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...

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

I just want to say a quick thank you to our two tireless indexers who are beavering away behind the scenes. Heather is working on the archiving project files, and Lee is working on the bloggo index. Hopefully there will be some stuff posted from both of them in the next week or so.


But we always need more. Do YOU fancy being an indexer? Or even more urgently.. do YOU live in North Devon and fancy spending a day or so every little while working on the CFZ Library indexing? If the answer is yes to either of these questions please email me at jon@eclipse.co.uk


Also if you have computer equipment or aquarium equipment that is syrplus to requirements please get in touch. We also want building materials, office equipment and some vinyl flooring...

GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: The Block Ness Monster

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...

One of my favourite monster mysteries pertains to the Rhode Island carcass. Partial remains, measuring almost twelve-feet, of a huge aquatic creature were dredged up from the breakwater of Old Harbor in the June of ’96. 49-year-old local fisherman and conservationist Lee Scott stored the mass (Gary Hall caught the ‘monster’ which attracted more than 1,000 people), which consisted of ninety-six cartilage vertebrae, in ice before it was shipped to the National Marine Fisheries Laboratory in Narragansett.

“It smells like a dead sea monster”, commented Mr Scott at the time.
“I got the Block Ness monster in a freezer…”

Initial investigations determined the beast could well have been a sturgeon.

The mystery deepened however when World Explorer magazine in 1997 featured the story, Block Ness Monster Is Stolen -:

“The remains of a fourteen-foot (strange, considering the remains started off at twelve-feet!) , as yet to be positively identified creature have been kidnapped from their frosty holding tank near New Shoreham, Rhode Island. In June of 1996, two fishermen aboard the Mad Monk scooped up an unusual serpentine skeleton. The spine stretched longer than the two men and its narrow head with vacant eye sockets was adorned by some mighty strange looking whiskers.”

Photographs were allegedly taken of the monster by Mr Scott, but shark specialist Lisa Nathanson believed the remains belonged to a basking shark, prime candidate for many sea serpent finds over the years. However, Scott then countered the claim by stating that if it was a shark then it must be a new species. The snout of the beast measured twelve-inches but, according to Nathanson, the basking shark snout only measures six-inches.

Even so, despite the find, the local kidnappers believed that the carcass they held should never leave the island for it may never return. Of course, for a brief period the beast and the local area prospered by attracting several tourists, all eager to snap up the Block Ness t-shirts and posters.

Tragically, no-one knows what happened to the most ridiculously named sea-serpent of all.

FLEUR FULCHER: Who loves the Beetles

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....

Whilst I was a bit disgusted by articles (both recent and from a few years back) about Japanese boys making male Stag Beetles fight each other, I wasn’t very surprised. Little boys of all cultures will enjoy fighting and many also enjoy making other creatures fight each other. This doesn’t mean that they will turn into serial killers or even that they perceive it as cruelty. My brother and I (when aged maybe 4 and 5) used to pull centipedes apart and feed ants to fish and so on, but we both love and respect nature now. children are, after all, far closer to being animals than we would like to think.. (and that isn’t a slight on children!)

But some types of stag beetle are getting rarer and the thought that instead of getting a chance to mate they are being made to fight each other in Japanese school cafeterias is a bit of a downer.

However there is a slight positive to this story, apparently many of the boys (and girls?) who own the fighters rear them themselves and enjoy studying them as well as the more brutal side to it. Many of them will doubtless stop the fighting and through their pets come to love the natural world and the fascinating side to many invertibrates.

Leaving Japan alone for now, what about the Stag beetles of the UK? The one that we here refer to as the stag beetle is in fact only one of about 1200 species in the family Lucanidae. Our largest beetle the Lucanus cervus is a charming and intriguing creature, even when I was a squeamish teenager I loved these particular bugs. Living in Epsom there were many of them, you’d find them pootling down the paths in the park, lurking on your (somewhat rotten) doorstep and particularly on Epsom Downs where they have an excellent stag beetle conservation scheme.
But if you happen to live anywhere in their habitat there are things you can do to help these personable little chaps.

On this website you can learn how to make a home for stag beetle larvae - http://ptes.org/index.php?page=211

And if you are lucky enough to own or look after any woodland then you can do your bit by ensuring that some fallen trees remain on the ground to rot and provide the ideal habitat, also compost heaps, wood sheds and wood piles are favourites.

If you know that you do have stag beetles in your garden then you can also help them by keeping your cat indoors during breeding season as cats, magpies and badgers are the main predators of the beetle.

So in conclusion, we all like Stag Beetles, even those Japanese schoolchildren who hopefully will learn from their small charges that it is better to watch them in the wild than to make them fight.

