Weirdness one-upmanship

Thursday's post -- about a strange legend from England called the "fetch" and similar bits of odd folklore from Finland, Norway, and Tibet -- prompted several emails from loyal readers that can be placed under the heading of "You Think That's Wild, Wait'll You Hear This."

The first submission in the Weirdness One-Upmanship contest was about a Japanese legend called Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女), which translates to "the Slit-mouthed Woman."  The Kuchisake-onna appears to its victims as a tall, finely-dressed woman with long, lustrous straight black hair and the lower part of her face covered, carrying either a knife or a sharp pair of scissors.  She comes up and says, "Watashi wa kirei desu ka?" ("Am I pretty?")  This is also kind of a pun in Japanese, because kirei ("pretty") sounds a lot like kire ("cut").  In any case, by the time she asks the question you're kind of fucked regardless, because if you say no, she kills you with her knife.  If you say yes, she lowers her face covering to show that her mouth has been slit from ear to ear, and uses her sharp pointy object to do the same to you.

The only way out, apparently, is to tell her, "You're kind of average-looking."  At that point, the Kuchisake-onna is foiled.  It's a little like what happens if a vampire tries to gain access to the house of a grammar pedant:

Vampire: Can I enter your house?

Pedant:  I don't know, can you?

Vampire: *slinks away, humiliated*

So if you're ever confronted with a Kuchisake-onna, it will be the only time you'll ever come out ahead by telling someone "Eh, you're okay, I guess."

A man about to meet his fate at the hands of a Kuchisake-onna. The three women on the left don't seem especially concerned.  (From Ehon Sayoshigure by Hayami Shungyōsai, 1801)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kuchisake-onna has made multiple appearances in movies, anime, manga, video games, and at least one mockumentary that was taken seriously enough that people in Gifu Prefecture (where the film was set) were cautioned by one news source not to go outdoors after dark.

The second reader who contacted me asked me if I'd ever herd of the Panotti.  I speculated that it was some kind of Italian finger food that was a cross between pancetta and biscotti, but of course that turned out to be wrong.  The Panotti were a race of humanoids with extremely large ears who appeared in Pliny the Elder's book Natural History.  The reader even provided me with a picture:

A, um, Panottus as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Panotti, said Pliny, lived in a place called -- I shit you not -- the "All-Ears Islands" off the coast of Scythia.  The guy in the picture looks rather glum, though, doesn't he?  I guess I would, too, if I had twenty-kilogram weights hanging from the sides of my head.

A reader from Hawaii wrote to tell me about a legend called the Huakaʻi pō, which translates to "Nightmarchers."  This extremely creepy bit of folklore claims that dead warriors will sometimes arise from their graves and march their way to various sacred sites, chanting and blowing notes on conch shells.  Anyone who meets them will either be found dead the next morning, or will soon after die by violence.  The only way around this fate is to show the Huakaʻi pō the proper respect by lying face down on the ground until they pass; if you do that, they'll spare you.

That'd certainly save me, because if I was suddenly confronted at night by a bunch of dead Hawaiian warriors, I'd faint, because I'm just that brave.

The reader wrote:

People still sometimes plant rows of ti trees near their houses, because the ti is sacred in Hawaiian culture and the Nightmarchers can't walk through them.  Otherwise the Nightmarchers will walk right through your walls and suddenly appear in your house.  So without that protection, even staying indoors isn't enough.

Last, we have the Mapinguari, a cryptid from Brazil that I'd never heard of before.  The reader who clued me in on the Mapinguari commented that he would "rather meet a fetch, or even a tulpa, than one of these mofos," and when I looked into it I can't help but agree:

A statue of a Mapinguari in the Parque Ambiental Chico Mendes, Rio Branco, Brazil [Image credit: photographer Lalo Almeida]

These things -- which kind of look like the love child of Bigfoot and a cyclops -- also have an extra mouth where their belly button should be, because apparently one mouth isn't sufficient to devour their victims fast enough.  They're denizens of the Brazilian rain forest, and the name is thought to come from the Tupi-Guarani phrase mbaé-pi-guari (mbae "that, the thing" + pĭ "foot" + guarî "crooked, twisted"), because in some versions of the legend their feet are attached to their legs backwards so anyone seeing their footprints and trying to flee in the opposite direction will get caught and eaten.

