Hodgepodge posted:

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

If Owls weren't real they would definitely be cryprtids.

Look at those little freaks, they're more ghost than bird! I love them.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

I'm actually trying to remember which old book I borrowed from the library that talked about Gef, but the only thing I'm finding is "Out of this World: Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time" (1989) and I'm not entirely sure that's the one I'm thinking of.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Here's a scan from the relevant pages in the Mysteries Of The Unknown books where I'm pretty sure I first read about it, it was in both the original Ghosts books and the later collected omnibus edition



I remember thinking that the illustrations of the claws coming out of the ceiling was particularly creepy

Hodgepodge posted:

mothman is borne of the intersection of car travel at night with headlights, the human mind, and barn owls being creepy af. it needs no base "dna."

e: as scientific understanding of avian intelligence increases, it becomes clear that the gap in intelligence between these and ourselves may be much, much smaller than previously believed. Primate levels of neurons in the forebrain, with in some respects a higher efficiency than our own (okay in crows but still):

Barry Foster posted:

Worth noting that owls specifically are dumb as rocks, mind

small ghost posted:

I've heard this from falconers on a few occasions. Raptors apparently are generally pretty smart but owls are notoriously dim.

The_Doctor posted:

Oh yeah, I’ve driven a lot across the States, and outside of the cities, when night falls, it gets dark. It’s incredibly easy to believe things are watching you pass by. There’s just so much of it too. Even in smaller cities and towns, there’s dark parts. Creatures on the periphery is some ‘stay close to the campfire’ cavemen vine.

small ghost posted:

I've heard this from falconers on a few occasions. Raptors apparently are generally pretty smart but owls are notoriously dim.

Barry Foster posted:

Worth noting that owls specifically are dumb as rocks, mind

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

The Mothman plush kickstarter I'm backing (located here if you're interested: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windywoods/campfire-creatures-mothman-cryptid-plush-and-pins/description) just revealed this as one of the stretch goals:



It feels like I just yesterday learned about Notdeer from this thread, I'm weirdly excited to see them become well known enough to get made into an enamel pin. I hope their popularity continues to grow because they really are a fantastic concept for a spooky critter off in the woods.

Marcade posted:

This photo reminds me of this video

The_Doctor posted:

Oh yeah, I’ve driven a lot across the States, and outside of the cities, when night falls, it gets dark. It’s incredibly easy to believe things are watching you pass by. There’s just so much of it too. Even in smaller cities and towns, there’s dark parts. Creatures on the periphery is some ‘stay close to the campfire’ cavemen vine.

Snooze Cruise posted:

this is killing me because its reminding me i didn't got to back the kickstarter for mothman bag that i think was posted in here earlier
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studioeggface/mothman-crossbody-mini-backpack-ita-bag

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

Oh poo poo I posted that one too!

If it makes you feel any better the project did well enough that they're considering just selling the bags on the reg once the kickstarter ones get sent out, I'll post a link to where you can buy them if that ends up happening.

twistedmentat posted:

Thanks for turning me onto In Reasearch Of..., that is totally my jam. I just listened to the first one, but holy poo poo, the casual racism of ancient aliens is on point, also how did Rod Sterling not know how to pronouce Zimbabwe?

Rascar Capac posted:

alf_pogs posted:

sounds me to me like something someone who's son WAS being weird would say

The_Doctor posted:

Oh yeah, I’ve driven a lot across the States, and outside of the cities, when night falls, it gets dark. It’s incredibly easy to believe things are watching you pass by. There’s just so much of it too. Even in smaller cities and towns, there’s dark parts. Creatures on the periphery is some ‘stay close to the campfire’ cavemen vine.

stereobreadsticks posted:

