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On the subject of the Hodag and Hidebehind, I believe they're both from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearsome_Creatures_of_the_Lumberwoods%2C_With_a_Few_Desert_and_Mountain_Beasts My understanding is that the creatures in the book aren't, strictly speaking, cryptids because nobody really believes in them, at any rate it's a fun read. It's formatted like a field guide and very tongue-in-cheek. It's also in the public domain so it should be easy to find online.
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Mar 9, 2021 03:04
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twistedmentat posted:One of the big problems with Cryptozoology is that its been largely taken over by Young Earth Creationists who seem to think that if Bigfoot exists or there are living Dinosaurs, that means all of science is wrong and the bible is 100% true. Even though that's not how science works, they still keep seeking cryptids out. Flat Earth has a lot of this too, if the world is flat, God is real. This is probably why a lot of Flat Earthers are now Qanon people. My understanding was that young earth creationists mostly avoid Bigfoot when they get into crytozoology because he seems a little too close to an intermediary form between apes and humans. They somehow think that surviving dinosaurs would be evidence that evolution or an old earth or both are untrue (as opposed to just evidence that an animal we previously thought went extinct hadn't), but if bigfoot is real then that's potentially evidence of a link between humans and non-human primates and they don't want that. What really confuses me is the young earthers embracing the chupacabra. If chupacabra then young earth seems like even more of a stretch than the dinosaurs. By the way, young earthers aren't the first problematic pseudo-science practitioners to get into cryptozoology for terrible reasons. De Loy's Ape is a well known cryptozoological fraud (and genuinely creepy image) where a dead spider monkey was posed in such a way that it looked like a human sized ape. The image, and the fact that it's fake, are relatively well known but what's not quite as well known is that at least part of the motivation for the fraud was the promotion of the incredibly racist theory of multiple evolutionary origins for humanity. The gist of the idea being that the races of man evolved independently from separate ape-like ancestors. The lack of anthropoid apes in the New World was a problem for the theory because it would mean that at the very least Native Americans had to have a common evolutionary ancestor with at least one Old World race. De Loy, in faking the image, hoped to prop up the idea.
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Mar 9, 2021 16:44
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Hodgepodge posted:huh, it turns out that tails are a common feature of all new world monkies, and that hoaxes passing off manipulated photos of spider monkeys as south american apes is a cryptozoological tradition: This is the one I mentioned before that was used to prop up the racist theory of hologenesis, which argued that the different races of humanity were actually separate species who had evolved from different non-human primate ancestors. There were enough living apes and fossilized hominids in Africa, Europe, and Asia that the proponents of this theory could point to them as explanations for the physical differences between Asians, Africans, and Europeans but the fact that there aren't any apes in the fossil records of the Americas or Australia presented a problem to them, so there was a bit of a market for "proof" of the existence of potential human ancestors in those continents in order to prop up the shaky foundations of the theory. De Loy himself was probably just looking for money and fame but it turns out he was closely associated with a French anthropologist (and later Nazi collaborator, shocking I know) named George Montandon who was committed to proving the theory.
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Mar 12, 2021 05:22
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:If you enjoyed the old "Finding Bigfoot" show with Matt Moneymaker and Bobo and the team or paranormal reality TV shows in general then you might get a kick out of this show. The editors are actually pretty good at building suspense even though it always turns out to be nothing but they also have a really bad habit of ending episodes on cliffhangers with the team yelling "OMG what is that?? What is that??!?!?" which also always turn out to be nothing. I used to (still do if I'm being totally honest) love things like In Search Of... with Leonard Nimoy or even more recent nonsense pseudo-documentaries like MonsterQuest but I honestly can't stand any of the paranormal reality shows that function like this. Show me 40 year old obvious hoax plaster casts and grainy black and white photos, interview people with weird stories, I'll be happy but I just plain don't understand the appeal of watching a couple of idiots wander around in the woods and freaking out at shadows or the sounds of raccoons in the trees. The old mystery documentaries allow you to suspend your disbelief and have fun with it, this kind of thing just throws it in your face again and again that there's nothing there and these people are either morons or conmen. Much less fun in my opinion.