So anyhow, thanks to the readers who responded to Thursday's post.  I guess we humans never run out of ways to use our creativity to scare the absolute shit out of each other.  Me, I'm just as glad to live in upstate New York, where I'm unlikely to run into Kuchisake-onna, Panotti, Huakaʻi pō, or Mapinguari.  Around here the main danger seems to be dying of boredom, which I suppose given my other choices doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.

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Strange bedfellows

There's a Senegalese expression that goes, "There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

The outcome of this general principle is that trying to support pseudoscientific claims sometimes forces alliances between groups you'd never think would have anything in common -- such as the cryptozoologists and the young-Earth creationists teaming up to find evidence of the "Mokèlé-Mbèmbé," a water-dwelling beastie that supposedly lives in the Congo River Basin.

The first written account of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé seems to be from science writer (and cryptozoology buff) Willy Ley in his 1941 book The Lungfish and the Unicorn, but his description was (he said) taken from an unpublished report written by German military officer and explorer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, who was summarizing sightings by natives he'd spoken to in Cameroon.  Here's what Ley had to say:

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus.  It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn.  A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator.  Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies.  The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends.  It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable.  This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth.  The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits.  At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food.  The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby.  But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.

So already we're talking about a third-hand account; Ley recounting what he'd read that von Stein had written about what natives told him.  Ley also quotes one Lieutenant Paul Gratz, who is not a lot more convincing:

The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu, except in the mouths of the large rivers at the north.  In the swamp lives the Nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws.  I did not succeed in shooting a Nsanga, but on the island of Mbawala I came by some strips of its skin.

Ley says that the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé and the Nsanga are the same, which I guess is true because it's very likely that neither one is real.  Skeptic Donald Prothero dismisses alleged sightings of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé as being either crocodiles, black rhinos, or simply overactive imaginations, and I'm inclined to agree with him.  The only alleged photograph of the beast, taken by explorer Rory Nugent in 1985, is almost certainly a distant snapshot of a floating log.

A sketch of a Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, which I have to admit looks nothing like either a crocodile or a rhino, but does appear to have been heavily influenced by watching The Land Before Time [Image is in the Public Domain]

So the whole thing would be in the same category as Bigfoot and Nessie and Mothman et al. -- but then the creationists got involved.

Scottish explorer and young-Earth creationist William Gibson funded and led two expeditions into the Congo River Basin to try to prove the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé exists, although how this would support creationism is beyond me.  Maybe it's because the creationists have asserted for years that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, and that the dinosaurs went extinct because they all missed getting on the Ark or something, so having one around today would mean we still coexist.  Q.E.D.

Hey, don't yell at me.  I'm not claiming it makes sense, I'm just telling you about it.

A highly scientific artist's conception of prehistory, as per the Creation Museum

In general, it's hard to see how the existence of "living fossils," organisms long thought to be extinct that have proven to be very much alive -- the coelacanth inevitably comes to mind -- is any kind of cogent argument against evolution, but the sad fact is that your average creationist wouldn't know a logical train of thought if it came up and bit them on the ass.  Be that as it may, the creationists are all in on the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, with the general consensus being if one is discovered, all the evolutionary biologists will retreat in disarray and immediately join evangelical Christian churches.

So we have here a case of strange bedfellows -- the cryptozoologists, who are generally well-meaning even if they have a different standard for what constitutes reliable evidence than I do, are on the same team as the young-Earth creationists, who by and large want to turn the entire world into an autocratic Christian theocracy.

