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CHRIS CLARK: Three Little Known Cryptids

Two major cryptozoological encyclopedias have been published in the last few years. It might be thought that between them they have exhausted the field. However, I believe that there are still a handful of fascinating cryptids that failed to make the cut.

The Magnetic Mole

This animal seems to have developed the magnetic sense, used by some birds for navigation on long cross-country flights, to an extent found in no other creature. Fossil remains show the brain cavity to have contained a number of tiny nodules of haematite, an iron oxide with magnetic properties also found in the brains of pigeons and responsible for their orientational skills. The mole apparently used its magnetic sense to solve the problem of navigation underground in total darkness.

The mole, which flourished in several places in Europe including the British Isles, was believed to have become extinct in the Pleistocene after an abrupt reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field confused its orientation and caused it to tunnel ever deeper in the confident belief that it was returning to its burrow. Recently however there have been a number of extraordinary reports of this animal appearing, often in a highly exhausted state, in Australia and New Zealand…

Giotto’s Bat

This agreeable cryptid, the only one associated with Italy, was distinguished by an unusually narrow choice of habitat, only roosting within those Tuscan and Umbrian churches decorated with excellent frescoes and with a good restaurant within a few hundred yards. It flourished from the Romanesque to the Renaissance periods but was believed to have become extinct during the Baroque. Several years ago however it was tentatively identified with a small bat in the corner of a picture painted by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones during his tour of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Though it is impossible to identify the precise location at which Burne-Jones worked, and though this identification remains the only evidence for its continued existence, its sympathetic choice of habitat make it a favourite subject for the less intrepid cryptozoological explorer.

The Antikythira Elephant (Elephas volans)

The hypothesis that a large species can become substantially reduced in size after being isolated on islands is dramatically illustrated by the extinct Sicilian elephant, which grew to only three feet high. Even more striking confirmation came from the discovery on the tiny Greek island of Antikythira, only a mile or so long, of the fossil remains of an elephant much smaller still. The Antikythira elephant was only a few inches high, with a long slender trunk and very large ears. Recent aerodynamic calculations leave no doubt that the combination of large ears and low body size allowed this elephant to fly, and the long trunk suggests that it lived much as moths or humming-birds do, hovering in front of flowers to drink the nectar.

Like other elephant species of the Mediterranean area, it was believed to have become extinct some time during the last few thousand years and thus be of no interest to cryptozoology.

Recently however a small number of tourists have begun coming to Antikythira , and there have been reports of creatures ‘like grey humming birds with four feet’ feeding amongst the flowers: one woman even found a ‘tiny elephant’ perched on the edge of her glass drinking her gin and tonic through its trunk.

OLL LEWIS: Another Fine Ness

78 Years ago today, a little piece of cryptozoological history appeared in a newspaper that really should have known better. Oll Lewis investigates...

April Fool's Day has always, for me, been a day to look forward to, not least because of the many eccentric and tall tales that appear in the press. Some of my favourite April Fools have been last year’s flying penguins documentary from the BBC (which probably didn’t fool anyone but looked incredibly cute) and a fake video game preview where the aim of the game was to kill as many innocent people as possible, in a magazine called Playstation Plus. The game was obviously fake and it doesn’t seem that funny a concept, but laughs were had when a certain tabloid newspaper, upon hearing about the game decided to run a campaign to “ban this sick filth!” The magazine took great joy in pointing out that the tabloid had not only fallen hook, line and sinker for the prank, but was also guilty of copyright theft for reprinting their mocked up screenshots without permission, and served as a gentle reminder to tabloids to actually do their research before they run a story.

A hoax can be seen as a bit of jolly japery or harmless fun if the perpetrators come clean before any real damage is done. If not then it becomes a very different kind of animal indeed that can have unforeseen consequences. One such hoax occurred in the winter of 1933 on the banks of Loch Ness.

Earlier in 1933, a new section of road had been completed which, as a consequence, meant that a large number of people would get a clear view of and easy access to the shore of that part of Loch Ness for the first time ever. Sure enough it was only a matter of months before sightings of a strange animal started to filter through to the media, starting with a sighting by George Spicer and his wife on the 22nd of July 1933.





Reports of a strange animal showing up in the loch were soon tied to folkloric accounts, going back hundreds of years, of strange animals lolloping around in the waves and on the shore of the loch. Sensing that the story of the year, or possibly even the decade was about to break most of Britain’s national news agencies, and several international ones, soon had their correspondents positioned in Inverness and several other vantage points around the loch.

The Daily Mail decided to go one better though. Rather than just paying some random bloke to send them back stories of peoples sightings and negosiating the rights to any photos, their man would BE the story. The Mail basicly wanted Allan Quatermain to hunt for the monster, but as Quatermain was a work of fiction they got the next best thing, Marmaduke Wetherell. Wetherell was the perfect character to create a buzz for their paper: He was an actor and film director, so certainly knew what played well on film and cinema newsreels and he knew his stuff about hunting, having been a big game hunter in Africa for a number of years. The fact that he had the sort of looks that at the time would have caused many women to swoon in the street, also counted in his favour. The message was clear, if anyone was going to find the monster it would be the Daily Mail’s dashing action hero, you might as well not even bother reading another newspaper!

