MORE ON THE SAGA OF THE PERUVIAN GIANT ANACONDA

The saga of the supposed giant snake from Peru continues. I am now in a dialogue with Greg Warner, the younger of the two explorers who claim to have taken photographs of a 130ft snake in South America. And - much to my surprise - he does seem to be a decent and polite bloke. But his story is so extraordinary that we would not be doing our job properly if we did not approach our investigations of the affair with as much rigour as possible.

Despite recent political changes in this country people are still just about inocent until proven guilty. However, when one is approaching a case like this one, one has to take the opposite tack.

But one thing is paramount: whereas we have to treat all claims, especially ones as extraordinary as this, with a great deal of suspicion, we also have to treat the people making them with respect.

Last year I was quoted in a press story about artist Pollyanna Pickering's trip to Bhutan where she saw what appeared to be a yeti scalp, and I was
pilloried (often illiterately) on websites across the cryptoverse. I know what it is like to have your claims under suspicion, and to be treated with ill-bred rudeness both from the canaille and from those who really should know better. Greg and his father Mike have treated us in a polite and gentlemanly manner, and we have every intention of treating them the same.

The first mystery that had to be cleared up was the matter of the photograph that accompanied the original press story, reproduced in facsimile here just in case anyone thought that we had made it up.

If you read the article, it doesn't claim that this photograph was actually taken by the expedition. Indeed it wasn't. It appears to have been taken by a dude called André Issi and was used to illustrate a journal that can be found here. Tony Lucas in New Zealand and Dr Dan Holdsworth both provided translations which can be found here

Dan went on to write:

This page too is written in Portuguese, and once again Google translate only seems to want to translate part of it, however searching through for the word "anaconda" and translating those sections of text still doesn't seem to yield much info on the photos.

Chris Kraska wrote:

Jon-

That's looks like a dead yellow anaconda on its side. It could also be a dead green anaconda on its back but the photo is so tiny I can't tell if I'm seeing ventral scales or dorsal/lateral scales.

Bobbins.

Chris

However, Greg Warner has written to me that "The photo used is a research photo not one from the expedition although we believe it has all the charictoristics [sic] of a Yacumama or Black Boa 15-20 Meters long." That is fair enough, although I think it shows a dead yellow anaconda about 12ft long. But it is a relatively convincing explanation for how this picture became associated with the case, so I think that it is time that we took Senor Issi and his picture out of the equation, for the time being at least.

If one reads the original newspaper article from the Belfast Telegraph carefully, a lot of the more outlandish claims for the creature (which sounds far more like the minhoaco than a giant snake, but that's another issue) are from stories originally from the South American newspapers reproduced on this page.

Greg kindly provided a translation of these newspaper articles. His translations can be found here Being a suspicious bugger, (although I prefer to call it an adherance to some level of scientific rigour) I also got Chris Kraska to translate them:

(PS although I can make myself understood in New World Spanish, after my expeditions to Mexico and Puerto Rico, my grasp of the language is rudimentary at best, and mostly only good for buying beer and cigarettes, and finding the nearest bar or airport - and as I have since quit smoking, a large chunk of my bilingualism is rendered completely pointless)

It destroyed their home and devoured domestic animals. (smaller above)

Sachamama frightens elderly couple (larger below)

Next. From the text (Btw, this is basically one big run on sentence):

A nearly inexplicable act was what happened to an elderly couple residents of Committee 11 of the Michaela Bastidas settlement who from one moment to the next were swung from one extreme to the other by something large that came out from the depths of the river, from the depths it came out like a hurricane that destroyed my poor house that is more than 50 meters from where it was located, I was dying of fright because I saw it, saw it's gigantic jet black head that was about to kill me, expressed Mrs. Dolores Suna, who was sure that what had left her exposed to the elements with one canoe worth of supplies, is the mother of that island that is in front of ours, there you find her, in the aguaje tree there, finished Dolores, who along with her husband Artemio, was comforted by her neighbors, who didn't doubt in their prayer, now they wait to have the same luck with Civil Defense, we hope.