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Mar 20, 2021 04:29
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The_Doctor posted:This was a front page tabloid story dated Oct 3rd, 2014 in the UK (it’s my photo). Said tabloid doesn’t usually go for the big paranormal headline, so clearly it’s true. 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. But I remember the specific thread on the SA forums where slenderman was invented. There's no mystery, there's no suspension of disbelief, it's explicitly fictional and always has been. It's not folklore, it's folkloresque (which it turns out is actually a term used in academia for precisely this kind of thing). I, and I'm sure many others in this thread, actually saw the transition firsthand when I showed one of my nephews a couple of the early Everyman Hybrid videos. He knew it was fake because I told him the origins and he was kind of an amateur filmmaker himself so he was familiar with the process of making low budget films, but when he showed the video to my other nephew he declined to fill his brother in on the origins, and for a while at least he had him fooled. That transition between me telling my nephew "Hey I know you're into online amateur horror films, look at this series" and his brother thinking it was real and sharing it with who knows how many of his friends only took a few days. It's kind of amazing how quickly these things can earn credence among people who don't know their origins and how quickly they can spread into something people genuinely think is a longstanding phenomenon.
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Mar 23, 2021 12:58
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Treguna Mekoides posted:
Replace the US flag with either the California or Cascadia flags and I'd wear that bigfoot t-shirt.
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Mar 26, 2021 04:06
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I don't remember the title of it but I had a UFO book when I was a kid that included several paintings of notable encounters that really creeped me out but also one particular painting that was of special interest to a young and curious boy. It was illustrating the story of Antônio Villas Boas, a Brazilian farmer who not only claimed to have been abducted by aliens but also claimed to have had sex with one of them. He claimed that after his abduction he was stripped, slathered in some kind of gel that apparently made him horny, then the beings that abducted him left the room and another being entered. He described this alien as an incredibly attractive naked woman with platinum blonde hair but bright red underarm and pubic hair. Apparently after the act was finished she seemed relieved to have gotten it over with and gestured to her stomach and the sky, which he interpreted as meaning that she had conceived and would raise the baby in space. Apparently after they dropped him off he got all pissed off because they just used him for his sperm instead of, I don't know, taking him with them or something? I don't know what his preferred outcome would have been to be honest. Anyway, the story was illustrated with a full color two page painting that focused heavily on a full frontal illustration of the alien he slept with. When I first got the book at like 8 or 9 I always felt a little uncomfortable with that particular story and I'd often skip it when reading about aliens but I remember suddenly developing a much more keen interest around 11 or 12.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:07
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Was it this painting? That's the one. I haven't seen that picture in over 20 years. I definitely didn't remember how messed up her face was.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:35
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On Villas Boas, obviously the sexual aspect of things gets the attention but when googling to find the dude's name I thought the reasons given by believers to defend his credibility were really interesting. At first, he was presented as a simple country bumpkin farmer, far too unsophisticated to have made something so extravagant up. Then later in his life it became apparent that he was rather upwardly mobile, even going to university and becoming a lawyer, so later accounts switched to claiming that his education made him too bourgeois and respectable to have made up such an outlandish story. On Earth, Wind & Fire and George Clinton, they're great but the real alien come to earth is Sun Ra.  Also, there was an album put out by a "real" UFO abductee named Howard Menger that he claimed to consist of music channeled to him by the aliens. You'll be disappointed to hear that it's rather dull piano music, nowhere near as bizarre and out there as the story behind it would imply.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKNAT4rItko stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 03:42 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 03:08
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The discussion of the platypus kind of reminded me of Thomas Jefferson's own cryptids, mastodons and giant lions/ground sloths in the American West. Jefferson was interested in fossils for a few reasons and he was particularly fascinated by the mastodon fossils discovered at the delightfully named Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. The most significant discovery attributed to Jefferson is the Jefferson's ground sloth, whose bones were discovered at a cave in West Virginia and shipped to the president, who at first believed them to be something like a lion, only 3 times larger than actual lions. It's worth noting at this point that the idea of extinction was a relatively new one at the time and Jefferson himself was not a believer. The religious objection was that God would not allow one of his creations to disappear, the secular objection was that nature was too finely balanced for any species to vanish. Which means that most people who knew about these fossil discoveries actually believed that the animals were still wandering around somewhere out west. Finding evidence that these creatures were still around was one of the primary goals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Incidentally, living ground sloths still occasionally pop up as cryptid stories, particularly in South America where some cryptozoologists identify the folkloric creature known as the Mapinguari as a ground sloth.