Me, I think it'd be cool if Mokèlé-Mbèmbé existed, but purely because it'd be a fascinating new area of biological study.  Sadly, the fact that there's exactly zero evidence other than hearsay (which, after all, isn't really evidence at all) argues against it.  For those of you who were hoping for confirmation of a Brachiosaurus lumbering around in the Congo Basin, I'm afraid it's kind of a non-starter.

And that goes double for those of you who think Adam and Eve had a pet velociraptor.

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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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Going to the dogs

Well, the Rapture happened again, and just like every other damn time, I got left behind.

At this point, I've kind of given up.  There's been, what?  Like two dozen Raptures in the past five years?  I beginning to think I'm not invited to the party.

Of course, it shouldn't be a shock, given my history.  I doubt I'll be headed to heaven unless I can somehow get there under cover of darkness via helicopter.  And even then, there's a 50/50 chance that God will smite the crap out of the chopper before we can land at the Holy Heliport.

So since I'm still stuck here on Earth and likely to be for a while, I suppose I should proceed on to looking at today's topic, which is: Dogman.

In one of those funny coincidences that would make some people think there's a Glitch in the Matrix, a couple of days ago a friend of mine (who is also a cryptid enthusiast) asked me if I'd ever heard of Dogman, and I said I had -- a long time ago -- but didn't know much of anything about him, and then the following day a post showed up on the delightfully weird JAMZA Online Forum talking about recent Dogman sightings in California.  The writer, Paul Dale Roberts, says he's an "Esoteric Detective" with Halo Paranormal Investigations, which is certainly an impressive job title.

Roberts explains that Dogman isn't a werewolf, because of the obvious dog vs. wolf distinction, but also because werewolves transform back into ordinary humans when the Moon isn't full, but Dogman is kinda stuck that way.  He talks as if Dogman is pretty terrifying, but the problem for me is, my experience of dogs is this:

This is Jethro, and the only things that would be justifiably afraid of Jethro are squeaky toys.  In his presence, squeaky toys labeled "Completely Indestructible!" last about three minutes, because that fuzzy little muzzle conceals the Jaws of Death.  But other than that, he's about as dangerous as a plush toy.  A cryptid with a human body and Jethro's head would elicit more laughter than fear.

Plus, Roberts also says that "all you have to do is clap, and Dogman runs away," which doesn't sound very threatening to me.

Still, a seven-foot-tall human/dog hybrid could be kind of alarming to run across unexpectedly.  Some of them, he says, have "glowing red eyes."  This phenomenon of glowing eyes is a pretty common trait in cryptids, which is something I've never understood.  I mean, reflective eyes, sure; a lot of animals have a tapetum, which is a reflective membrane at the back of the eyeball that is why deer's eyes shine in headlights.  But actually glowing?  Eyes receive light, they don't emit it.  What, are there little guys with flashlights in there, shining the beams out through the pupils whenever anyone comes close?

Be that as it may, Roberts proceeds to relate a number of incidents where people have seen Dogman.  Here's his own encounter:

I once saw a strange hunched-back dark green bi-pedal figure in Elk Grove [California, where several other sightings have taken place].  From the distance from where I was observing this strange sight, I was unable to make out what I was seeing.  I had to drive up closer, so I can identify this mysterious figure.  I discovered I was looking at a homeless person that was covered in a blanket.

Who, he admits rather reluctantly, had an ordinary human head. 

But other people have insisted they saw a giant guy with a dog's shaggy head, and from the sound of it they weren't anywhere near a convention of Furries at the time.  Apparently Dogman isn't a recent invention, either; the legend seems to have started in Wexford County, Michigan, where a report in 1887 describes a sighting by two lumberjacks.  This Dogman apparently had blue eyes, so that's kind of cool.

