GLEN VAUDREY: Water Blackfella (a masterclass)

Before his computer went belly up a few weeks ago Glen Vaudrey promised us some photographs from the process of making his fake "Water Blackfella" pictures.


Here, finally, and for the first time we see a glimpse behind the magick...


What a clever fellow he is.


By the way (shameless plug time) I am currently typesetting Glen's book Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland: The Western Isles and jolly good it is too. This really is shaping up to be a smashing series.



http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-water-blackfella-pictures.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/04/yesterdays-water-blackfella-pictures.html

RICHARD FREEMAN: It's a hoax folks

There’s a lot of it about, hoaxes that is. In recent weeks we have seen a ridiculous doll touted as being some kind of unknown primate and, hot on the heels of the discovery of Titaniboa a badly photo-shopped picture of a giant snake swimming up a jungle river. Then the ‘water blackfella’ reappeared. I recall seeing this in Fortean Times in the 1990s and thinking it was an obvious fake back then.

As it happens I believe in both unknown primates and giant snakes, but neither of these pictures showed one. I also believe in sea serpents but as it happens there is a new hoax doing the rounds at the moment. Mark North warned me about it. He had an e-mail to his Dark Dorset website hat ran thus…

Hi there,
>
> Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch. I’m from Unruly Media, a
> viral marketing company in London, and we’re currently running a
> campaign for the Association of Marine Research, a small, non-existent
> organization which is currently conducting research into possible
> sightings of suspicious sea creatures in the English Channel. The AMR
> has asked us to contact bloggers asking for any information that could
> be helpful.
>
> I thought the story might go down well on your site, and was wondering
> if you’d be interested in writing a sponsored post about it, for which
> we can pay you £75. 30 days after the campaign ends via Paypal.
>
>
> If you’re interested, please drop me a line and I’ll send you the
> assets so you can get the blog underway- it will need to be proof-read
> by us before going live, which needs to happen before Friday 1st May.
>
> The sort of posting we are after:
>
> http://thedailyblast.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-seen-channel-creature.html
>
> Our videos/images are clearly marked as commercially sponsored and we
> adhere to a strict code of ethics, which you can read here:
>
> http://www.unrulymedia.com/ethics-code
>
> We'd love you to be involved,
>
> Kind Regards,
> Salwa Azar
>
> --
> Salwa Azar
> Campaign Manager, Unruly Media
>
> Unruly Media
> www.unrulymedia.com
> 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL, UK
> +44 (0)207 247 4176
> +44 (0)7515 543 598

I had never heard of the ‘Association of Marine Research’ and thought the whole thing sounded very suspicious so I visited their website www.thechannelcreature.com

Here was posted an unconvincing photograph and a piece of film purporting to show the monster. It is some of the very worst computer animation I have ever seen. If Frank Searle had been alive today and computer literate this is the sort of crap he would be churning out.

There are two filmed interviews on the sight one with ‘Audrey Du Pre’ a supposed member of the ‘Association of Marine Research’ and obviously someone putting on a bad French accent and an ‘eyewitness’ called Matt Williams (no not our crop circle making, micro-light flying, sunflower shirt wearing Matt Williams!). He claims to have seen a fast moving creature 300 meters or 1000 feet long! The very concept that a Godzilla sized beast is swimming around of the coast of Dover is absurd. What the hell would it ea for a start?

They also have a Facebook page with an even less convincing piece of animation on it.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Association-of-Marine-Research-The-Channel-Creature/196160515400

Stuff like this, and that ridiculous bigfoot costume stuff with animal gut that was been touted as a real sasquatch corpse, do us no favors. They put the idea in the heads of the general public (most of whom have he attention span of an invertebrate) that all cryptid sightings must be hoaxes. They also queer the pitch for real researchers. What kind of a chance of funding or support can we expect with rubbish like this polluting the collective brains of the masses. When, one day, someone does find a genuine cryptid most people will dismiss it at a hoax.

