The monster in the mist

I thought that after writing this blog for twelve years, I'd have run into every cryptid out there. But just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about one I'd never heard of, which is especially interesting given that the thing supposedly lives in Scotland.

I've had something of a fascination with Scotland and all things Scottish for a long time, partly because of the fact that my dad's family is half of Scottish descent (he used to describe his kin as "French enough to like to drink and Scottish enough not to know when to stop").  My grandma, whose Hamilton, Allan, and Lyell ancestry came from Paisley (near Glasgow), knew lots of cheerful Scottish stories and folk songs, 95% of which were about a guy named Johnny who was smitten with a girl named Jenny, but she spurned him, so he stabbed her to death with his wee pen-knife and ended up getting hanged for it.

Big believers in happy endings, the Scots.

Anyhow, none of my grandma's stories were about the "Am Fear Liath Mòr," which roughly translates to "Big Gray Dude," who supposedly lopes about in the Cairngorms, the massive mountain range in the eastern Highlands.  He is described as extremely tall and covered with gray hair, and his presence is said to "create uneasy feelings."  Which seems to me to be putting it mildly.  If I was hiking through some lonely, rock-strewn mountains and came upon a huge hair-covered proto-hominid, my uneasy feelings would include pissing my pants and then having a stroke.  But maybe the Scots are made of sterner stuff than that, and upon seeing the Am Fear Liath Mòr simply report feeling a wee bit unsettled about the whole thing.

A couple of Scottish hikers being made to feel uneasy

The Big Gray Dude has been seen by a number of people, most notably the famous mountain climber J. Norman Collie, who in 1925 had reported the following encounter on the summit of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms:

I was returning from the cairn on the summit in the mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.  For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.  I said to myself, this is all nonsense. I listened and heard it again, but could see nothing in the mist.  As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.  Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there myself I know.

Collie's not the only one who's had an encounter.  Mountain climber Alexander Tewnion says he was on the Coire Etchachan path on Ben MacDhui, and the thing actually "loomed up out of the mist and then charged."  Tewnion fired his revolver at it, but whether he hit it or not he couldn't say.  In any case, it didn't harm him, although it did give him a serious scare.

Periodic sightings still occur today, mostly hikers who catch a glimpse of it or find large footprints that don't seem human.  Many report feelings of "morbidity, menace, and depression" when the Am Fear Liath Mòr is nearby -- one reports suddenly being "overwhelmed by either a feeling of utter panic or a downward turning of my thoughts which made me incredibly depressed."  Scariest of all, one person driving through the Cairngorms toward Aberdeen said that the creature chased their car, keeping up with it on the twisty roads until finally they hit a straight bit and were able to speed up sufficiently to lose it.  After it gave up the chase, they said, "it stood there in the middle of the road watching us as we drove away."

Interestingly, there is a possible scientific explanation of this, that doesn't require believing in some giant humanoid hulking about in the wilds of Scotland.  Most of the sightings have taken place when it's foggy, which immediately made me think about the weird (but completely natural) phenomenon of the Brocken spectre or Brocken bow.  This occurs when filtered sunlight passes through mist from behind an observer, casting the person's (enormously enlarged) shadow on the fogbank in front of them; because the light is passing through spherical droplets of water, sometimes the shadow is also surrounded by a rainbow sheen called heilegenschein, caused by light refraction.  It's an eerie effect, and certainly has scared more than a few people.  (It's named for Brocken Mountain, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, where it is sometimes seen.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Solar glory and Spectre of the Brocken from GGB on 07-05-2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, it still leaves the massive, non-human footprints and Collie's crunching noises unaccounted for.  So do with that explanation what you will.

Anyhow, that's our cryptozoological inquiry for today.  I've been to Scotland once, but never made it out of Edinburgh -- I hope to go back and visit the ancestral turf some day.  When I do, I'll be sure to get up into the Cairngorms and see if I can catch a glimpse of the Big Gray Dude.  I'll report back on how uneasy I feel afterwards.

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Halos and shadows

About two weeks ago, I wrote a piece here about a Scottish cryptid called the Am Fear Liath Mòr -- which roughly translates from Gaelic as "the big gray dude" -- a horrifying apparition that has been seen in the Cairngorms of northern Scotland.  It's described as a human figure, but huge and hulking, that appears in the distance, understandably creating "uneasy feelings" in the observer.

As I mentioned in my previous post, if I were to see such a thing, my "uneasy feelings" would include being so terrified I'd drop dead of a brain aneurysm.  Because I'm just that brave.

Well, thanks to a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I've learned that this might be an unfortunate overreaction on my part.  The Am Fear Liath Mòr may have a completely rational, scientific explanation, and one that doesn't require belief in some enormous Sasquatch knock-off wandering around in the Highlands.  It seems like the Scottish Big Gray Dude might be an example of a phenomenon that occurs in foggy mountains called the "Brocken spectre."

The Brocken spectre (or "Brocken bow") is an optical effect that occurs when there are eye-level uniformly-dispersed water droplets of all about the same size -- as you find in a fog bank -- and you're backlit by sunlight.  This requires specific conditions, not only fog in front of you, but it being clear enough behind you that there's sufficient sunlight to cast a shadow.  The result is that your shadow, or more accurately the light rays that outline it, are refracted and reflected by the water droplets in the fog, creating a hugely magnified shadow surrounded by a halo of glare, sometimes with a rainbow sheen.

A Brocken spectre photographed near the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Brocken Inaglory, Solar glory and Spectre of the Brocken from GGB on 07-05-2011, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The phenomenon gets its name from the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, where it has been observed for centuries, and was described in detail by scientist Johann Silberschlag in 1780.  The idea of the allegedly-supernatural Brocken spectre being nothing more than an optical illusion generated by a shadow and the refractive effects of water droplets is supported by the fact that it's always seen in the fog when the Sun is behind you, and it seems to shift size unpredictably -- unsurprising if you're moving (which I sure as hell would be if I saw one), and there's a breeze making the fog bank waver and shift.

So it turns out that the Big Gray Dude of Scotland may not be a cryptid at all, just a weird -- and fascinating -- localized weather phenomenon.  And it also accounts for other instances of eerie figures in the mist, such as the "Dark Watchers" of the Santa Lucia Mountains in California and the strange looming presence reported by British mountaineer Eric Shipton while climbing Mount Kenya.  It's also related to the optical phenomenon called heiligenschein ("holy light") which probably accounts for instances of people being seen surrounded by what appears to be a ghostly halo.  The somewhat anticlimactic explanation for this latter effect is that it's not Tongues of Fire or the Radiance of God descending upon you, it's light scattering and a thoroughly understood mechanism called retroreflection that happens regardless of the holiness level of the person involved.

In any case, one more win for the scientific approach, even if it kind of blows away the mystique of a giant scary shadow-man wandering about in the Scottish Highlands.  Skeptic though I am, I have to admit to being a little disappointed.  It seems like if there's anywhere that should actually be haunted, it's the Cairngorms.  But even so, it's somehow fitting that the thing that has been terrifying the superstitious for centuries turns out to be nothing more than...

... their own shadows.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]