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Mar 31, 2021 10:20
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Yeah they died out super recently in paleontology terms, there were almost certainly still around when humans first came to North America. This is the most amazing thing to me. Mammoths, at least on Wrangell Island, were contemporaries with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. That's the kind of thing that almost makes you want to give credence to some of these weird stories.
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Mar 31, 2021 17:49
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nonathlon posted: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. I think it depends on what you mean by "cryptid." If you just mean species previously unknown to science, then yes, it's basically a certainty that previously unknown species have been misidentified as known species. Especially if you include things like the Tapanuli orangutan that were known populations that have only been identified as distinct species since the development of DNA analysis. But the thing about that example is that it wasn't really a cryptid. It wasn't identified by cryptozoologists and in fact it barely rates a mention because cryptozoology is so focused on big, weird, charismatic creatures from folklore and romantic stories of brave adventurers wandering the forests in search of mystery that the actual discoveries of new species that happen all the time due to unromantic DNA analysis or studies of incredibly diverse but uncharismatic things like beetles and frogs just don't attract attention. This is pretty characteristic of all pseudo-science. Scientists put in the work, get excited about small discoveries and clarifications, and with a few exceptions don't get a lot of fame as a result. Cryptozoologists and others like them all want to be the one to discover the Loch Ness Monster, real scientists would be thrilled to find a new species of algae in the lake. Reminds me of something a friend posted on facebook recently about the Fuente Magna Bowl, supposedly a stone bowl discovered in Bolivia that has writing in two scripts inscribed on it, one from a local predecessor of the Tiwanaku civilization and the other, Sumerian cuneiform. Now, aside from the fact that it's an obvious forgery that looks like a prop from a low budget tv movie, the thing that really sticks out to me is the extreme nature of the claims being made about it. The civilizations of the Andes never developed writing, the idea that any script could be the predecessor to the Tiwanaku script is nonsense since there's no such thing as a Tiwanaku script and if the bowl were real the existence of any writing in the Andes before Columbus would be a massive deal. But the discovery of a new written language that would have meant the Andes joining Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, and possibly Egypt as the only places on earth to have independently developed writing apparently wasn't exciting enough for the people behind the forgery. They had to go bigger and claimed the existence of a 6500 year old transoceanic connection to the world's oldest civilization. Something that would have been mind blowing to a real archaeologist or historian gets glossed over by the pseudo-archaeologists in favor of the more romantic story. stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 13:27 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 12:55
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Cooked Auto posted:Seems like a recurring theme from what I can tell. A friend of mine, with rather dubious beliefs sometimes, tried to make me watch a documentary a few years back about there being some ancient proto-civilization that spanned the Earth because of "conclusive" (read incredibly vague without zero backing) evidence and that historians were covering it up (I think) because they didn't want to answer their "hard hitting" (read bullshit) questions during interviews. Years ago a coworker told me I needed to watch an "amazing" video on youtube that exposed all kinds of weird conspiracies, most of them nonsense about Obama, or at least that's what he told me because the only part of it I watched was literally 20 minutes of "What you are about to see will blow your mind and the experts don't want you to know about it. You won't see this on mainstream news channels..." and on and on and on. The video was an hour long and at least the first third of it didn't even make any actual claims about anything but how amazing the video itself was. quote:There does seem to be a weird, most likely incredibly racist, idea that ancient civilizations weren't able to do things on their own and were all getting boosted or just stole from some lost forerunner super-civilization. It's absolutely racist. You rarely hear about European cultures relying on intervention from aliens or ancient super-civilizations or any of that kind of thing. It's always African and Native American civilizations that people claim couldn't possibly have accomplished the things they actually accomplished.