The "Water Blackfella" Redux

Dale Drinnon writes: "I do not believe photoshop circa 1995 could have produced the "Water Blackfella" photo. I still hold out for its being a model: vegetation in the foreground looks mighty like plain grass to me and the appearance surface of the water seems to indicate that size to me. Of course a digital photo version of the original could well have been made later (circa 2000?) and be the version subsequently shipped around.I first saw the photo in the late 1990s myself. I thought I had an older printing in one of my books but the oldest copy I have reproduced anywhere in my library is circa 2000."


I tend to agree with you mate, and I am fairly certain that I can see lesser duckweed (Lemna minor) and Canadian pondweed (Elodea) in the background...

GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: The continuing saga of the "Water Blackfella"

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

I used to collect piles of magazines pertaining to cryptozoology, and have stacked in my study around ten boxes of hundreds, if not thousands of crypto-related documentaries. Among the stack of magazines I’ve found several mentions of the recently revived ‘Bigfoot’ photo as mentioned in several blog posts. Originally I could have sworn I’d seen mention of the photo in an old Strange Magazine, but have since located it in Fate and the lesser known World Explorer.

The photo is also mentioned in the December 1996 issue of Fortean Times (No. 93). As far as Fate goes, (September 1996), they feature the picture in A4 colour, on page 28, although only refer to the photo in a snippet on page 57, as the rest of the main story (written by researcher Daniel Perez) concerns a piece of Sasquatch footage shot in 1995 in California, and witnessed by a handful of people including Playboy model Anna-Marie Goddard. It’s strange that the ‘Water Blackfella’ photo has been connected to so many countries, but the facts are that the creature was allegedly photographed in July 1995 near Ashford, Washington, in the Snoqualmle National Forest. A month after the photo’s were snapped, there were several sightings of a hairy hominid at Mill Creek Road, in the Blue Mountains area of south-eastern Washington. The case became known as the Walla Walla Bigfoot.

World Explorer featured a full-length colour picture on their front cover of Volume 1, No. 9. Although the article (written by David Hatcher Childress – on page 15) pertains to the legend of the Yeti, on page 25 (page 24 has a small black and white photo of the creature) there is mention of the case, the author writes:

‘…a forest patrol officer from Tacoma, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, had an encounter with a giant ape-like creature and was able to take a series of 35 mm photos. The ranger then called Cliff Crook at the Sasquatch-monitoring group named Bigfoot Central.

Bigfoot Central is located in Cliff Crook’s living room in Bothell, Washington. Crook held a news conference on December 9th, 1995 to satisfy the mounting interest over the photos. Crook told the conference that the ranger had taken 14 photographs of the Sasquatch, but eight of them were dark because fleeting clouds blocked the sun on his 50 mm telephoto lens. The ranger said that he heard a splashing noise to his left while hiking along a ridge in Washington State’s Snoqualmle National Forest. He went to investigate the noise. Then, from a high bank, he observed the eight foot creature just 30 yards away in a swampy lagoon. He then short the rest of his film.

The photos are sensational, clearly depicting a hairy Bigfoot creature with its head low on a pair of massive shoulders. Not the sort of creature one wants to tangle with in a back alley or backwoods swamp. The photos have a certain Frank Frazetta-look to them that makes their authenticity seem doubtful. One photography analyst declared that he had found tiny diamond-shapes in the image indicating that it was a digitally created image. Cliff Crook countered that the analyst was examining a laser-copied print and not an original. Analysts at the World Explorer Club digital labs concluded that bright colours and “unnatural digital fracturing” led them to believe that the photo had been digitally created, probably in Photoshop. The verdict is still out and actual analysis of the original prints has yet to be released.’

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this fascinating case.

Yesterday's "water blackfella" pictures revealed

I thought they were more convincing than the original, with the possible exception being that the fern tendrils were pretty obviously not from a tree fern. However they were of course the ones that Glen Vaudrey wrote about a few weeks back.

He writes:

Jon, I sent you an email a couple of weeks ago bragging that i could produce some made at home Blackfella pictures, well here are the pictures. Sorry no great cryptozoological breakthrough involved just two quids worth of plasticene, a peice of thick wire and plenty of spare hair left after my last haircut. Maybe not the most convincing images but near enought for a quick glance".

Far more convincing than many mystery animal pictures we are sent.

MORE "WATER BLACKFELLA" PICTURES

These pictures are just in. There will be more news on them tomorrow..