Because forewarned is forearmed, it's important to have a plan for if you ever run into Dogman.  (I mean, you can try clapping, but my guess is that won't work.)  So here's what you should do:

• Stare straight into his eyes, to establish dominance.
• Say, "Whoozagoodboy?"
• When Dogman, not knowing who the Good Boy is, looks confused, say, "YOU are!"
• Dogman will be so elated by this unexpected revelation that he will wag his tail excitedly.
• Reward him for being a Good Boy with ear skritches, and if you have any, a puppy biscuit.
• Dogman will then be your friend for life.

At least this technique works with Jethro.

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the World of the Weird for today.  On the other hand, the word "weird" describes the world as a whole pretty well, given the news lately, and Dogman is no more peculiar than, for example, Donald Trump claiming that the reason California has droughts is that people in Canada were incosiderate enough to turn off a giant faucet.  ("It's so big it takes a whole day to turn once!" he said.  And no, I didn't make any of that up.)  May as well have a look around the place, since I (and, I presume, you) missed the Rapture and are stuck here for the time being. 

At least until the next helicopter leaves for heaven.

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Ghostsquatch

At the end of yesterday's mashup of alien invasions and giant superintelligent (and malevolent) bugs, I wrote that I couldn't guess what might be the next bizarre woo-woo hybrid, but speculated that it might be ghost Bigfoots.  I picked that largely because it sounded ridiculous.

As of this writing I have now been emailed three times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia that yes, there are people who believe in spectral Sasquatches.

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the cryptid world that the Ghost Bigfoot Theory became more than just a fever dream of mine because of Nick Redfern, author of Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, Three Men Seeking Monsters, and about a dozen other titles on similar topics.

But to set the stage, a bit of explanation.  You almost certainly know all about such familiar cryptids as Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, and Champ, and if you're a regular reader of this blog you likely also have a good working knowledge of some less familiar ones -- the Bunyip, Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, LizardMan, Sheepsquatch, the Beast of Gévaudan, Black Shuck, and Cadborosaurus.  You are probably also well aware that there has never been a bit of hard evidence for the existence of any of them.  All we have is sketchy eyewitness accounts, grainy photographs, and videocamera footage so shaky it looks like it was taken by a person who had just consumed about a quart of espresso.

What explains this dearth of tangible proof for any of these mysterious creatures?  There are two possible explanations that come readily to mind:

1. None of them actually exist.
2. The eyewitness accounts, photographs, and video clips aren't of actual, live cryptids; what people are seeing are the ghosts of prehistoric animals.

Well. I think we can all agree that option #2 is a pretty persuasive scientific explanation, can't we?  Redfern clearly thinks so.  He writes of a discussion he had with his friend, Joshua Warren, on the subject:

Could it be that certain animals of a strange and fantastic nature seen today are actually the spirits or ghosts of creatures that became extinct thousands of years ago?  As fantastic as such a scenario might sound, maybe we shouldn’t outright dismiss it.

Indeed, paranormal expert and good friend Joshua P. Warren, the author of the highly-relevant book, Pet Ghosts, told me that he had extensively investigated a series of encounters with apparitional, ancient animals on farmland at Lancaster, South Carolina – one of which seemed to resemble nothing less than a spectral pterodactyl.  Josh seriously mused upon the possibility that the ghostly presence of certain extinct animals might very well help explain sightings of monstrous beasts in our presence to this very day.

“Maybe Bigfoot is a phantimal,” said Josh to me, utilizing a term he uses to describe ghostly beasts, “perhaps even the ghost of a prehistoric creature, similar to the enormous extinct possible ape, Gigantopithecus, or maybe even the spirits of primitive humans.”

Okay.  Right.  A "phantimal."  So, what we've succeeded in accomplishing here is to take something that is potentially open to investigation (I hesitate to call what the Finding Bigfoot people did "investigation"), and place it entirely outside of the realm of what is even theoretically verifiable.

Redfern and Warren seem to think that this is a good thing.  If all of those people who claim to have seen Bigfoot are actually seeing a spectral proto-hominid, then the lack of evidence somehow becomes a point in favor of the claim, right?

