The other day Alan Friswell, the bloke who made the CFZ Feegee Mermaid and also the guy responsible for some of the most elegantly macabre bloggo postings, wrote me an email. He had an idea for a new series for the bloggo. Quite simply he has an enormous collection of macabre, fortean, odd and disturbing magazine and newspaper articles, and he proposed to post them up on the bloggo.
Alan Writes: "Yes! Welco
me to Friswell's Freaky Features, an ongoing spot on the CFZ blog page where you will encounter the fun, the freaky, the frightening and on occasion, the downright horrifying. Many of these items are from almost forgotten archives and no doubt should, in many cases, have stayed forgotten. But no chance of that on this site! So be prepared to be amazed by the bizarre manifestations of nature, the abberations of the natural world and the complete (on occasion) mind-bending insanity of collective humanity. Read on...."What a smashing idea, we thought, and so with a burst of alliteration that will - I hope - make Dr Shuker proud of me, here we go....
I wonder if any of you out there has seen this before, or knows anything about it. We're all familiar with the famous 'lost' pictures of people holding up dead thunderbirds, or other giant species, but has anyone heard of this huge ray, photographed in April 1934? While it undeniably has the look of a classic 'hoax' about it, I think that it's authentic. What do you think...?
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4 comments:
This might not be a hoax - the manta looks approximately 20ft wide (being about 3 1/2 times the height of the men), and Wikipedia says that they reach a maximum size of "about 25ft across" and "about 5,000lb".
However, i can't help noticing that the composition of the photo is extremely similar to the "mythical" Thunderbird photo - could this pic be a contributor to that legend?
There's a second picture related to this. Please see for example:
http://blogs.damar.nl/blogs/danielmarianne/WindowsLiveWriter/Swimmingwithdolphins_7724/GiantMantaRayNJ%5B1%5D.jpg>this one
I've searched a little bit and found your pic also on the blog "Modern Mechanix" which publishes old magazine articles. As it seems our picture was published in the magazin "Modern Mechanix and inventions" in issue April 1934. Anyway a fake is still possible but I think then it's an old fake. The Blog-Site:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/12/25/5000-pound-devil-fish-is-caught/
More Infos about the magazin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanix_Illustrated
After a second cup of tea from just waking up, as Ive told Jon im never on the ball until the second cup.
A bit of reseach shows this article to origineate from Modern Mechanix Magazine - April Issue 1934.
I believe it to be authentic as a similar Ray in weight was hooked on a vessels anchor and hauled up some years later.
The crucial difference between this pic and the 'lost' thunderbird photo is that this one isn't lost, whereas the t-bird pic probably never existed in the first place.that is probably some sort of collective false memory syndrome.If so many people can recall seeing the thunderbird-nailed-to-barn pic, how come noone remembers where they stashed the old book/mag?
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