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Apr 4, 2021 11:59
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I think a lot of the ancient alien stuff comes from people assuming a practical purpose for things that are actually for ritual or decorative purposes. That and a tendency of people to assume that belief in things we don't personally believe in to be insincere. Modern Western people generally believe in either one God or no gods at all, so when faced with people who built monumental structures in honor of other gods they must have been aliens. Take the Nazca Lines for example. Yeah, you can really only see the designs from above and people think "well, they must have been trying to communicate with something in the sky." And yeah, maybe that's true but why couldn't that "something in the sky" be gods or other mythological beings instead of aliens? Things don't have to be real for people to feel a desire to reach out to them and just because modern people don't believe in them anymore doesn't mean the beliefs of ancient people were any less sincere. stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 07:36 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 07:30
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I'd prefer it if this thread didn't die so I thought I'd post about one of my favorite motifs from traditional folklore, the ghostly black dog. Most common in British folklore, ghostly black dogs also pop up in the folklore of France, Germany, the Low Countries, North and South America, and even as far away as the Middle East where they're sometimes described as the mounts of Jinn. My personal favorite specific manifestation of the motif is the Shug Monkey of Cambridgeshire, which supposedly has the body of a huge black dog and the face of a monkey. Incidentally, the idea of the ghostly black dog as an omen of death from the Harry Potter series is based on real folklore. I've heard several stories that state that if you see one you have to keep silent about it for at least a year, if you tell anyone before the deadline it will return to kill you. Not really related, except for the canine aspect, but I also enjoy the fact that dog headed humanoid creatures have gone from obscure, mostly ignored Midwestern cryptids like the Michigan Dogman and the Beast of Bray Road to seemingly hugely popular creatures on creepypasta and cryptid youtube channels.
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Apr 12, 2021 09:13
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Not really related to anything, but I've always liked this sculpture, which forms the entryway of Shennongjia Forest Reserve, about 6 hours west of Wuhan in Hubei Province, China. It commemorates a cave that's locally famous as the home of the Yeren, the Chinese version of Bigfoot. I just think it's a cool sculpture.
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Apr 12, 2021 10:32
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, a lot, and I mean a lot of beliefs about weird poo poo is people confusing media with reality. I've seen believers say that Lovecraft didn't know he was writing truth, and it was filtered through his mind, so things aren't exactly how they wrote it. Leng exists, just not full of big purple spiders, not partially in the dreamlands and not called Leng. I'm sure you know this but this phenomenon of people thinking weird poo poo from fiction is true is much older than Lovecraft. For example, all the weird beliefs people have about the Holy Grail come from medieval writers like Chretien de Troyes and Thomas Malory, many of whom framed their stories as having been "discovered" rather than made up. But they weren't intended to be taken as factual any more than Tolkien intended people to believe that his works were really taken from the writings of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam.
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Apr 13, 2021 04:36
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Captain Hygiene posted:I had that same phobia but the weird part is, I lived out in the country and went camping a lot, and it somehow started even before I really cared about aliens. I specifically recall a day dream where a deer, of all things, spooked me by looking in. Something about its intelligent eyes freaked me out. My grandparents lived in a mobile home in rural Oregon, right on the edge of the small town of Siletz, not far from Newport for anyone who knows the area. As a kid anytime we went to visit them I had to sleep on the sofa in the living room, where the main entrance was a sliding glass door facing the woods. I used to have nightmares about opening the curtain that covered the door and just having an animal there staring in at me. This being Oregon these nightmares sometimes dovetailed with bigfoot stories.
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Apr 13, 2021 13:52
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Captain Hygiene posted:Don't believe the mainstream media, Tree Shrimps are real!!! There's a whole marine arboreal ecosystem that THEY don't want you to know about!!  
