Saturday, February 28, 2009
I have just got back from a holiday in Italy. When I left, we still had snow here on the hills. I got back to snowdrops in full bloom, daffodils pushing through the turf, hens laying for England... amazing what a difference a week makes.
It’s only a matter of days before the local frogs start spawning – although there are some places in the Northern hills where last year’s tadpoles are still waiting to morph... The spring/summer season is too short and tends to be cold, slowing down the process to two years instead of one.
The toads will wait until the frogs are well into their spawning season before they will start, and their tadpoles are noticeable by being small and jet black, at a time when the frogs are turning mottled and growing legs.
The robin is singing his heart out and staking out his territory, as is the blackbird, but what really caught my eye yesterday was a pair of buzzards riding the thermals in a fantastic courtship display. The sun was shining off their backs and they just took my breath away.
But I blather... What I wanted to tell you about was a Creature from Pisa. We’d stopped off at the Botanic Gardens, close to the wobbly tower. My fella doesn’t notice things unless they are blatantly obvious, so he didn’t notice the THING that was living under the flaked sun-baked plaster peeling away from a building. It was small, black, and it was next-to-silent, and it disappeared into it’s broken plasterwork home when my shadow past it. I just caught a glimpse of a fast moving blackness, so obviously, I stopped walking and watched.
It took about 3 seconds to re-appear – a quick flicker of jet black something, which hid again as soon as it realised I was still there. A few seconds later, and I was rewarded by a similar performance, but I still didn’t know what it was. I’d guessed at a lizard, a gecko perhaps, or a bat maybe... or even a huge mother**cking spider... So I did what ANY self-respecting Beast-Hunter would do... I broke a bit of the plaster off. It had lifted anyway, and wasn’t doing the building any good.
The THING hid deeper in the plasterwork, and so I broke more off. I just wanted to see what it was, you understand.... By this time, my absence had been noticed, and himself had come back to find me. He was horrified to find me “demolishing a building” as soon as his back was turned, and insisted that I stop my destruction immediately.
I said “...but there’s a THING...” but he wasn’t having any of it. I broke one more bit of plaster off, for luck, and realised that the THING was in fact some sort of lizard, before I was lead away to look at plants. I don’t think RyanAir would approve of me smuggling a reptile into Liverpool Airport, so it’s perhaps as well that I was lead away when I was.... But, girls and boys, I ask you – wouldn’t you have done the same?
Jan Edwards, Head of Animal Care
Farplace Animal Rescue - the no-kill animal sanctuary
Farplace, Sidehead, Westgate, County Durham, DL13 1LE
A week or so ago I made a certain tongue in cheek prediction about the surrealchemical follow through that would most likely result from the advent of what I dubbed the Falmouth Bay cattything. Guess what was advertised in the pub wherein Maxy, Corinna and I found ourselves in the Holloway Rd last saturday night?
The other night I caught the American show Monster Hunter, wherein host Josh Gates is sent all across the globe in search of real monsters. It sounds great, but it isn't. Josh spends only a miniscule amount of time in each location, the research is non-existent and Josh has no zoological knowledge whatsoever.
A case in point was the show. I wasted an hour of my life watching the other night. Josh and his team had been sent to New Britain to look for a 'dinosaur'. Despite the fact that the beast had supposedly eaten three dogs, it was labelled as an 'iguanodon'. Iguanodon was a herbivore.
The actual sighting took place on the island in 2004. It occured near the village of Rabaul. Witness Christine Samei reported a 30 foot, grey scaled beast as thick as a 900 litre water tank. It reared up on its hind legs some ten feet tall. The monster ate several dogs and a search was launched, with armed soldiers carrying M16s. Nothing was found.
New Guinea and the surrounding islands are well known for such encounters. In 1960, a number of people in Papua New Guinea were supposedly killed by dragons that were over 20 feet long, stood on their hind legs and spat fire. