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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Bear with us

A paper appeared last week in the Journal of Zoology that has elicited a good bit of self-satisfied chortling amongst the people who think cryptids are abject nonsense.  It was written by a data scientist named Floe Foxon, and is entitled, "Bigfoot: If It's There, Could It Be a Bear?"

Foxon's conclusion was, "Yeah, it probably is."  Foxon writes:

Previous analyses have identified a correlation between ‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’ sightings and black bear populations in the Pacific Northwest using ecological niche models and simple models of expected animal sightings.  The present study expands the analysis to the entire US and Canada by modeling Sasquatch sightings and bear populations in each state/province while adjusting for human population and forest area in a generalized linear model.  Sasquatch sightings were statistically significantly associated with bear populations such that, on the average, every 1000 bear increase in the bear population is associated with a 4% increase in Sasquatch sightings.  Thus, as black bear populations increase, Sasquatch sightings are expected to increase.  On average, across all states and provinces in 2006, after controlling for human population and forest area, there were approximately 5000 bears per Sasquatch sighting.  Based on statistical considerations, it is likely that many supposed Sasquatch are really misidentified known forms.  If Bigfoot is there, it could be a bear.

While this certainly is a suggestive correlation, it's not the slam-dunk the scoffers would like it to be.  There are no known black bear populations in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, but all of those states have had significant numbers of Bigfoot sightings; Illinois, in fact, is fifth in the nation for the number of sightings (exceeded only by Washington, California, Florida, and Ohio).

This may seem like an odd stance for a self-styled skeptic to take, and don't interpret this as saying more than it does.  My point is that it is a significant jump (and Foxon himself is clear on this point) from saying "many, perhaps most, Sasquatch sightings are actually black bears" to saying "all Sasquatch sightings are actually black bears," which is the reaction I'm mostly seeing.  My issue is with not with Foxon and his analysis, which is excellent, but with the doubters who are saying, "Ha-ha, we toldja so" and thinking this settles the question.

It's precisely the same reason I agreed with controversial physicist Michio Kaku when he said that even if only one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural phenomena, that one percent is still worth looking into.  For myself, both Kaku and most Bigfoot aficionados go a lot further into the True Believer column than I'm willing to; but in my mind, an abject statement of disbelief is no better than an abject statement of belief given that in both cases there are plenty of data left to explain.

So the whole thing leaves me pretty much where I was.  We don't have any convincing hard evidence either of Bigfoot or of alien visitation, so my opinion is they're both unlikely to be real phenomenon.  But "unlikely" doesn't mean "certain," and my opinion is just my opinion.  In neither case should we stop looking, nor close our minds to the possibility that we doubters could be wrong.

The burden of proof, of course, still rests on the ones making the claim.  You can't prove a negative, Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence, and all that sorta stuff.  So Foxon's paper gives us a good reason to be cautious about accepting Bigfoot sightings as conclusive -- but then, we really should be cautious about accepting damn near anything without due consideration of alternative explanations.

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Birds of unusual size

It's been a while since we've had anything here at Skeptophilia of a purely cryptozoological nature, partly because the ongoing sightings of Bigfoot and Nessie and the Chupacabra and Mokele-Mbémbé and the rest of the crew have been pretty pedestrian of late.  More anecdotal eyewitness accounts, more blurry photographs, zero in the way of hard evidence.  Even one of the recent sightings from Loch Ness -- supposedly showing the Monster's dark, shadowy shape swimming just underneath the water -- was kind of underwhelming, and in fact it took me about five watchings, and having one of the people in the comments section tell me when and where in the video it occurred, for me even to see anything other than a placid Scottish lake on a cloudy day.  When I finally spotted it, it turned out to be a vague little dark smudge moving slowly from right to left, and that was about it.

One of the commenters said, "Oh gosh I'm never going to sleep again after watching this!"  Well, all I can say is it'd take a good bit more than this to keep me awake.  Maybe Nessie knocking on my window at night, or something.  I dunno.

