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Last year, I wrote an article about the megalodon, the history of research into it, and its role in cryptozoology. Today (and with my permission) a YouTube channel that focuses on prehistoric life made a video adaptation of the article. It's the first time I've seen some adapt a piece of my work, thought some of you might enjoy. Also of potential interest, I wrote an article a few years ago on mokele-mbembe, Great Zimbabwe, and lizard people conspiracies.
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Aug 26, 2022 19:36
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Captain Hygiene posted:Oh wow, awesome stuff! Mokele-mbembe in particular has always fascinated me, it was a big part of all the weird Young Earth stuff I read while I was growing up. Even after moving beyond that, it's still an idea that sits in my mind with other cryptids, but it's interesting to look at from a more critical perspective alongside all the other aspects like the problematic colonialism it ties into. twistedmentat posted:That's so cool! I'm going to have to watch this asap. BTW I love that Meglodon is just drawn as a big shark, when we have zero idea what it actually looked like, so it could have looked hilariously chonky. Thank you both! Incidentally, the mokele mbembe article, and some of the Megalodon article, came from a chapter I cut out of my dissertation on Great Zimbabwe and the pseudohistory around it, which you can read for free here if anyone's interested. Another element in my dissertation is a brief discussion of Flat Earther views in South Africa. I expanded that into a short article, and also gave a talk on it at my college which you can view on YouTube. I'm expanding the Flat Earth stuff into a full book - I'm still looking for a publisher, but I've finished with the research and hoping to get the manuscript done next year or two. Even though it focuses on a history of the Flat Earth idea, it still delves into some other conspiracy views around cryptids and alternative medicine.
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Aug 27, 2022 13:31
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Tree Bucket posted:This was super interesting, thanks. Thank you! And yeah, Australia in particular got such a fixation on Flat Earthers in the 70s and 80s largely thanks to the fact that the wife of the then-leading Flat Earth group was Australian and she was fixated on the idea that calling it "Down Under" was a slur. Some mid-20th century Flat Earthers in the US spun off from an Australian evangelical church as well, though that was not explicitly Flat Earth based. uber_stoat posted:being a child let loose in a library to do important ufo and bigfoot research, this is an important developmental milestone. When I was a kid, my grandfather worked at a small library down the street from his house, one of those 200 year old churches that had been turned into a little town library. He'd give me the key and I'd walk down the street, unlock it, let myself in, and have free reign of the library all afternoon. I would of course spend it on the little section full of the 1970s conspiracy books. I definitely remember Chariots of the Gods, God Drives a Flying Saucer, I think the Condon Report, and some of the skeptical stuff by Asimov and Ben Bova.
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Aug 30, 2022 14:15
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Sorry to keep spamming this thread, but: I help run an online history of science group. Last summer, one of the other people involved and I set up two sessions on pseudoscience and its spread during the pandemic. We wrote up a short article about those sessions and our group overall for the history of science journal Endeavour. The article should be free to read online and download as a PDF from this link for 30 days (feel free to spread the link if you want, there shouldn't be any limit to those accessing it). Incidentally the fact that they're making this free for 30 days is a big deal as the publishing paywall racket is very real, and I would have had to pay almost $3000 out of pocket to make it free to read permanently.
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Sep 1, 2022 16:05
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Over the summer, I went through the Betty and Barney Hill papers at the University of New Hampshire. I did a brief writeup on it which just came out, along with a number of photos from the archives, and a brief excursion to America's Stonehenge as well: https://contingentmagazine.org/2022/10/17/edward-guimonts-from-outer-space/
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Oct 17, 2022 19:37
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Thank you all, glad you enjoyed it! It started out as a shorter pitch as part of their postcard series, and then I was able to slightly expand it, but I still had to trim a lot of my rambling discoveries out. If anyone is interested, I did a Twitter thread in July where I posted various interesting discoveries I made in the collection. Some of my favorites were Betty writing to Erich von Daniken and only getting a form letter back, and a letter from Stanton Friedman where he speculated (maybe jokingly) that the alien script in the book Betty saw on the ship was the same writing as the Voynich Manuscript, something I'd never seen before. One other thing that really struck me on a personal level was reading a letter from Betty where she described the last day of Barney's life. There was a snow storm so they had the day off from work, had a big second breakfast, went out in the snow, made a fire and played some games in the evening, and then he started feeling bad and she called an ambulance, the medics knew Barney and joked, and then several hours went by in the hospital, he declined and died at night, and she went back to a cold, lonely house. https://twitter.com/edward_guimont/status/1544711639999676418 Captain Hygiene posted:That case is fascinating, both in how much it's been followed up on and in how it fits into the early narrative development of "typical" encounters/abductions. What really interested me was how much scorn Betty had for both the 1950s Contactees and the 1980s Strieber/Hopkins type of abduction lore. She thought the Contactees were just ridiculous and that the 1980s abduction people were sinister in their misuse of hypnosis to create false narratives. There was a MUFON journal article by her niece, Kathleen Marden, about the potential for hypnosis to create false abduction narratives out of general pop culture consensus, and that was (I think) from the late 70s, so that was a very prescient insight. Interestingly, Betty did think that the Pascagoula Abduction and Travis Walton cases were genuine in contrast to the 1980s waves. The fact that she bought into Walton is especially interesting because she also thought that the publicity of her and Barney's case inspired a lot of copycats by the late 70s. Captain Hygiene posted:I don't think I'd seen this artist's recreation before, I wish aliens wearing recognizable clothes had stuck around a more common part of the mythos This isn't the same artist, but I loved this depiction of the Leader I found in one of the files. https://twitter.com/edward_guimont/status/1544753094604513280
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Oct 18, 2022 14:08
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Captain Hygiene posted:Oh man, my folks were into all that back in the 80s, they had a bookshelf full of that kind of conspiracy and eschatology stuff. They even had one on satanic toys: Just imagining Christian parents denouncing The Indian in the Cupboard as a Satanic conspiracy.
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Nov 28, 2022 00:19
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As covered in the Christmas classic Pottersville. Still really curious how exactly that movie got made.
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Dec 14, 2022 19:26
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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. When I was doing research in the Betty & Barney Hill papers over the summer, I actually came across an account of Roswell from a 1967 UFO magazine, which really surprised me. It was really brief, acknowledged it as mistaken identity for a balloon, and located it at Fort Worth. It was really interesting to see an example of how (little) Roswell lingered even in the UFO field prior to it getting revived in 1978.
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Dec 18, 2022 15:33
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Is there any source that’s a good comprehensive look at the Phantom Time/New Chronology/Tartaria conspiracy?
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Dec 19, 2022 15:09
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Captain Hygiene posted:For some reason, reading about this historical dating technique suddenly reminded me of some creationist traveling lecture series I saw as a kid, whose central point was teaching you to question any kind of scientific observation or technique that goes against the young earth idea with the mantra "were you there?". Like, to the point of getting the entire auditorium to say that in unison as a response to slanted example statements a """scientist""" might have. The documentary We Believe in Dinosaurs has footage of Ken Hamm doing exactly this to an audience hall full of schoolkids. Great documentary, by the way.
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Dec 20, 2022 20:05
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Loren is still around, but I know he’s had some health issues recently and is busy relocating his museum. As of last year, he was planning to bring back the International Cryptozoology Conference this May, but I haven’t heard anything about that recently so I’m assuming it was delayed. He asked me to give a talk there so whenever it happens I’m hoping I will still be on the list. I know a lot of skeptics are very hostile to him but he’s always been very friendly towards me when we’ve spoken, and back in 2019 he invited me to speak at his last conference after reading my very critical article on the mokele-mbembe.
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Jan 16, 2023 12:37
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I used to listen to the Mysterious Universe podcast for laughs and they really fixated on Missing 411 for a long time. That used to be a fun podcast to occasionally listen to, especially because they seemed to have a slight tethering to reality (mocking Alex Jones and Trump and related right wing figures, pointing out things that were obvious hoaxes or too bizarre to take seriously), but they started going really off the deep end with anti-China paranoia and then at the start of covid they went full Plandemic promoting, and I stopped even casually dropping in at that point.