Ghostly Sasquatches, after all, leave behind no hair samples.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pike's Peak highway bigfoot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seems mighty convenient to me.  It takes all of the objections that skeptics have to the cryptozoology thing, and dismisses them at one fell swoop: "Of course there's no tangible proof.  If we're right, there' wouldn't be."  It also explains all of the cryptid sightings with equal facility.  Nessie and Cadborosaurus are spirit pleisiosaurs. Mokèlé-Mbèmbé is the ghost of a brachiosaurus.  Black Shuck and El Chupacabra are the ghosts of deceased canines.  Sheepsquatch is the ghost of... well, I still don't know what the fuck Sheepsquatch is.  But the ghost of some prehistoric mammal or another.

All of this, of course, just goes to show something that I've commented upon before; there's no crazy idea out there that's so outlandish that someone can't elaborate upon it so as to make it even crazier.  We take something for which there is no evidence, but which at least isn't biologically impossible (the existence of cryptids), and put it in a blender with another thing for which there is no evidence (the existence of ghosts), and pour out a wonderful new Woo-Woo Smoothie -- Cryptids are the Ghosts of Prehistoric Animals.

Maybe we can elaborate it further, you think?  Maybe the spirit animals are actually in contact with... aliens!  That's it, the spirit animals are spies and are relaying information on us to their alien overlords!  I'm sure that somehow it's all tied up with the Roswell Incident, HAARP, and the Illuminati.

Or maybe I should just shut the hell up, because every time I say, "Ha-ha, surely nobody believes this," I turn out to be disproven within twenty-four hours.

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Animalia paradoxa

Carl Linnaeus was born in Råshult, Sweden, on 23 May 1707.  His father Nils was the minister of the parish of Stenbrohult but was also an avid gardener, and the story goes that when Carl was young and got upset, Nils would bring him a flower and tell the little boy its name, and that always calmed him down.

The love of botany -- and of knowing the names of living things -- was to shape Carl Linnaeus's life.  Prior to his time, there was no systematic way of giving names to species; there were dozens of names in various languages for the same species, and sometimes several different names in the same language.  Additionally, the fact that this is before the recognition of the relatedness of all life meant that things were named simply by their superficial appearance, which may or may not indicate an underlying relationship.  We still have some leftovers from this haphazard practice, such as the various birds called buntings (from the Middle English buntynge, "small bird") that aren't necessarily related to each other.  (For example, the North American indigo bunting is in the cardinal family; the European pine bunting in the family Emberizidae.) 

Young Linnaeus was lucky enough not only to have supportive parents, but a variety of people who recognized his intellect and ability and nurtured him in his studies.  (Amongst them was the scientist and polymath Olof Celsius, whose nephew Anders gave us the Celsius temperature scale.)  He was primarily interested in botany, but quickly became frustrated with the fact that the same plant could have six different names in six different villages -- and worse still, it was impossible to communicate taxonomic information clearly to botanists in other countries, where the names would have come from their native language.

So he decided to do something about it.

Linnaeus came up with the idea of binomial nomenclature -- the "two-name naming system," more commonly called "scientific names."  Each species would be assigned a unique and unambiguous name made of the genus and species names, each derived from Latin or Greek (which were the common languages of science at the time).  The genus would include various related species.  His determinations of who was related to whom were based upon appearance -- this is long before genetics became the sine qua non of systematics -- and some of Linnaeus's classifications have been revised in the 250-odd years since he wrote his magnum opus, the Systema Naturae.  But even so, the system he created is the one we still use today.

And this is why scientists the world over will know, if you say Mustela nigripes, that you are talking about the black-footed ferret.  (The scientific name translates to... "black-footed ferret."  Just because they're fancy-sounding Latin and Greek words doesn't mean they're all that revelatory.)

So Linnaeus took the first steps toward ordering the natural world.  But what is less well-known is that he included a few animals in his book that are more than a little suspect -- and labeled them as such, illustrating an admirable dedication to honoring hard evidence as the touchstone for scientific understanding.

In a section called "Animalia paradoxa," Linnaeus listed some "species" that had been reported by others, but for which there was no clear evidence.  From the tone of his writing, it's obvious he was doubtful they existed at all, and was only including them to point out that any reports of them were based upon hearsay.  These included the following genera, along with his description of them:

• Hydra: "body of a snake, with two feet, seven necks and the same number of heads, lacking wings, preserved in Hamburg, similar to the description of the Hydra of the Apocalypse of St.John chapters 12 and 13.  And it is provided by very many as a true species of animal, but falsely.  Nature for itself and always the similar, never naturally makes multiple heads on one body.  Fraud and artifice, as we ourselves saw [on it] teeth of a weasel, different from teeth of an Amphibian [or reptile], easily detected."
• Monoceros: "Monoceros of the older [generations], body of a horse, feet of a 'wild animal,' horn straight, long, spirally twisted.  It is a figment of painters.  The Monodon of Artedi [= narwhal] has the same manner of horn, but the other parts of its body are very different."
• Satyrus: "Has a tail, hairy, bearded, with a manlike body, gesticulating much, very fallacious, is a species of monkey, if ever one has been seen."
• Borometz: "The Borometz or Scythian Lamb is reckoned with plants, and is similar to a lamb; whose stalk coming out of the ground enters an umbilicus; and the same is said to be provided with blood from by chance devouring wild animals.  But it is put together artificially from roots of American ferns. But naturally it is an allegorical description of an embryo of a sheep, as has all attributed data."
• Manticora: "Has the face of a decrepit old man, body of a lion, tail starred with sharp points."

A manticore, from Johannes Jonston's Historiae Naturalis (1650) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I've always admired Linnaeus -- like him, I've been fascinated with the names of things since I was little, and started out with plants -- but knowing about his commitment to avoid getting drawn into the superstition and credulity of his time makes me even more fond of him.  He was unafraid to call out the Animalia paradoxa as probable hoaxes, and that determination to follow the rules of scientific skepticism still guides taxonomists to this day.

Of course, sometimes there are some bizarre "forms most beautiful and most wonderful" in the natural world, to borrow a phrase from Darwin.  When the first taxidermied pelts and skeletons of the duck-billed platypus were sent from Australia back to England, many English scientists thought they were a prank -- that someone had stitched together the remains of various animals in an attempt to play a joke.  And once convinced that they were real, the first scientific name given to the platypus was...

... Ornithorhynchus ("bird-billed") paradoxa.

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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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The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch

One of the problems that crops up in discussions of cryptids is that a lot of people consistently fall back on arguments based upon the number of alleged sightings.  "It's been seen hundreds of times," they'll say.  "It's got to be real.  All those sightings can't be wrong."

This argument is backwards, and the reason why has to do with a misunderstanding of statistics.  Let's consider two species, a common one and an extremely rare one.  It's no stretch to assume that the common one should be sighted more often than the rare one.  But you'd also surmise that if you set out to do so, hard evidence of the common one should be way easier to come by.  If you set out traps, you should catch more of the common one than the rare one.

So far, nothing very surprising.

A cryptid -- or, in fact, any paranormal phenomenon -- with more anecdotal reports should also leave behind more in the way of hard evidence.  If the Omaha Weasel Man has only ever been seen once, okay, maybe it's not so surprising we don't have any proof of his existence.  But if there are hundreds, or even thousands, of sightings, shouldn't there be something in the way of scientifically-admissible evidence?  A bone, a tuft of hair with DNA not from any known species, something?

Zero hard evidence along with lots of anecdotal reports strongly suggests a different answer -- gullibility, misinterpretation of what witnesses have seen or heard, or outright fraud.