#3

Smaller above:

Knocked down a house and panicked two residents

Larger below:

Giant Boa in Moronacocha

Smaller below:

People say monster has huge eyes, scales and horns

Iquitos (Peru)-

With fear they are found the neighbors of the settlements of El Porvenir and Micaela Bastidas, located in the sector of Moronachocha, by the presence of a gigantic boa. Antonio Mayta Aricaya (64), fisherman of Moronacocha lake, attests that months prior, in the zone there were plenty of fish and that now there are none owing to the enormous reptile.

"The island is always alive at night and sounds are heard in the river, it's all a mystery. It appears the giant animal uses the vegetation as camoflage to slide through without being seen", decared Mayta Aricaya.

Admin Perez Gutierrez related that all the time the island was a peaceful place, and now it's the opposite. "Until it knocked down a house that was in the middle of the lake. It's the first time this has happened and the river has grown too much."

In the meantime, the people of the two settlements, don't go close to the edges of the river, for fear that the animal will appear, that has been catalogued as a monster with huge eyes, horns and scales.

In RED at center.

"That zone is known for having animals; previously there was a lizard that ate hens, but this incident was different because I saw that there was a huge one with eyes that sparkled like a lantern" says Carlos Caballero Dahua (47), subsecretary of the Micaela Bastidas settlement. According to the neighbors, the boa travels in a zone of vegetation and moves from one end to the other during the night, when there are no humans present.

In my opinion the two sets of translations are substantially the same, and that unless Greg and Mike have far too much time on their hands, and have gone to the trouble of faking two sets of South American newspapers, which is not impossible, but would seem ridiculously unlikely, that the stories that they claimed came from the newspaper were exactly that!

Whether or not a snake did attack someone's house and cause the damage described (which sounds incredibly unlikely), Greg and Mike are making no such claims from their own experience. It is tempting to suggest that someone at the Peruvian newspaper has resurrected stories of the minhoaco and used them to explain damage done to a crappily built building by a flash flood or something similar. Who knows?

The events overnight (and forgive me if they are a little confused, but I was up late watching the election results and I am less than 100% compos mentis this morning) seem to have clarified the matter considerably. And at the moment I have to say that Greg and his father Mike are coming out of this looking much better than I had at first expected.

Watch this space, for there will undoubtedly be more updates later..

COLIN HIGGINS: Redmire Carp and Goblin

One of my favourite guest blogs is that of 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 also went on the lash with Shane McGowan back in his student days, and is obviously a very fine fellow...

To traditionalists, Carp are synonymous with country house lakes where beneath a canopy of weed and lilies they can grow to enormous size, unseen and largely un-fished for. The reality today is more likely to be stocked commercial pools with numbered pitches containing named fish which emerge a few times a season to give their captors momentary notoriety as ‘The Fat Lady’, ‘Two Tone’ or ‘Benson’ put on a few ounces under an onslaught of high protein ground baits.

The most famous of the former idylls is undoubtedly ‘Redmire Pool,’ a secluded three acre lake near Ross on Wye that came to national attention under this pseudonym when Richard Walker smashed the British record in 1952 with a fish of 44 lbs. Chris Yates went on to break the record again in 1980, his 51 and a half pounder coming from the same lake.

In spite of the prodigious nature of these Redmire fish, Walker, Yates and one or two others were given a glimpse of a fish that dwarfed their own captures, a carp of unspeakable proportions known as The King or simply The Monster. If the monster existed as anything other than a hallucination from too many hours on the bankside it was never landed, though estimates place its weight anywhere from 70 to 100 lbs.

Redmire is also famous for its ghosts. Rumour has it Chris Yates attempted to hold an exorcism after events he has alluded to in print and various anglers have written about strange incidents at the lake, their names being shouted, the sound of a phantom cyclist on the bankside, locomotives heard where there are no lines, sudden inexplicable winds, frost covering the contents of their bivvies in midsummer, locked car doors slamming and most frighteningly, a horrible goblin like creature that reduced two grown men to abject fear before being found cowering in the corner of their tent by fellow anglers. Other carp fishermen have admitted, guardedly in a sometimes macho world, to seeing the same staring-eyed thing.

Whatever the nature of this entity Redmire’s secrets have yielded to commercial pressure and the lake has become a sort of heritage site where, for a price, small groups of anglers can fish the same pitches their heroes once trod. Future records are unlikely though, Leney’s original stocking of fifty Galician carp having died out and their offspring showing none of the same tendency for enormous size. Whether the spooks have also departed now this quiet fold in the Herefordshire hills has gone public remains to be seen.

