Not easy being green

After recent posts dealing with politics, culture, the hazards of AI, and important scientific discoveries, I'm sure what you're all thinking is: yes, Gordon, but what about sightings of the mysterious Green Elf Chimp of Florida?

All I can say is that I'm sorry for the oversight, and will do my best to rectify the situation today.  I found out about the Green Elf Chimp from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who was responding to my recent comment that the world has gotten so surreal lately that I'm beginning to wonder if the aliens who are running the simulation we're all trapped in have gotten bored and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us.  The reader sent me an email with a link and a message that said, "Yeah, there's no doubt about it.  The aliens are just throwing weird shit at us to see how long it takes us to stand up, flip the table, and say, 'That's it.  I'm done.'"

The link was to the website of one Karl Shuker, zoologist (of the crypto as well as the ordinary variety), who tells us about sightings of a strange cryptid near the town of New Port Richey, north of Tampa on Florida's west coast.  Here's one account:

"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained...  As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood of the car.

"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour.  "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was glowing greenish in color, with glowing green eyes.  I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."

A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.

One thing I've never understood is why cryptids and aliens and whatnot are so often described as having "glowing eyes."  And how many horror movies have you seen where evil creatures' eyes suddenly start emitting light, usually green or red?  Now, reflective eyes, sure; anyone who's ever caught a deer or raccoon in their car headlights at night knows that a lot of animals, especially nocturnal ones, have reflective eyes.  This is because of a structure called the tapetum lucidum, a reflective membrane behind the retina.  For diurnal animals (like ourselves), we're usually exposed to more light than we need; so if a lot of it passes right through the retina and gets passively absorbed by the tissue behind it, it's not really a problem.  But for nocturnal animals, they need every photon they can get.  That's why many of them have evolved a tapetum, which reflects the light back through the retina and gives the light receptors therein a second chance to catch it.

Glowing eyes, though?  What do they think, that there are little guys inside there with flashlights, shining them out through the pupils?

To Shuker's credit, he does point this out, although he still seems to give the whole incident a lot more credence than I would.

He also (rightly) wonders if it may have been an actual chimp, i.e., not a strange paranormal alien chimp or whatever.  But this doesn't explain why the chimp was green, which is definitely not a standard-issue color for chimps, and why the chimp itself was glowing.  He then speculated that perhaps the chimp was an escapee from a zoo that had gone for a swim in water containing bioluminescent algae, simultaneously explaining (1) green, (2) glowing, and (3) smelling bad.

Fig. 1: A non-green, non-glowing, non-elf chimp, for reference purposes. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chi King, Chimpanzee (13968481823), CC BY 2.0]

However, Shuker also goes on to suggest that the Green Elf Chimp might not itself be a separate species of cryptid, but a juvenile Florida Skunk Ape.  Which, I have to admit, had not occurred to me.  Maybe they fluoresce when they're juveniles and not when they're adults, which gives new meaning to the phrase "he has a youthful glow."

Of course, there's always the possibility that the whole account could be explained by the people reporting it having ingested a few controlled substances themselves.

Anyhow, that's the news from the world of cryptozoology.  As luck would have it, some dear friends of mine live in New Port Richey, so I'll definitely have them keep their eyes out.  They are also the keepers of varying numbers of absolutely enormous dogs (they have a soft spot for Great Danes and Mastiffs), who I'm sure would also notify the human inhabitants if a smelly green glowing chimp showed up in the back yard.

I'll keep you posted.

On the other hand, if this is all because of some stoned aliens twiddling the knobs on the simulation to try and see what they can get the humans to fall for -- enough, already.  I'm having sufficient difficulty accepting the fact that the same people who falsely claimed for eight years that an African immigrant was running the country now have zero problem with an actual African immigrant running the country, and a guy who admitted that a worm had eaten his brain was nominated to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, and a guy so catastrophically dumb that he couldn't find the Bahamas on a map if there were arrows printed on it with the caption "HEY, STUPID, THE BAHAMAS ARE RIGHT HERE" was appointed Ambassador to the Bahamas.  We get it, aliens, you win.  Humans are idiots.

No Green Elf Chimps required.

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