Which brings us to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

The Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre plot of land in a remote region of Uintah County, Utah.  It gets its name from the Navajo legend of the yee naaldlooshii (which translates to "it goes on all fours"), which is an evil magician who can take the shape of a non-human animal at will.

Skinwalker Ranch has been the site of literally hundreds of bizarre claims, including:

• UFOs (lots of these)
• vanished or mutilated cattle
• glowing orbs hovering over the ground/"ball lightning"
• invisible objects emitting sparks and powerful magnetic fields
• large animals with glowing red eyes that are alleged to be unharmed by gunfire

The last one is what gave the place its name, and comes along with a legend of uncertain provenance -- that the Navajo who lived there were attacked and enslaved by Ute warriors, and the Navajo cursed the place, saying whoever settled there afterward would be plagued by an evil spirit who could take the form of a wolf.  Several successions of modern owners of the property have claimed to have seen this thing, most notably Gwen and Terry Sherman and their family, who owned it from 1994 to 1996, and Robert Bigelow, who bought it from the Shermans in 1996 and owned it until 2016.  The Shermans are the first ones who made a big deal about bizarre happenings on the place, including seeing strange, wolf-like animals, and a sighting of an "orb filled with a glowing blue fluid" that supposedly killed three of their dogs.  Bigelow, a prominent businessman, is deeply interested in UFOs and other sketchy phenomena, and bought the ranch because of the Shermans' stories; he can be credited with bringing the site to national attention.

So, naturally, people have tried to figure out what's going on there, with some of the more scientifically-minded saying that the strange animal sightings, at least, have a natural explanation -- they're a surviving population of dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus).  There are two problems with this, of increasing difficulty: first, that the most recent dated remains of dire wolves is from almost ten thousand years ago, and second, if there is an extant population somewhere in the Uintah Basin, they've left exactly zero evidence.

Artist's reconstruction of a dire wolf [Image is in the Public Domain]

In fact, that last bit is the sticking point about Skinwalker Ranch in general.  Robert Bigelow founded a group he called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose sole raison d'être was to find evidence for claims of the paranormal, and after a long investigation of the claims from Skinwalker Ranch, they concluded -- and this is a direct quote -- they had "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication."

Which is a euphemism for "we found fuck-all in the way of proof."

So the problem here is, we have a place that -- to listen to the hype -- has UFOs out the wazoo, strange meteorological phenomena, and wild animal sightings that are (depending on who you believe) something like a werewolf, or a ten-thousand-year prehistoric holdover.  And despite all that, there has not been a single piece, not the tiniest shred, of hard evidence.  To me that argues strongly that the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  It may well have started out with some odd observations that were misinterpreted -- the Shermans certainly seem to have been earnest enough -- but after Bigelow got involved, it's become one tactic after another to keep people's attention on the place.  UFOlogist Barry Greenwood, who investigated the ranch earlier this year and also came up empty-handed, said Bigelow was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

Belief and hope aren't the only things he's selling.  It's telling that in 2020, Bigelow, filed for -- and was approved for -- a trademark on the Skinwalker Ranch name, for the purpose of "providing recreation facilities; entertainment services, namely, creation, development, production, and distribution of multimedia content, internet content, motion pictures, and television shows...  cups and mugs, shirts and short-sleeved shirts, sports caps and hats."

Gullibility is, as always, big business.

So once again, we're faced with the difficulty that just the sheer quantity of anecdotal reports doesn't mean there's anything real behind it; in fact, without hard evidence, it can actually argue for the opposite.  The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch are very likely to be nonexistent.  As much as I, like Fox Mulder, "want to believe," this one appears to be a non-starter as anything but a way to make money.

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Monster mash

Well, the biggest mass search for the Loch Ness Monster in history has come and gone, and like Monty Python's camel spotters, the searchers spotted nearly one monster.

This past weekend hundreds of amateur cryptid enthusiasts, in partnership with the Loch Ness Centre and Loch Ness Expeditions, studied the lake both in person (many using sophisticated cameras and microphones to record any anomalies) and virtually via video links, but the end result was... not much.