In any case, just yesterday I ran into a cryptid sighting that was curious from a couple of perspectives.  It was reported at Stan Gordon's site UFO Anomalies Zone, which is not just about UFOs but all sorts of Fortean stuff, and allegedly occurred this past April.  A woman in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania reports being dive-bombed by a giant flying creature that sounds more like a pterodactyl than a bird.  She was arriving at an office for an appointment, and beforehand was sitting in her car in the parking lot talking to a friend on her phone, when an enormous creature soared overhead -- so large the shadow looked like a low-flying plane.  It glided up toward the roof of the office building, and landed on the top of the chimney.  Alarmed but intrigued, the woman told her friend what she'd seen, then said she was getting out of her car and to see if she could get a photo.

Here's how Stan Gordon describes what happened next:

[T]he giant bird looked down at her and made eye contact with what she told me were piercing fiery eyes.  The eyes were large and round even from the distance up on the roof.  They were vivid and green-red and orange in color.

The witness stated that the size of the creature was the most amazing thing that she had ever seen.  The moment it looked down she realized that it had made direct eye contact with her she knew she had to run.  She immediately turned and ran in panic and disbelief.  As she turned the corner, she looked back for a second.  The huge, winged creature was gliding toward her at an angle.  It was only about eight feet behind her, and its talons were out.  The woman made it to the door and rushed into the private office and yelled that she was being attacked by a huge bird.

It had a wingspan of between eight and ten feet, she said, and was brown in color -- but she didn't see any feathers, and wasn't sure it had feathers.

What makes this even more curious is that Gordon contacted the man with whom the woman had the appointment, and he confirmed that she had burst into the office in hysterics, saying she was being chased by a giant bird -- and then said that he, too, had seen some kind of giant winged creature in the area on several occasions, but always at a distance.  And he said that after the woman left her appointment, he'd gone outside.  The creature was gone, but he found that several bricks had been dislodged from the top of the chimney, and had fallen onto the roof and onto the ground below.

Edward Julius Detmold, "The Roc Carrying Away an Elephant," from his illustrations of The Second Voyage of Sinbad (1924) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What strikes me as the weirdest thing about this is the location.  I don't know if you've ever been to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, but it is not some kind of remote area with wide-open spaces, few people, and lots of places that a big critter could hide.  It's more or less contiguous with the greater Philadelphia area, and is the third most populous county in the entire state.  (73rd most populous county in the United States as a whole, in fact.)  I've been through that area several times and although there are some farms and green spaces, mostly what I remember is strip malls.  It's kind of solid suburbia between Philadelphia and Reading along I-76.  There might be other places less likely to be inhabited by enormous pterodactyls, but Montgomery County has to be near the top of the list.

But I guess Montgomery County is some kind of hotspot for "thunderbird" sightings.  Stan Gordon thinks they come down from the Poconos to hunt for deer.  I don't know about that, but the only thing I can think of that would be scarier than seeing a giant pterodactyl flying over a strip mall would be seeing a giant pterodactyl flying over a strip mall carrying a deer in its talons.

However terrifying it would be, this once again brings up the question of why other people have all the luck.  Here I am, out in an old house on wooded acreage in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere in upstate New York.  You'd think my name would be on the "People to Visit" list of every cryptid in the eastern half of the country.  Maybe you're thinking, "Yes, but you have two large dogs.  Maybe they keep the cryptids at bay."  To which I respond: you haven't met my dogs.  Lena is sweet, gentle, friendly, and has the IQ of a Pop-Tart.  If a thunderbird picked me up bodily out of our back yard and carried me away, I'd lay odds Lena would sleep right through it.  Guinness the Fierce Pit Bull, on the other hand, is such a complete wuss that he'd hide from a fluffy bunny, much less some humongous carnivorous Cretaceous holdover.  

So counting on them to protect me would kind of be a losing proposition.

Anyhow, I'll issue a challenge: if there are any cryptids reading this, my back yard is at your disposal.  That also goes for any aliens, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and whatnot.  If you're still worried about the dogs, even after the preceding paragraph, I promise to keep 'em inside.  Come on down, and bring your friends.  It'll be a party.  I hope you don't mind if I take pics, though.  After all my disparaging comments about anecdotal evidence, you can't blame me for wanting something more concrete.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

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