There is a lot of evidence that supports the existence of a large undiscovered animal currently living in Loch Ness and in other freshwater lakes around the world. Though many sightings have been recorded, plus photographs and video footage, an animal’s existence remains questionable despite the insistence of many witnesses that the object they are seeing is animate. Here I propose that the “animal” people are seeing is actually nothing of the sort, and is in fact a vegetable, using the Ipomoea batatas paratype CFZ076 as evidence.Ipomoea batatas is a globally important root vegetable well known for its sweet flavour and potato-like texture. It is eaten nearly worldwide with a major production centre in China. Its maximum size has been well documented as being just over 11kg, but never before has a shape for the potato been grown to give a satisfactorily plesiosaur-esque shape.
New evidence now clearly shows that sweet potatoes can both grow large enough to be seen from a distance bobbing in water, but can also grow in a shape sufficient to produce the general shape
seen by witnesses. The large floating sweet potato hypothesis to explain sightings of lake monsters should be taken very seriously indeed by all researchers working in this field.
Max - you have to lay off eating those funny little mushrooms.
ReplyDeleteLars
Hmmm, in order for the hypothesis to work it must match up with the data it endeavours to explain. In this case, since you are using the old arse-end-first method of having your solution in hand and forcing the base data to fit your solution, you must needs go through and mangle every Water Monster report in the world such that the reported features consistently match those of a sweet potato.
ReplyDeleteLet me break the news to you gently, the reports do not match your solution, not on the average, not in the majority of the reports and not even in the tiniest minority of reports. They just plain are not described as remotely resembling sweet potatos.
This does however provide a good comparison for any of the numerous comparable candidate theories composed arse-end-first and intended as blanket explanations for the entire body of reports, made without any prior reference to those reports. In this case, most of the theories about Water monsters are composed without any more applicability than using the sweet potato as an example. Long-necked primitive cetaceans (or indeed, plesiosaur-necked variants of ANY placental mammal) fail not only because they are anatomically unsound constructions, but simply on the basis that they do not match the majority of the descriptions that are on record and which the hypothesis is intended to explain.
Best Wishes, Dale D.