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Apr 16, 2021 02:19
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The_Doctor posted:And how about Atlantis? Where's that? I haven't heard anything about the Bimini Road in like 25 years, have the crazy people moved on from Atlantis? Edited to add that I just looked the Bimini Road up on Wikipedia and according to the article Gavin Menzies claims in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, that the Chinese explorer Zheng He visited Bimini on a circumnavigation of the world and was responsible for building the structures there. What is it with people always trying to rope in as many mysteries as they can into one grand, overarching theory? stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 04:53 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 04:48
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Otteration posted:Curious: do posters ITT wanna believe, but can't get past the obvious lack of data? Sometimes I wish this stuff was literally, physically real, but I think the people who bash around in the woods or use high tech gear to spot orbs in abandoned houses miss the point of what makes these things compelling. Folklore, religion, and mythology (and these kinds of things fall into at least 2 of these 3 categories, and to go by some of the claims made by UFO afficionados, maybe all 3) aren't important because they represent reality, they're important because the stories we tell each other and ourselves shape the way we think and reflect the values of our cultures and societies. Part of me wishes that bigfoot, for example, could be found and studied and if it's close enough to humanity perhaps even communicated with, but a much larger part of me values the story of bigfoot. If bigfoot is really discovered, it's just another animal, but if it's forever a possibility, that we can all say "yeah, probably it doesn't exist but who knows, I heard that a friend of a friend's cousin's uncle's boyfriend's daughter saw one once," that uncertainty is fun and interesting and a compelling cultural phenomenon that goes away if it becomes just another animal that we can see at the zoo or watch David Attenborough documentaries about.
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Apr 23, 2021 21:07
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I love every bit of folklore I've ever heard from Southeast Asia. Even, no, perhaps especially, weird magic pigs made up by religious leaders for twitter followers (though I think it must be stressed that the pig itself is a real part of Javanese folklore, it's just this particular pig that's a fraud). Not from Indonesia, but my personal favorite Southeast Asian legendary creature/maybe cryptid? is the Aswang from the Philippines, which is the subject of this documentary that I find really entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ePhqoyLpXQ
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May 1, 2021 04:15
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twistedmentat posted:Overly Sarcastic Productions has a good video on Finn McCool Yeah, one thing that struck me when I read Journey to the West is the relatively neutral tone it took when describing the demons. They didn't necessarily seem evil, just like, this kind of creature eats people. It might very well have a well established moral code and in some ways even be admirable, but it eats people and therefore it's a monster/demon, which, I mean, fair enough. The other really striking thing about Journey to the West is how bureaucratic heaven and the underworld are. There are constant digressions in the first part of the book about how the various heavenly or diabolical figures officially registered their complaints with the heavenly minister of whatever because they had been unjustly treated by Sun Wukong and there's a whole subplot about Sun Wukong being unsatisfied with simply being known as the Monkey King and doing everything he can to get a better title, specifically the Great Sage Equaling Heaven. It's very clear how bureaucratic the society the author was parodying was. On the subject of Chinese literature with a lot of influence from folklore and creepy ghost stories, everyone needs to read Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling. The Penguin edition is an abridgement but from what I'm told by people who have actually read it in Chinese it gets a little samey in the unabridged version. Lots of ghosts and fox spirits. Going by this book you'd think that every man in China who ever had casual sex accidentally wound up loving a fox or a ghost.
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May 14, 2021 08:00
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Since Halloween is coming up soon and I think it's kind of a shame that this thread isn't so active anymore so I thought I'd post a few of the cryptid photos that always creeped me out as a kid. Not necessarily the most convincing ones or the most interesting ones, just the ones that I thought were scary. First off, the Skunk Ape, Florida's own redneck bigfoot, which in this famous image looks like what you'd get if an orangutan was creepy.  Second, this photo of something from Chile. Some have claimed this to be a gray alien, others have claimed it's a goblin or fairy or some other kind of mystical creature, others have even claimed it's a reappearance of the Dover Demon, a weird one-off cryptid supposedly sighted in Dover, Massachusetts in 1977. In reality it's most likely a dog from a weird angle where you can only see two legs and the tail.  And finally, we have De Loy's Ape. It's a nonsensical racist hoax that I've talked about in this thread before but it's also a genuinely creepy image of a dead spider monkey propped up in a very unpleasant way. 
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Oct 1, 2021 09:27
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Holy poo poo I feel old now Don't feel too old, if they are 20 years old then I misremembered seeing them as a kid. I would have been at least in high school, if not college when they first came to light.
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Oct 1, 2021 15:09
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I remember when the Myakka Skunk Ape was the new cryptid on the block, just a few years after chupacabras became fashionable. I just checked and those skunk ape photos are now 20 years old
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The_Doctor posted:I like Josh Gates, he’s always having fun, and clearly wants to believe. I agree, it helps that he doesn't seem to mind saying "keep an open mind, but realistically this is nonsense." Also, his voice sounds exactly like Kermit the Frog.