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Jan 19, 2023 19:59
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Speaking of Midwest cryptid/urban legends, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon is one I always liked and found really creepy as a kid, especially this illustration from Karl Shuker's book The Unexplained: Reading up on it later, it really did come across as mass hysteria. Reminds me of Havana Syndrome more than anything, come to think about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon Ror posted:Just want to thank this thread for introducing me to Strong Toad, who I think about constantly. Hypnotoad's cousin!?
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Jan 31, 2023 22:14
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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.
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Feb 5, 2023 16:50
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nonathlon posted: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". Awesome, thank you for this - it looks like Engineers of Jihad is available on Jstor, for anyone who has access to that.
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Feb 5, 2023 17:34
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I think it’s more that the current election system in Mexico favors the conservatives and this is just the latest example of the Mexican right finding ways to demonize him for the sin of having actually won in the first place. I was going to say, imagine Republicans calling Obama a dictator for trying to alter the electoral college or preserve the voting rights act, but it’s kind of impossible to imagine Democrats actually wanting to improve the system in the first place.
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Feb 27, 2023 12:24
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Bogart posted:I know this is late but holy poo poo this sucks. Dude is a full on crazy. And I always thought he was the more reasonable moderate one of the Mysterious Universe guys. Glad I never bought anything from them. I gave a recent episode a listen and it is all Covid is planned China is evil crackpot poo poo said so casually without the kind of indulgent irony they used to portray. Oh well, there's a few gigs of podcast data freed up. Yeah, them slowly becoming (or dropping the facade of not being) complete raving far-right loons was a huge disappointment to me, especially since they had tried to distance themselves from the actual Alex Jones/Trump fan conspiracy fringe for a while. There were occasional anti-China bits but nothing too out of the ordinary for what passes for the mainstream views on China here in the US (or Australia, I'd imagine). Covid really seems to have done for them what 9/11 did to people twenty years earlier. This is a very small thing but while them becoming far-right whackos is sad but not weird, one lingering question I have about Mysterious Universe is that very briefly, back in 2016 or so, they brought on a third host, who then a few episodes later completely vanished and I don't think was even mentioned again. Really curious just what was going on behind the scenes for that.
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Feb 28, 2023 19:30
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I always liked Spring-Heeled Jack. Just seems like such a great example of a urban legend. The_Doctor posted:Nessie! The mother of all the lake monsters! I have to stand up for the local hero - Champ, and New England sea serpents in general, predate Nessie by decades!
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Mar 30, 2023 16:48
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Trainee PornStar posted:I've always liked the ghost chicken. https://youtu.be/E28WrhpTzQA
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Mar 30, 2023 21:55
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Terrible Opinions posted:David Icke postdated tv showings of V. Not only that but in The Biggest Secret, Icke cites the Super Mario Brothers movie as evidence that lizard people are real.
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Apr 12, 2023 14:53
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Kind of funny he published a book with Tikal on the cover implying it had a connection to outer space and mystical powers in 1976. Good timing at least.
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Apr 14, 2023 00:35
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:If anyone lives near the Ballarat region of Victoria Australia there's an interesting public lecture at the Ballarat Municipal Observatory on May 28 about the 1914 German Airship Hysteria which was a precursor to modern day UFO panics There was just an Australian podcast that did an episode on this topic: https://talesfromratcity.com/2023/04/13/ufo-sightings-of-australia/ The author they interviewed, Brett Holman, has written a few articles on the Australian mystery airships. The general mystery airship phenomenon has always been of interest to me. I visited a friend in Austin years ago and convinced him to drive up to Aurora to see the local cemetery where the supposed Martian pilot of the 1897 airship crash was buried. I have a photo of it somewhere, I'll try and find.
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May 4, 2023 16:14
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FreudianSlippers posted:I imagine flying a German airship all the way to Australia for reasons would be a pretty lovely gig but probably preferable to drowning in mud in a trench in Flanders I suppose. New Guinea was a German colony at the time (same with Namibia, where there was also a German plane panic in South Africa) so it wasn’t that far, but as the researcher mentions in the interview it was still an extreme distance for a plane at the time. Part of it was also the panic that German spies were smuggling in plane parts and building planes from secret remote spots in Australia itself.