To be fair the country wasn't officially known as Zimbabwe until a few years after the show was made. At the time Sterling was trying to pronounce it the name was used only to refer to archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe and as part of the names of anti-apartheid rebel groups. If he knew the country at all, even if he did his research, he probably would have referred to it as Rhodesia. Incidentally, the connection of Great Zimbabwe to aliens (or other outsiders, it's also been claimed at various times to have been built by Portuguese, Hebrew, and Arab builders as opposed to the local people who actually built it) was intentionally encouraged by the colonial and apartheid authorities in the region as a way to imply that the local people were simply too primitive to govern themselves and that this ancient evidence of complex civilization was irrelevant to local societies. There's also the issue that Great Zimbabwe isn't the only ruined stone city in southern Africa, far from it, there were several more cities that clearly shared a culture with Great Zimbabwe both within the modern borders of Zimbabwe and in nearby Mozambique and South Africa. Great Zimbabwe is the only one most people from outside the region know of, which helps to feed the "mystery," after all, it would be much stranger for there to be one isolated monumental stone city far from any other stone architecture than for there to be tens or hundreds of similar sites that were clearly built by the same culture and had documented trade ties with the rest of the world via the Indian Ocean coast. The Rhodesian government officially denied that the builders of Great Zimbabwe were Black and heavily censored any publications, museums, or archaeologists who went against that official line. So basically a documentary released in 1973 claiming that aliens were responsible for the site was, whether intentionally or not, pushing apartheid propaganda.

nonathlon posted:

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.

twistedmentat posted:

Oh! I thought Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in the 60s, not the 70s. I must be thinking of another African nation.

And yea, the poo poo about "how could people who live in mud huts build something like this!" is hella racist and also wildly ignorant of history. It's like the white settlers coming across this perfect farmland in the US and thinking God left it for them, when in reality it was from the First Nations people who had lived there before they died off from whatever horrible fate were visited to them by Europeans, either intentionally or unintentionally. The thing is, and they mention this in the pod, is that academics knew that stuff, but because this was academia, they didn't give a poo poo if regular people didn't know, so there was no pushback except from Sagan and a few other people that felt that science and history should be hidden away from the plebeians.

stereobreadsticks posted:

Yeah, all of this is very similar to the US manifest destiny ideas that God had prepared the country for white settlers, but it has an even more direct comparison to an American phenomenon, the attribution of the mound building sites such as Cahokia in Illinois, Serpent Mound in Ohio, etc. to just about anyone but Native Americans including but not limited to aliens, Irish, Welsh, Phoenicians, and Egyptians. You also see a version of this tendency in the Ancestral Puebloan sites of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado where you have places that still carry names like Aztec Ruins and Montezuma's Castle despite the fact that they're thousands of miles from Mesoamerica and have no stylistic similarities to actual Aztec sites. But acknowledging the reality of these places would mean acknowledging their continuity with the indigenous people who still live there, something the authorities of settler colonialist societies are always resistant to.

The_Doctor posted:

Oh yeah, I’ve driven a lot across the States, and outside of the cities, when night falls, it gets dark. It’s incredibly easy to believe things are watching you pass by. There’s just so much of it too. Even in smaller cities and towns, there’s dark parts. Creatures on the periphery is some ‘stay close to the campfire’ cavemen vine.

stereobreadsticks posted:

But acknowledging the reality of these places would mean acknowledging their continuity with the indigenous people who still live there, something the authorities of settler colonialist societies are always resistant to.

twistedmentat posted:

I've seen people use the argument that like we don't complain the Franks stole France from the Gauls, so why should be care if Native people lost their land, they lost, get over it. There's something massively different between people who are roughly the same level of development and a Modern Industrial Power just taking the land and forcing the people living there to assimilate or die, or assimilate and die in a lot of cases.

Racists will use anything to justify their racism, and trying to pretend that only White People (Or as they like to Western People) are the only ones who ever did anything important is like a big racist tick buried deep on your arm. Claiming something ancient and maybe not well understood is an easy way for them to deligitimize non white people.

Knormal posted:

I was thinking of the gnome video, which remains one of the most confusing reactions to a cryptid I've seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBCd3w3192Y

FreudianSlippers posted:

I've read some old British books where they claim that the Irish are actually Phoenicians and/or Scythians that swept in from the Orient and massacred the native Britons and took over.

Additionally the Irish are obviously moon worshipping pagans in addition to being heretical papists and the fact that many of them were pastoralists meant that they weren't really using the land properly anyway.