In December 1933 the Mail’s man struck gold. Wetherell found a line of large four toed footprints only a few days after he arrived in Loch Ness and took casts of them using plaster of Paris. From the spacing between the tracks Wetherell estimated that the creature must have been over 20 feet (6m) long. Wetherell sent the casts to the Natural History museum and while he waited for their staff to come back from their Christmas break so they could analyse the casts, Wetherell and the Daily Mail went public. The Daily Mail and the cinema news reels went crazy for the surrogate Quatermain’s discovery of the first physical proof of the monster’s existence, surely with Wetherell on the case it was only a matter of time before the monster itself was found. The number of Daily Mails that would be sold with a photograph of Wetherell twiddling his moustache while standing aloft a ‘bagged’ Nessie, smoking shotgun over his shoulder didn’t bear thinking about.

Unfortunately the Mail and Wetherell would come down to earth with a bump in January 1934. Upon return from their Christmas break, Natural History museum scientists eagerly unwrapped the plaster casts to take a look at them and determined that they were not only of a hippopotamus’s foot, but all of the same hippopotamus foot. It is thought that the tracks were made by somebody stamping an ashtray or umbrella stand made from a stuffed hippopotamus foot and that someone had laid out the tracks as a hoax. Who laid out the tracks is unknown; possible suspects including a local hotel owner, a rival journalist wanting to take Wetherell down a peg or two or even Wetherell himself.

Wetherell is probably the least likely suspect however as if he knew that all tracks had been made by the same foot he probably would have had the good sense not to send the casts to experts who would spot that right away. Regardless of who laid out the fake tracks, the damage was done, and all the papers, including the Daily Mail, turned on Wetherell, blaming him for the hoax. His reputation irreversibly damaged the Daily Mail sacked him and wrote damming articles about him that stuck the knife in and twisted it into the open wound whilst exonerating the Mail from any blame in the matter.

All this hurt Wetherell deeply and he, along with his son, Ian, son in law Christian Spurling, planned his own revenge on the Daily Mail. Ian Wetherell bought some plastic-wood and a toy submarine from Woolworths and Christian moulded the plastic wood to form what looked like a head and neck above the submarine before setting it afloat in the loch and taking photos. The next stage of their plan was to use a go-between, Maurice Chambers, to get a trustworthy acquaintance of his to pose as the photographer and sell their photograph to the Daily Mail. A gynaecologist friend of Chambers who had a practice in London, Robert Kenneth Wilson, obliged and the photo was published in the Daily Mail in April 1934. The photo became known as the surgeon’s photo and is probably the image most people think about when Nessie is mentioned.

Marmaduke Wetherell had got his revenge on the newspaper but never personally revealed his involvement in the hoax, perhaps believing that it would be discovered as quickly as the hippo-print hoax and leaving the Mail itself with egg on it’s face this time, but by the time he realised this wasn’t going to happen he was in too deep. It was only when a 90 year old Clinton Spurling confessed to the hoax in 1993, to Loch Ness researchers David Martin and Alastair Boyd, that the photo was finally debunked. Even after Spurling's confession there are still people who believe the surgeon’s photo is not a hoax and others who believe that because the photo was a fake this means that there is no such thing as a monster in Loch Ness.

I don’t know for certain whether a monster lives in Loch Ness or not, but one thing is sure, the fact that one photograph was fake doesn’t mean that everything is. The problem comes when people base their opinion on something on a hoax related to it and ignore any other evidence that comes along after.

An ancient rock painting of a marsupial lion

Antiquity Vol 83 Issue 319 March 2009

An ancient rock painting of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex,from the Kimberley, Western Australia

Kim Akerman & Tim Willing

Introduction

In June 2008 Tim Willing, while exploring rock art on the north-western coast of the Kimberley, found and recorded the image of a large striped quadruped painted in a shelter near the western shore of the Admiralty Gulf. Unfortunately conditions permitted the taking of only three digital images. Reviewing these, Akerman considered that they depicted a marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) rather than a thylacine or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus).

In an earlier paper Akerman (1998) had described another painting of a large quadruped, also from the north Kimberley, and suggested, after reviewing the palaeontological literature and literature dealing with representations of ancient fauna in Aboriginal rock art (Calaby & Lewis 1977; Murray & Chaloupka 1984; Lewis 1986; Chaloupka & Murray 1986), that it possibly represented a Thylacoleo. The 2008 image however clearly shows a number of features, absent in the image previously described and which tend to confirm that it represents a Thylacoleo.

Read On...

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

Yesterday’s News Today
http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the round up of the latest cryptozoology news, courtesy of the CFZ daily news blog:

Three Neanderthal Sub-groups Confirmed
3 new tiger cubs in Vizag zoo
Mystery ailment kills 14 horses at polo tournament
Nandankanan gets ‘wild’ gift from Bhopal
And
Pig Brother reality show to sell more bacon

Most reality TV is a real ‘boar’, but this gives me the chance to ‘ham’ it up by telling some truly horrific pig gags:

Q: What is a pigs favourite band?
A: Pork-wind

Q: What is a pigs favourite sporting event?
A: The Olym-pigs

Q: How can you tell if a pig is in a bad mood about something?
A: they start to swine about it.

