The fabled monster is actually a species of giant ground sloth believed extinct for 8,500 years.

"I have every confidence we have found it," Oren said last week from his offices at the Emilio Goeldi Natural History Museum in Belem, where he is recovering from malaria contracted during his search in November and December.

Alhazred posted:

Fun Fact: There's always a badger right behind you. And he's not happy.

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

edit: Mike Dash has a nice long article about Searle here: https://aforteantinthearchives.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/frank-searles-lost-second-book/ unfortunately all the images are dead, as is the link to Searle's final, unpublished Loch Ness pamphlet where he rails against other researchers. Bummer.

quote:

All this changed when Shine and the LNMP came on the scene in the early 1980s. The Project, less easily intimidated, set up an ‘Evidence Committee’, run by a delightful, level-headed man named Ricky Gardiner, who was in real life an art teacher from Nottingham. Gardiner set about the first detailed examination of Searle’s photographs – checking images, comparing backgrounds to locate the site of shots – and soon came up with firm evidence of hoaxing. I don’t have a copy of his final report, and I’m recalling near 30-year-old conversations here, but I do remember Gardiner explaining that some of the shots – such as the July 1974 image shown right – had been set up in shallow water, where it was possible to place “muppets” that might well have consisted largely of cloth wrapped around a fence post. On this occasion, Searle had betrayed himself in another way as well; he had gone on record to state that the shot had been snatched with a telephoto lens, but the depth of focus he’d obtained would have been impossible to obtain with such equipment.

quote:

Gardiner’s proudest discovery, made in an Inverness newsagent’s shop, was a picture postcard of a brontosaurus. Examination of this image revealed startling similarities to several of Searle’s photos. The bungling monster-hunter had purchased copies, cut up portions of the dinosaur’s body, and glued them to photos of the loch surface to produce not one, but three different photos – one showing a head and neck, another a large single hump, and a third a tail emerging from the water (below). None of these images showed backgrounds; between them they were as crude as could be.

david_a posted:

Similar to how the first Chupacabra sighting was from someone who had recently watched Species, wasn’t one of the first Nessie sightings from a couple that were driving home from having seen King Kong? There’s a brontosaurus in a lake on Skull Island that’s highly reminiscent of the famous Nessie photo. There’s also a plesiosaur later on but it acts like a constricting snake.

david_a posted:

Similar to how the first Chupacabra sighting was from someone who had recently watched Species, wasn’t one of the first Nessie sightings from a couple that were driving home from having seen King Kong? There’s a brontosaurus in a lake on Skull Island that’s highly reminiscent of the famous Nessie photo. There’s also a plesiosaur later on but it acts like a constricting snake.

Terrible Opinions posted:

David Icke postdated tv showings of V.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Mothman is named for a batman character who existed before any sightings.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Dr. Jerrold Coe posted:

Omg thanks for the nessie archeology! The photos add so much to the article

Terrible Opinions posted:

The first description of greys came after the Outer Limits had an episode with a costume that's grey looking. David Icke postdated tv showings of V. The entire theosophical movement and associated belief in vril is snapewife level fanfiction of the novel "The Coming Race". Mothman is named for a batman character who existed before any sightings. This applies to just about all cryptids.