It's a shame, really.  I was honestly rooting for them, especially after I found out that one of the leaders of the effort is named (I swear I'm not making this up) Craig Gallifrey.  I was hoping that his assistants would be Joe Skaro, Annie Appalappachia, and Rex Raxacoricofallapatorius, but no such luck.

Gallifrey, for his part, is undaunted.  "I believe there is something in the loch," he said.  "There's got to be something that's fueling the speculation."

Stories about a creature in the lake (and the River Ness) go back a long way.  The first certain mention of it is in the seventh-century C.E. Life of St. Columba by Adomnán of Iona, in which Columba came upon some people burying a guy by the bank of the river, and after inquiry, was told that he'd been mauled to death by a water beast.  The saint then commanded one of them to swim the river, and instead of doing what I'd have done, which is to look at Columba like he'd lost his mind and say, "Were you even fucking listening to us just now?  Especially the 'mauled to death by a water beast' part?", the dude went, "Okay, sure," and jumped right in.  On cue the monster came swimming up, but Columba made the Sign of the Cross and said, "Go no farther.  Do not touch the man.  Go back at once," and the monster went, "Dude, whatever, simmer down," and backed off, and the locals were all super impressed.

But after that, you pretty much have to wait until the nineteenth century to get any more serious accounts.  In the 1930s there were several sightings, leading to a craze -- especially when The Daily Mail Fail, which apparently was as dedicated to accuracy back then as it is today, published the famous "surgeon's photograph" in 1934, now known to have been a hoax:

But even so, interest has continued, lo unto this very day.

The evidence generated by this weekend's search was pretty slim, however.  "We did hear something," search leaders report.  "We heard four distinctive ‘gloops’.  We all got a bit excited, ran to go make sure the recorder was on, and it wasn’t plugged in."

The fault, of course, lies with the Sound Engineer In Charge Of Plugging Stuff In, Roderick Ranskoor av Kolos.  You can't get good help nowadays.

In any case, they later admitted rather ruefully that the "gloops" might not have been Nessie.  "It may well be gas escaping from the bottom of the loch."

Lake flatulence notwithstanding, my guess is the negative results aren't going to dissuade enthusiasts.  Negative results never do.  Witness shows like Ghost Hunters, wherein a bunch of intrepid haunted house aficionados get together and visit spooky locations week after week, always at night, stalk around for an hour with flashlights and recording equipment, and never find anything.  This doesn't mean there aren't dramatic moments, e.g. this actual scene from an episode I watched when I was in a hotel one evening and turned on the television because I was bored:

Ghost hunter 1: Here we are in the attic of this abandoned courthouse.  As you can see, it's extremely atmospheric, with cobwebs and dust and all.  We're expecting to see a ghost any moment now.

Ghost hunter 2:  Yes, as I turn this corner and pan my flashlight beam across the wall, I can see... *screams*  *several bleeped out obscenities*

*cut to commercials*

Ghost hunter 1:  Let's replay that dramatic sequence, shall we?

*sequence replays*

Ghost hunter 2: *several more bleeped out obscenities*  Wow, that is one bigass yellowjacket!

That's it?  I sat through about eight stupid commercials, thinking I was finally going to get to see a ghost, and instead, I get a "bigass yellowjacket"?  I got stung by one of those in my own back yard a couple of days ago, and I was not impressed with that one, either.

In any case, I'm expecting that no one will be discouraged by the fact that Craig Gallifrey et al. didn't see anything this past weekend, and we'll still have periodic excursions to find Nessie and other cryptids.  My general response is: knock yourself out.  Like I've said many times before, I'm not a disbeliever, per se, I'm just waiting for the evidence.  So we'll just have to see what comes up with the next expedition, to be led by crack cryptid hunters Cathy Castrovalva and Mike Metabellis Three.

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