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May 6, 2023 21:02
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So here's a quasi-cryptid sighting I was wondering if anyone here had any insights on. A friend of mine is transcribing letters from one of his family members who had been a Connecticut soldier in the US Civil War. In one letter home, he wrote about seeing baboons on Tybee Island in Georgia. I'm trying to figure out what he could have seen (other than the earliest recorded Skunk Ape sighting, of course).
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May 7, 2023 16:36
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If anyone's interested in the Bunyip, Loren Coleman posted a link to download a PDF of an article on it from the latest issue of Folklore. https://twitter.com/CryptoLoren/status/1659192169763053568
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May 18, 2023 15:47
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If anyone has Netflix, the third season of I Think You Should Leave dropped, and the start of the second episode has a good cryptid/monster-related sketch.
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May 30, 2023 18:53
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https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley/status/1677369079085031445 For those who don't know, this is the oldest Republican in the US Senate. Kind of shocked a Republican politician is taking a stand against Ancient Aliens.
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Jul 7, 2023 19:37
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By Fortean synchronicity, I actually just listened to this episode last night! They briefly mentioned a case in the 1880s where spiritualists claimed to have contacted Abraham Lincoln, who told them that the real reason he was assassinated was because he was planning on revealing the truth of spiritualism to the world. I love that at least some 19th century spiritualists were jumping on the conspiracy theory bandwagon. Also they talk about the case of a medium who claimed to have contacted Napoleon, who told them that after dying he had gone on to conquer the entire spirit realm, which is impressive.
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Jul 26, 2023 14:44
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I thought we all knew the Roswell aliens were actually the genetically engineered results of Mengele’s experiments after Stalin hired him.
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Jul 27, 2023 14:01
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Thanks to Uri Geller and Whitley Strieber, we have our first confirmed 100% real photograph of an alien hanging out in the basement of a house in Mexico. https://twitter.com/theurigeller/status/1694279078050672834
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Aug 24, 2023 18:33
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I forget if it was in this thread or another that I recommended How To with John Wilson's recent episode on the Green Bank radio quiet zone and the people who live there, but I thought people here would be interested that the latest episode from yesterday not only featured people who believe in Titanic conspiracies, but also out of nowhere a short (but both very funny and very earnest) interview with Travis Walton.
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Aug 27, 2023 01:23
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The_Doctor posted:Mothman’s crisis PR management company has really done wonders on the rehabilitation of his image. Reading The Mothman Prophecies really makes it funny to consider how the public image of Mothma has changed in the last few years.
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Aug 30, 2023 01:00
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The UFO whisperer reminds me of the short indie documentary Curse of the Man Who sees UFOs. Definitely recommend that for a short slice of life look at a guy who is convinced that UFOs follow him everywhere.
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Sep 3, 2023 14:22
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Captain Hygiene posted:Nobody could possibly have foreknowledge of when a train could be at a place, that defies belief! Especially silly because given he's a bodybuilder with a meat-related Twitter handle and a blue check, he's most likely a fan of Mussolini.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:51
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It’s also funny that that’s what they chose to make Mothman look like when the illustrations from the time had him look more like a bell pepper with eyes.
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Oct 27, 2023 15:28
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It’s still so funny that that is the general conception of Mothman given the actual eyewitness descriptions.
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Mar 18, 2024 00:13
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There’s one point in the book where Keel hypothesizes that Mothman is just a guy in a jet pack flying around.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:57
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Betty Hill later talked about believing the aliens were from a cold planet because they looked like Indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego (I believe) she had seen in a documentary, but also talked about them looking Italian. Barney compared them to Boston Irish-Americans who dressed like Nazi officers from World War II. Betty specifically mentioned the leader alien wearing an ascot and others wearing jackets and caps and speaking accented English. When I went through the Betty and Barney Hill archives at University of New Hampshire a few years ago, Betty had a really amazing picture of the ascot-wearing alien looking very jaunty. You can see it here, second row on the far right: https://license.unh.edu/product/BettyandBarney1 I'll say it was a weird experience to be able to be able to pick up and look at the actual iconic winged-flying saucer picture that Barney drew of the UFO.
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Mar 22, 2024 18:15
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The thylacine is probably the only cryptid (if you really want to call it that) that has an actual chance of (still) existing, but that chance is still basically above absolute zero as opposed to below zero for essentially everything else.
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Apr 9, 2024 14:38
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