TIM MATTHEWS: The morons in our midst

Everyone knew that the Roswell footage was a fake and yet few people bothered to even try and demonstrate this. It took efforts from myself and Philip Mantle to break the dam, so to speak, and begin to show how the footage had its origins in a cheap yet devious home grown, home made fake. Most UFO footage is either fake, or a case of mistaken identity, most ghosts aren't ghosts, and not one crop circle or similar formation has been laid down by aliens, the secret paranormal force or anything of that nature. And yet, despite our knowing this, small numbers of lunatics and believers want to take such simple matters of, in this case, flattened crops, to ridiculous extremes. The same could be said for people who believe that UFOs are alien craft, when, in fact, the better flying saucer sightings related to earthly craft flown under the cover of psychological warfare programmes operated by the military.

Against this background, we have seen the rise (and possible fall) of pseudo fakery like Most Haunted and Most Haunted Live, we have seen UFO Magazine and all its associated weirdery bite the dust and now the sensible people remaining are, it would seem, looking to groups like the CFZ for some sort of leadership and some sort of structure; a place where they can happily do their business and still retain a shred of integrity.

Into this maelstrom, where certain people want to make money at any cost (!), the credulous will always be sucked in and ripped off. The incredible will be said to be within reach and the gullible will be fooled, pay money and believe, pretty much, what they want to believe. Charlatans, fakers, forgers and friends have had a field day over the years. We have seen the Majestic 12 documents treated as gospel by American UFO researchers despite it being massively obvious that the whole thing is a fraud and a fake. The latter is, perhaps, or was, a good one, but it didn't take long for its inconsistency, illogic and fabrication to emerge.

But you can make money from such nonsense, and people do. You can get more hits on your website my making "exclusive" claims and by running "sensational stories" and nowhere has this been more obvious than within a certain segment of US counterculture and society. Some Americans, it would seem, will believe anything and the more extreme the story is the better.

We see, this week, an utterly ridiculous and frankly outrageous hoax promoted by people who really should know better. We shall call this latest insult to intelligence The Toy Goblin Conspiracy and concur that, despite all claims to the contrary, there is no father Christmas, no Mother Earth and certainly no new species of Mini Goblin haunting the shadowy world of our neo-Tolkeinesque existence.

How and why a small rubber toy could become the focus for extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence is almost impossible to understand. How long could anyone be fooled by such nonsense?

First last year's bigfoot scam, where talk of scientific evidence was thrown at a cheap monkey suit in a block of ice, and now a plastic Goblin toy.

Next they'll be telling us that the Loch Ness monster attack someone whilst sitting on a toilet in Inverness........

WHITE DEER HERD IN WISCONSIN

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=inwi10s22a3q81f

Naomi sent us this fascinating video about a herd of albino deer in Wisconsin. It is very interesting particularly because of the sheer numbers of the=m. I suspect that I am being stupid because I have not been able to succeed in embedding the video, so - sadly - you will have to follow the link at the top of this page.

NOW HE HAS THE VIEW FROM ATLANTIS

One of my favourite guest blogs over the last few weeks has been Colin Higgins from Yorkshire, who - incidentally - was the winner of the compy in January's `On the Track`, where he won my everlasting admiration by recognising Surabaya Johnny by the ever lovely Marianne Faithfull. He usually blogs about fish, but here he marks the passing of John Michell...

As a child I found one of the most diverting, not to say fearful examples of cryptic animal behaviour was loud raps on the window pane by birds. My mother interpreted these as a warning and would expound on previous occasions sudden bangs on glass coincided with grim events, usually a death in the family.

Although a conventionally religious Christian there was also a streak of animism in her outlook. A bird in the house was worst of all though such things were never spoken of clearly, one had to deduce her inferences, a spring of delicious, unlimited hypothesise for an imaginative child.
Even bird figurines were thought to be suspect as were birds in art. Perhaps she believed they were obverse representation of the holy spirit, messengers from the dark side of nature, chaos waiting to return the house to the wilderness all homes must one day become.

An approaching thunderstorm would see her turning the mirrors round and putting the cutlery away, something I believe she inherited from her own mother who’d hide the family under the stairs if lightning were nearby: nature became theatre. Everyday objects were the focus or good or bad luck; mirrors, vases, clothing, all would carry associations of events when they were acquired. Clock faces shattered when two of her female relatives died and the family shared a similar conviction the dead were just out of sight with a meaningful dialogue to be had if the living could interpret the signs.

These were private affairs and a visitor to the house wouldn’t suspect this cheerful woman harboured such a psychological grimoir. Like most teenagers I became archly rationalist and felt her superstitions were shameful, ignorant, all the while harbouring a secret fascination for their implications: a weird world, immanent but out of reach. Then one day in the 1970s I walked into a bookshop and saw a copy of John Michell and Bob Rickard’s ‘Phenomena, A Book of Wonders’ and the whole thing crystallised; life was quite as mad and fascinating as I’d once suspected.

I never knew John Michell but he and Bob Rickard had the biggest influence in turning me into what one would now describe as an anomalist. I read the article on him in the FT the day before he died an odd sensation in retrospect, though the piece must have been planned as an obit. It reminded me of another personal coincidence - I once sat through David Lynch’s ‘Straight Story’ at the same time the lead actor Richard Farnsworth (Alvin Straight) died. Weird, as they say.

Whichever hearth you’ve returned to John, I hope it’s a curious one.