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Oct 3, 2021 03:19
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On the topic of invasive species, I think alien big cats are certainly among the most plausible cryptids, and given the occasional body that pops up they are to a certain extent confirmed. That said, I do think it's quite interesting that weird large cats seem to pop up again and again around the world while other weird exotic animals just don't. Maybe a combination of some kind of instinctual fear of large cats inspiring people to interpret things in a certain way and just a huge number of feral cats basically everywhere there are humans, which I can confirm from personal experience can seem much bigger than they actually are (thought I saw a mountain lion once near my brother's old house in rural Nevada, wouldn't have been a cryptid but not exactly a common thing to see, turned out it was just a large feral cat in a field with nothing nearby to provide scale).
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Oct 4, 2021 11:26
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I don't know why but I really hate attempts to connect bigfoot and yetis with aliens. Like, I get that it's not really any more ridiculous than anything else about either topic but something just rubs me the wrong way about combining the two.
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Oct 7, 2021 06:44
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Just read this, it's an excerpt from a new Penguin Classics anthology about dragons that presumably also includes legendary and explicitly fictional material, but it has two very interesting late-19th century newspaper reports about flying reptiles in the American West. I don't know why but I always love reading old newspaper reports of things that were clearly made up but presented with the veneer of respectability. Classic Charles Fort style nonsense is always fun. https://lithub.com/its-eyes-were-as-large-as-a-dinner-plate-encounters-with-dragons-in-early-america/
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Oct 19, 2021 04:26
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WITCHCRAFT posted:My biggest fuzzy happy memories of spooky cryptid/ghost stuff as a kid was coming home from school and watching episodes of In Search of... on TV. I can't remember if it was Sci-Fi or the The History Channel. I'm absolutely there with you. When you watch something like that it feels like you're getting some secret, arcane knowledge. HD cameras and modern technology just don't cut it.
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Nov 1, 2021 07:35
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remusclaw posted:Blake Smith of Monstertalk, which is a great Cryptid pod, and Jeb Card, archaeologist, do a side project pod called In Research Of, which is an episode by episode review and discuss show about in Search of. Its really good and I recommend it. I'm looking forward to checking this out, thanks. Totally agree on Monstertalk being a great podcast, though I can't binge it like I can with some podcasts because no matter how much I agree that none of these monsters are real it does get a little tiring after a while to hear about how it's all nonsense. Sometimes I like a little credulity mixed in.
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Nov 4, 2021 04:42
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So, I started listening to the In Research Of... podcast that was recommended earlier in the thread and there was a point made in the very first episode about tone that I think explains why I still have affection for old shows on these kinds of subjects but I can't stomach newer shows like Monster Quest or Ancient Aliens, let alone all the reality shows about guys in flannel running around the woods or poking around abandoned attics and finding nothing. They point out that from the very first episode, the tone of In Search Of... is positive, hopeful, and pro-science, while the tone of more modern stuff is negative, conspiratorial, and anti-science. Where In Search Of... might approach the subject of ancient visitors from another planet as (paraphrasing) "scientists don't currently understand these phenomena, but one day perhaps they will find more evidence to indicate that we've been visited by someone from somewhere else," Ancient Aliens would approach the same ideas with "mainstream science doesn't admit that the pyramids were built using UFO technology, but ancient aliens researchers have found the proof that the scientists are trying to keep hidden from you." One thing that really stuck with me that one of the podcast hosts said is that it's easy to imagine someone watching In Search Of... as a kid and being inspired to pursue a career in actual science, but it's much harder to imagine that happening with Ancient Aliens or Ghost Hunters or whatever. And I think that's why, even though the ideas presented are just as out there as the modern stuff, and the factual errors are just as obvious (even down to pronunciation, the pronunciation of Zimbabwe in the first In Search Of... special with Rod Serling is something special, though to be fair at the time it was the name of a rather obscure African archaeological site rather than a country), and the racist and eurocentric undertones of some of these theories are if anything more pronounced, it's still easier to overlook all of that and be entertained by the old stuff than the new stuff.
