Crypto critters

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“Monster smash” (Cryptozoology)

imaginaryaniml
Most preschoolers believe in monsters under their bed or in their closet. Those who never outgrow it become cryptozoologists. This field focuses on the search for make believe animals.

There are, of course, many creatures yet to be found by science. But few cryptozoolgists are searching for undiscovered types of beetles. Only a tiny fraction would be excited by the unearthing of a new grub worm. While usually claiming to be interested in promoting science, cryptozoologists show little to no interest in deeply learning biology and then applying this knowledge in pursuit of creatures reasonably assumed to exist.

There are some locations off limits to all but the indigenous, primitive population, such as the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, where undiscovered species could exist. It is a virtual certainty that the Amazon is home to mammals and reptiles yet to be found, along with thousands of bugs. The oceans are likely teeming with hordes of undiscovered species. But most cryptozoologists are only after exciting creatures that resemble dinosaurs, have fangs, or terrorize local populations. Cryptozoologists seldom examine animals, but rather are concerned with trying to establish a creature’s existence. These creatures are usually malevolent, indicating the monsters may be a manifestation of mankind’s fear of the unknown.

The Big Three of cryptozoology are Sasquatch, Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster.

There have been thousands of Bigfoot sightings, with just about as many descriptions. But a conglomerate report would describe a bipedal hominid eight feet tall, covered in fairly dark fur, and stealthily avoiding all capture, vehicles, and steady cameras, while never leaving behind any fur, excrement, bone, or skin. There have been many footprints, but there is no consistency to them.

His Asian cousin is the Abominable Snowman. Yeti measures slightly lower on the ridiculous scale, owing to his remote place of alleged residence. However, treks to the top of Mount Everest have become relatively common and there is still no capture, footage, or fur. Many sightings are likely the result of blizzard conditions and oxygen deprivation. A likely answer for many of the sightings is that the spotter was eyeing the Tibetan blue bear. When the hide of such an animal was brought down from Everest, Nepalese identified it as belonging to a Yeti. Other alleged Yeti samples have proven to be a goat or yak.

The mythical creature most embraced by locals is the Loch Ness Monster. Unlike most of the other cryptids, Nessie’s habitat is confined, enabling area merchants to promote the Monster and cash in. Blurry photos and videos exist, but the physical evidence is zero.

There are a few reasons why the Monster is highly unlikely. Loch Ness is inadequate in size to support a sustainable population of animals as large as Nessie is purported to be. An ad hoc hypothesis has developed that the animals come and go from a secret tunnel that leads from the loch to the ocean. There exists no evidence for this tunnel, nor is there an explanation of how the animals keep finding their way back, or how Loch Ness animals survive the introduction of seawater.

Another huge obstacle is that these animals would need to regularly surface for air. Yet none has ever been captured on film doing this, despite the thousands of camera-toting tourists on hand for just such an occurrence. Even the era of cell phone camera ubiquity has failed to produce this evidence.

There are some scientific theories that may explain many of the sightings. Loch Ness is long and straight, subjecting its surface to unusual ripples. When the water reverts to its natural level, tree branches and logs can rise to the surface, resembling the Monster. Wind can also give the loch a choppy appearance, with intermittent calm patches looking like humps.

Many other regions have monsters, such as Florida’s Skunk Ape, Champy in Vermont, the Jersey Devil, the Australian Outback’s bunyip, Central America’s Chupacabra, and the mokele-mbembe in Congo.

There are common threads to these creepy critters. First, they are usually fear-inducing. The Chupacabra, for instance, is said to kill livestock. Occasionally, supposed Chupacabras are captured, but they are always proven to be a dog or member of the Canidae family, usually with mange.

The Chupacabra is a relatively small cryptid, as most others are described as huge to gargantuan. The largest is the mokele-mbembe, an alleged sauropod. Despite 200 years of reports, there has never been a carcass, bone, or fossil of this animal as large as an Apatosaurus.

The other common characteristic is the inconsistency with which the monsters are described. This indicates that one factor in the sightings is pareidolia, which is seeing something significant in vague and random images or sounds.

Almost completely vanished today are belief in fairies, pixies, gnomes, and elves. These are usually benevolent, diminutive, and humanlike, so they lack the appeal of their larger, hairier counterparts. However, belief is not completely extinguished. In otherwise enlightened Iceland, road work was delayed in 2013 to ensure elven habitat remained undisturbed.