Thank you ladies and gents, I’m here all week.

SHANE LEA: More crypto songs

Hi Jon,

You definitely got the ball rolling with the crypto songs. Proper job mate! You are right, there are more crypto songs out there!

You mentioned David Bowie, or Bowie, as he is known to us music fans. One of his greatest songs, and one very near and dear to our cause, is none other than, "Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks)". The man who fell to earth even entitled an album Scary Monsters. You gotta love David Bowie!

Another wild album title and cover, for that matter, is Bat Out of Hell, by Meat Loaf. It is a very popular album, and there is even a song on there called "Bat Out of Hell". There are even two follow up albums, called Bat Out of Hell II and Bat Out of Hell III. On Bat Out of Hell III, there is a song entitled "The Monster is Loose" and one called "Monstro".

Another fantastic group to check out is Uriah Heep. They have a lot of fantastic imagery in their lyrics. Take for instance, "Rainbow Demon". "The Wizard" is a great Fortean song, but I digress.

Alice Cooper, the master of the macabre, has released "Feed My Frankenstein", "Halo of Flies" and "The Black Widow".

I would be remiss, if I didn't mention "Carpet Crawlers" by Genesis, and "All You Zombies", by the Hooters.

Speaking of zombies, the album of the day that doesn't just take the cake, but takes the entire bakery, is Hellbilly Deluxe, by Rob Zombie. On there are songs entitled, "Call of the Zombie", "Superbeast", "Dragula", "Living Dead Girl","Demonoid Phenomena", "Spookshow Baby", "Meet the Creeper" and "How to Make a Monster", all on one album! I have seen Rob Zombie speak about the Loch Ness monster and bigfoot. He seems quite interested in the bigfoot phenomenon!

I believe that we have just scratched the surface of songs one could claim had some sort of cryptozoological connection.

Have a great week Jon.

Very Best Wishes,

Shane

TO WHICH JON ADDS:

REM have an album called `Monster`, there is that song which goes "what's that coming over the hill, is it a monster" (that the boys played incessantly at the 2007 Weird Weekend, Frank Zappa has a song including Monster Magnet, and another featuring a giant dog called Threnobulax, and yet another featuring Jean-Luc Ponty, valled King Kong. But there are more...

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: Two obscure Welsh dragons

Once again we hand you over to guest blogger Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He is a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this is jolly good news for all of us..


The Red Dragon (Ddraig Goch) is, of course, the cryptozoological symbol of the Principality of Wales (although only officially for 50 years). Not surprisingly, there are numerous dragon yarns from Wales, one or two of which have escaped the standard works on the subject. The following are both from ‘Bye-gones’, that little known journal I have found so useful for odd snippets of Fortean interest.

In June 1896, correspondent ‘N.W.T.’ contributed this bit of folklore: ‘I have been informed that some 50 years ago at Ystradgynlais [Powys, Mid Wales] it was generally believed there was a flying serpent existing on a spot called “Winllan”; it was a rough, stony piece of ground covered with brambles on the river side, and is now the site of Yniscedwyn Board Schools. Lizards infested the place. My informant suggests that the story was invented to keep children from going blackberrying.’

A quick Google search finds an Ysgol Ynyscedwyn in Ystradgynlais but their website states that this school was founded in 1906, so this may not be the Board School referred to, despite carrying the same name (I attach a picture, anyway – imagine being taught over a former dragon’s nest!).

In response to this account, ‘T.H.J.’ dug out a reference to another dragon from an old Welsh language journal of 1877 and submitted a translation to ‘Bye-gones’ later the same month. This beast inhabited the valley of the River Conwy in North Wales and went by the name of a carrog. This is the only such usage I know of (although there is a village called Carrog not far from Llangollen, in the valley of the Dee). T.H.J. informs us:

‘The carrog somewhat resembled a flying serpent. According to popular tradition, this fearful creature sheltered at night in the brushwood that then grew on Dol-y-garrog, and during the day frequently visited Eglwysfach, kidnapping and eating children; and in order to slay this creature Saint Beuno paid a visit to the place.’

St Beuno is an important name in North-East Wales, a Dark Age saint to whom many churches are dedicated. He is said to have been the uncle of St Winefride, whose severed head created the famous Holywell in Flintshire. The village where the action takes place is today spelt Eglwysbach, but this is probably an inaccurate spelling. But back to the story:

‘He reached Eglwysfach very early. He went to the church, and repeated his prayers, and after the sun had shone for some time the Carrog came and lay down on the hill. Saint Beuno ascended the church tower, and directed an arrow from his bow to the tender spot on his throat, which took fatal effect; and it is said this was the only penetrable part of the creatures hide, being like that of a crocodile.’

A practical bunch these early saints. However, there is another tradition relating to the area in which a hero slays a fearsome wild boar, so this may be a variant on that theme.

Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazine (http://www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk/) and Uncanny UK (http://www.uncannyuk.com/).