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

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

You are now aware you are reading the daily cryptozoology news update from the CFZ’s cryptozoology news blog. Or at least you would be if anyone were to read this preamble before skipping to the links, like everyone does.

Video Tour: The Library of Dead Animals
Deer Disoriented by Power Lines
Zoo officials mourn big cat
Feral dogs may be culled to protect wildlife in Sikkim forests
Deer leaves Anoka office a bloody mess
Dolphins and porpoises stranded
The question is are they beaching themselves by accident or is it on ‘porpoise’.

GIANT ANACONDA - The plot thickens

The saga of the giant anaconda picture from the Northern Irish newspaper rumbles on, and has taken some most unexpected turns.

Firstly Markus Hemmler made the following post on the Fronitiers of Zoology Usenet group:



My first thought as I've read this story was that I know this picture before... I've tried it with a search for Sucuriju with Google-Picturesearch and you know what? I found it on the first site! Some deeper research and I found the site from which I know it:

http://www.popa.com.br/diarios/issi/BRAS-BSAS.htm



Published some years before and probably taken by a man named André Issi. So if this picture is that which they claim to have taken - it's a hoax.

But then I got a very polite note from one of the members of the expedition:

Hi,

This is Greg Warner. I was with my Father Mike when we made the discovery. He is downstairs relexing after our Sunday BBQ. I'm both excited and surprised to see this blog. One thing we hadn't planned for was a fight to convince fellow crytozoologists. We are putting togther our paper to be submitted to scientific journals as a start of phase two of our project.

However, your questions and concerns are valid and I will bring my father upstairs soon to address these questions. Sometimes the truth is extraordinary.

GW

Greg, if you read this I would be very interested to talk to both you and your father. Yes, your claims are indeed extraordinary, but I would be very interested in seeing your evidence. Email me on jon@eclipse.co.uk

The way I see it is that whatever transpires, if all involved behave like gentlemen, (and ladies, of course, where appropriate) then we can continue to push back the boundaries of human knowledge.

Watch this space

DALE DRINNON: A footnote to moosey water monsters

Dale started at IUPUI hoping for a degree in Biology before changing to Anthropology and as a result has a very diverse background in Geology, Zoology, Paleontology, Anatomy, archaeology, psychology, Sociology, Literature, Latin, Popular Culture, Film criticism, Mythology and Folklore,and various individual human cultures especially mentioning those of the Pacific and the Americas. He has a working knowledge of every human fossil find up until his graduation and every important Cryptozoological sighting up to that point. He has been an amateur along on Archaeological excavations in Indiana as well as doing some local tracking of Bigfoot there. Now he is on the CFZ bloggo..

Just as a sort of a footnote, The Great Horned Water Serpent in the Great Lakes was supposed to have red horns made of copper according to native traditions. The copper deposits on Isle Royale were supposed to be produced from the horns, meaning that the horns were supposed to be made of copper, the horns were dropped and continually renewing, and the copper horns became the copper deposits.Renewable horns means antlers. The translators make the meaning of such traditions much less clear by their choice of wording.

Further West, some folklorists have mentioned red-horned Water Monsters from Native traditions and Mark Hall mentioned that in passing in a PURSUIT article on horned-alligator reports "Horrors" From The Mesozoic. It seems that these reports come from areas associated with the Apaches, and the Apaches are Athabascans out of Western Canada originally: one of the members at Frontiers of Zoology is a Kiowa and he sent me a personal message saying that the native name for the type of creature is Water Horse.

The Water monster at Flathead Lake is moose-antlered in the Native traditions of that particular area. That is one place where the tradition specifically states that feature.

Incidentaly one of the later news items out of PURSUIT before it folded was about a Water Monster report from Colorado. The report was of a creature swimming along the surface of the water with one hump placed prominantly midway along the exposed back right behind the head and neck (as also recorded at Lake Winnepeg/Winnepegosis/Manitoba). The witness denied it was a swimming moose but that is EXACTLY what he had described.

GREAT SNAKE? OR NO GREAT SHAKES?