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Nov 8, 2021 01:24
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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? 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. stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 04:28 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2021 01:31
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twistedmentat posted:Oh! I thought Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in the 60s, not the 70s. I must be thinking of another African nation. 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.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:22
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:Ah gently caress me I just went and looked up Gentleshaw Common on google maps and this story is even dumber than I'd assumed at first. It's a goddamn park. Looking around the countryside around in this link and I found this.  Maybe bigfoot is hiding in the girthy oak tree.
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Nov 15, 2021 13:50
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On the topic of comics, I was thinking about Swamp-Thing the other day and how the concept (if not the plot, I haven't actually seen any Swamp-Thing related media in a long, long time though I heard the 2019 TV series was good, which is why I was thinking about it) has a lot in common with cryptid stories and wondering how much inspiration it took from them. That got me thinking about how many cryptids are directly tied to popular culture, for example the original siting of the chupacabra involved a woman walking home from seeing the movie Species at the theater, and the descriptions of mokele-mbembe and other "living dinosaur" type cryptids have more in common with the dinosaurs in old movies than with what we currently know about dinosaurs from scientific evidence. Does anyone know of any other interactions between pop culture and cryptozoology (other than direct adaptations of cryptid stories, I'm not looking for Harry and the Hendersons, more cryptids that were clearly inspired by movie monsters or original movie monsters that have elements of cryptids in their design)?
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Nov 30, 2021 01:16
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Thought I'd share a story I just recently heard about, kind of a Chinese version of Antônio Villas Boas' claims of having sex with an alien. In 1994 a man named Meng Zhaoguo was working at a logging camp in Heilongjiang, in the northeast of China, when he saw strange lights and metallic flashes from a nearby mountain. He thought a helicopter had crashed so he set off to help and in his own words "scavenge for scrap." Before he could though, something hit him in the forehead and knocked him out. When he awoke he met a 3 meter tall, six fingered woman with fur-covered legs who he says "otherwise looked completely like a human." At this point he was somehow transported back to his home, where he proceeded to have sex with this furry, six-fingered giant while hovering in the air above his sleeping wife and daughter. He was left with a mysterious scar on his thigh which a later doctor's examination claimed was not caused by a normal injury or surgery. A month later, he claims to have ascended through a wall to visit the aliens on their spaceship. He asked if he could see his alien lover again, and was told no but that his hybrid son would be born on another planet in 60 years. He claims they spoke Chinese but with a heavy foreign accent so it was hard for him to understand, but they explained that they were refugees fleeing a dying planet. In addition to the sex, it's worth noting that this story has apparently got Meng a fair amount of local celebrity, and even secured him a job maintaining the boiler at a university in the nearby city of Harbin. Better than working at a lumber camp anyway. Also worth noting, according to Meng at least, his wife didn't get too mad at him for cheating on her with an alien while floating in mid-air above his sleeping family. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chinese-lumberjack-alien_b_6986618 stereobreadsticks has a new favorite as of 04:32 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 01:16
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Napoleon Nelson posted:It's finally time for another excursion into the world of British Cryptids: I love how true to the 1970s documentary aesthetic these things are and I'm really looking forward to the inevitable day that one of his videos goes viral and people become convinced that these entirely made up cryptids not only exist but have decades or centuries of lore behind them. The fake Wordsworth quote at the beginning of this video is so great, it almost reminds me of a Borges short story.
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Mar 4, 2022 16:28
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So I just finished rereading The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, which compiles a selection of fantastical creatures from literature, mythology, and folklore, and I was reminded of the existence of the rather silly creatures from Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by William T. Cox. Animals such as the Axehandle Hound, a dog shaped like an axe that subsists on axehandles; the Goofus Bird, which flies backwards because it's more interested in where it came from than where it's going; and the Gumberoo, a massive, fat, hairless bear whose skin is almost indestructible but which catastrophically explodes when exposed to fire. Now, I could go on and on about these things and other similar legends but I was just kind of curious about what the thread's favorite silly cryptids and legenary creatures are. Although I'm not personally a huge fan I'd like to throw in a shout out to the Fresno nightcrawler for being from my hometown and just being a walking pair of pants, it doesn't get much sillier than that.
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Mar 10, 2022 08:43
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Greg of Doom posted:The original report is in BUFORA Journal vol 6 no 5 1978. This thing is amazing and the perfect response to my request for silly cryptids.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:55
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