It is a recurring paradigm in contemporary forteana that whenever an unfortunate creature dies, falls in the water, and is washed up, hairless and bloated by decomposition it is hailed as a monster.Well not, according to this story sent to us by our favourite Australian news-sleuth Rebecca (I am doing my best to stop calling her Ruby) Lang. What is most ignominous is that the whole sordid affair took place in Bude, seventeen miles away from the CFZ HQ, and we have to get a second-hand report from the Antipodies.
"A TV station in Britain has been left red-faced after mistakenly reporting that a polar bear had washed up on a beach in southern England. Presenter Naomi Lloyd astonished viewers of the ITV network's West Country Breakfast bulletin with a report that a polar bear had mysteriously travelled several thousand kilometres from the Arctic Circle to surface on the shores of Cornwall. "A walker in Cornwall has caught an extraordinary sight on camera. A polar bear has washed up on a beach near Bude," Miss Lloyd told viewers."
A polar bear? Could such a thing be? Well despite walruses and several other Arctic pinnipeds having turned up in British waters on occasion, and despite a comic strip in Look and Learn magazine during the early 1970s (if anyone can find the name for me I would be monumentally grateful), which featured such a thing as part of its storyline, no polar bears have ever (as far as I am aware) swum or drifted into British waters of their own volition.
It was a cow, with coat bleached white by the sun and sea. Never mind. Better luck next time.
http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/news/articles/7978035.html
This was not the first time that a carcass of an "unknown" animal (Trunko, several pseudo-plesiosaurs) was labelled as "polar bear". Something to remember dealing with "polar bear" carcasses in other cases... ;)
ReplyDeleteDoesn't look much like either a cow or a bear to me - my guess would have been something much smaller (beaver, badger, etc). I guess this is a rare case of photo perspective tricking the observer the opposite way to the usual with cryptid photos - ie. making the "mystery" creature look much smaller than it is rather than much bigger...
ReplyDelete