As we came downstairs this morning we were greeted by the following headline, which has been splashed across various portions of The Internet:

LISBURN MEN FIND GIANT SNAKE IN THE AMAZON

and a newspaper report from a Northern Irish newspaper which told how:


"After 23 years of research including the detailed study of ancient art, cultures spanning 3000 years and three continents to the latest in satellite imaging technology, a father and son make an extraordinary trip deep into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon to confirm their theories that this is where a giant anaconda with a difference lives.

But that's precisely what Lisburn man Mike Warner (73) and his son Greg (44) have done, seeking evidence that this was the home of the Yacumama and actually capturing a picture of the creature".

I had already done the morning posts for the bloggo this morning. We have visitors this afternoon, and I wanted to have my decks clear for action. But we had to comment on this before it gets out of hand. However, as Richard says "a number of things sound wrong with this story".

• Firstly as professional cryptozoologists we would have thought that we would have heard of Mike and Greg Warner, especially if they had been researching the giant anaconda for 23 years. They might well have been keeping their research secret however, and despite rumours to the contrary, it is not obligatory for UK cryptozoologists to be members of the CFZ, nor would we wish it to be. But one would have thought that we would have at least heard of them.
• But the doubts don't stop there. The size attributed to the snake is truly fantastic, 40 metres (133 feet long) and 2 metres (six feet) wide. The idea of it knocking down 90 foot trees and demolishing houses sounds equaly unlikely.These, together with the huge furrows the creature is said to make make it sound much more like the minhocão - a supposed giant worm like beast from Southern Brazil and Uruguay. The minhocão supposedly uprooted trees, made furrows and destroyed houses. But it has not been reported in recent years.
• The idea of a snake spitting water like a fire hose to knock monkeys out of trees strikes us as absurd, and may well have been inspired by the archer fish that squirts water at flies.
• On to the photo. It does seem to show a large anaconda but nothing like the 40 metres quoted. The size of the snake is hard to judge. We only have what seems to be the prow of a canoe to compare it to. Canoes can differ greatly in size. Is this a one man canoe or a large vessel for transporting a number of people and their equipment? At the front of the boat we see what looks like tarpaulin and rope covering something so the canoe may be quite large, If this is so then the anaconda may be very big (but nothing like 40 metres).
• If the boat is 3 to 4 feet wide then the anaconda would be 1 to 1.5 feet wide. The width to length ration of an anaconda can differ greatly between individuals and is effected by how much they have eaten. A rough estimate would put a snake of this width in the 18-25 foot range.
  

Now, we would like to stress that this story may be genuine, and that the peculiar aspects of it may just be the result of poor reportage, or even misprints. Neither Richard or I have any great faith in local journalists as a whole, having been misprinted and misquoted, and had complete rubbish just made up and attributed to us over the years. But as it is at the moment the stroy would seem to be too fantastic to be true.

The full story can be found at:

http://www.lisburntoday.co.uk/news/LISBURN-MEN-FIND-GIANT-SNAKE.5335325.jp

and no doubt the usual suspects will be attacking us by the end of the day with lines like "wot do this ppls think they is, Giant snakes rule rar!"

But we really don't care, and - believe me - we would love to be proved wrong: 130ft long snakes which spit water at monkeys would be monumentally cool beyond belief...

UPDATES CAN BE FOUND AT:

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/giant-anaconda-plot-thickens.html

http://forteanzoology.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-on-saga-of-peruvian-giant-anaconda.html

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday’s News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

Sunday is film recommendation day in the paragraph nobody reads before I post the links to yesterdays cryptozoological and related news storys. Before I do that though I’d like to inform you all that the link I posted last week to where you can watch the latest series of Fullmetal Alchemist legally and for free is working again. Anyway this weeks film is ‘Identity’ http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi848363801/ . At first glance it sounds like a conventional thriller but then… well I can’t really say much more than that otherwise it’ll spoil the twists, and I’m not Rosie O’Donnal.
And now, the news:

Royal dachshund savages Queen's guard
Get down boy!
Spider woos mate with shiny gifts
5,000 families flee hungry elephants
Real-life Clangers discovered!
Great apes 'laugh like people when they are tickled'
I think I smell a rat...
Beehive fence frightens away elephants


Q: What sound did the grape make when the elephant trod on it?
A: It gave out a little ‘wine’.