Also moribund is belief in unicorns and dragons. The only proponents I’m aware of are Ken Ham and his ilk. The evidence they put forward for unicorns is that the King James Bible references them and that rhinos have one horn. Ham is partial to dragons because he feels it bolsters his contention that dinosaurs and humans lived together. He points out ancient cultures had dragon tales, a logic that should have him worshipping Odin.

Unlike those is legitimate science, cryptozoologists have no samples of what they say they are studying. Cryptids are a self-perpetuating phenomenon built on shaky sightings, fuzzy photos, and confirmation bias.

Every day that passes without these creatures emerging further strengthens the unlikelihood of their existence. Nevertheless, they will endure. If they are real, they will be found. If they aren’t, the appeal of myth and mystery will sustain them.

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“Zzzzzzermatism” (Zermatism)

WBSNOWMANZermatism is a bizarre mix of horribly misguided archeology, anthropology, biology, linguistics, and other stuff I surely missed. Knowledge of its existence is almost exclusive to those immersed in the skeptic movement, and even then, it’s mainly because it provides the ‘Z’ when completing an alphabet of nonsense.

It draws some parallels to the origin myths of various religions, the key difference being it wasn’t written long enough ago to become gospel. Zermatism originated entirely in the mind of Stanislav Szukalski, an extremely gifted and precocious Pole who won two Gold Medals at Krakow’s Fine Arts Academy, among many other accolades.

Szukalksi was highly creative and could have turned this into an excellent novel, although the best part had already appeared in “The Time Machine.” He authored “I Claim the World!,” a work longer than the Bible, Koran, and Rig Veda combined. The gist of the 39-volume monstrosity is all that people are descended from inhabitants of Noah’s Ark, which landed on Easter Island (thus shortening the kangaroos’ jaunt to Australia).

Furthermore, all languages derive from a single source, the Protong tongue. And all art is a variation of ideas developed by the ancient Easter Islanders. These creatures were almost flawless until being raped repeatedly by Yeti. The resulting descendants are dubbed Yetisynys. And their evil forefathers did not have to travel from the Himalayas to the South Pacific to consummate their cryptozoologic crimes. For these Morlocks, per Szukalksi’s explanation, included varieties in the Amazon, Europe, Japan, Mongolia, North America, and Siberia. They ravaged the Eloi wherever they showed up since, for all of the advanced species’ perfections, they never managed the ability to mass communicate or produce weapons. And how the Yeti developed worldwide when there had only been eight perfect specimens, all on Easter Island, is left unexplained.

The theory incorporates some elements of racism, the most blatant being the assertion that, of all Earth’s languages, the one closest to the ideal Protong is Szukalski’s native Polish.

Similiar to the Reptilian conspiracy theory, Zermatism asserts that Yetisynys can be discerned by their features. These include: Long upper lips; sharply angled, undercut noses; a squat, round physique; and most awesomely, a short ape tail. One need not pore over and memorize these anatomical traits. Szukalksi makes it clear the Sons of Yeti commit all the atrocities, so Nazis, Commies, and serial killers are the ones.

The teaching is similar to the anti-Semitic extremists who think Jews are descendants of Eve and Satan. However, Zermatism offers a reprieve to the cursed offspring, if they study arts, engineering, literature, medicine, and science. Szukalski explains, “To endure their mental hardships, they develop extraordinary patience and perfect imagination. Along with their animal vitality, this makes them capable of miraculous inventions.”

Zermatism was Szukalski’s ego personified, as it was extremely creative, iconoclastic, antagonistic to opposition, and featured mild apophenia. He threw in whatever he wanted, jammed it in to make it fit his preconceived idea, and subjected it to no peer review (though finding other Zermatists to look it over would have been an issue).

The work mixes unvarnished opinion, speculation of the both somewhat reasonable and utterly implausible varieties, and uses one science to prove another. For example, he examines a Greek vase featuring a Pan-like creature attacking a woman, then ties it all to the immaculate creatures of ancient Easter Island: “This is one of many paintings where the woman has the pictographic Tree with her with the Snake wound around it. This, being a Rebus for Polish “drzewo,” refers to her origin, for Protong “Drze Wo” means “Where Water,” hence she was one of the humans who came from the now flooded homeland. The Serpent, as always, represents the Great Flood.”

The volumes abound in this type of elastic thinking and represent perhaps the most extreme shoehorning I’ve come across. All art, culture, history, language, and migration is shaped to fit Szukalski’s narrative.

I could not ascertain any modern Zermatism movement, even among conspiracy theorists, cryptozoologists, or fans of Szukalski’s art. Ironically, the only ones I saw promoting his ideas were those in a countermovement, which was a type of messianic, apocalyptic Judeo-Catholic cult. They argued that the Yetinsynys are the true geniuses and are no longer flawless only due to mixing with the Easter Islanders. As I am a lowly humanoid, I lack the Yetisynys’ vast intelligence and was unable to deduce if this was serious or satirical.

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“Seeking spooks and Sasquatch” (Ghost and Bigfoot reality shows)

BIGFOOT

If someone struggles through two weeks of incompetence at work, that person will likely have a talk with the boss. If it goes on for another month, that talk is put in writing. Still another month means another meeting with the boss, who is probably the ex-boss by meeting’s end.

And a decade of incompetence and total failure means a million-dollar contract and being brought back for more. “Ghost Hunters” is in its 10th season on Syfy. Ten years so far, with nary one captured spirit. In fact, no ghost hunter in history has captured one. If ghosts exist, their hunters are the planet’s most inefficient workers.

Among the issues with shows like “Ghost Hunters” is that only one solution is considered. Noises can never be the house settling, a board creaking, or the wind blowing. Let’s say the search is on for the ghost of a man whose fiancee, named Leigh, met a premature death. A high-pitched noise that vaguely sounds like, “Icy” has to be the poltergeist announcing, “I miss Leigh.” It can never be a pipe whistling or, for that matter, the apparition declaring, “I kissed a tree.”

These shows attempt to have an air of validity by using electronic equipment and scientific-sounding terms, however poorly-defined. They employ electromagnetic field measurements, Geiger counters, geophones, and night vision devices. But no explanations are offered as to how this equipment would reveal the ghost’s existence. No criteria are given for what constitutes a capture, the alleged point of the show. The practitioners try to appear scientific, but they have no established standards, no stated goals, no checks and balances, no critical peer review, and no definition of proof.

Those who hire ghost hunters think there’s a spirit present, so they already have feelings of dread or fear when in the house. This causes a self-fulfilling confirmation in someone who has decided ahead of time the place is haunted. That fear itself becomes more evidence in the continuing cycle, and the feelings are themselves claimed as proof by the hunters. The hunts are almost always done at night, even though there’s no reason to suspect this would lead to more success. It’s done only to make for a more theatrical production and to heighten the feelings of fright and mystery.

“Ghost Adventures” airs on the Travel Channel, an irony since ghosts never seem to travel. They are always sought out in the home where they lived and died.

Considerably more mobile is Bigfoot, the animal kingdom’s most rapid and stealthy offering. They are so fast and cunning that a sustainable population of 10-foot bipedal apes has lived within 50 miles of Seattle for a century without being caught. Not once have they been successfully hunted, captured, or hit by a vehicle. They keep moving even after death, as no camper or hiker has happened upon their remains.

Undeterred, producers of the History Channel’s “MosterQuest” trudge ahead in pursuit of this giant walking carpet. My idea for a History Channel episode: A story about the days when the History Channel covered history.

Like their ghost-chasing brethren, Bigfoot hunters have spent more than a century in the precise places they expect to find their prey and have yet to bag one. The strongest evidence, of course, would be the capture of a live creature, verified by biologists to be an undiscovered species. Other examples of strong evidence would be a corpse, skeleton, or sizable patch of fur. None of these have materialized. There have been thousands of pieces of weak evidence, in the form of eyewitness claims, shaky videos, and widely varying footprints easily faked with plaster. But 5,000 pieces of unverifiable evidence does not equate to strong evidence any more than 5,000 cups of weak tea dumped in a giant vat would make for a strong drink.

Cryptozoologists point out that Western science only confirmed the existence of the somewhat Bigfoot-like gorilla in the 19th Century. Okapis were found later still, and the coelacanth was thought to be extinct for millions of years. These points are not entirely without merit and, of course, the search for undiscovered animals should be encouraged. But using your desired conclusion as the starting point, then seeking support for that position, isn’t how science is done.

Furthermore, if discovery is the incentive, there are options that will yield more fruit. Entomologists estimate there are 10,000 undiscovered species of ant. But to a cryptozoologist, ants are boring. Also, it requires years of tedious study, learning the characteristics of all known ants, before foraging for their newfound crawling cousins.

So cryptozoologists spend their time looking for Bigfoots (Or Bigfeet, maybe. They’ve never found even one, not sure what they would call two). They also search for an extinction-defying plesiosaur in Scotland or for Frosty’s antithesis on the world’s highest mountain. At a minimum, they hope to land something with a backbone, like Chupacabra.

Since neither the poltergeist nor crypto camps have had success, maybe they should pool their resources and start hunting for Bigfoot’s ghost.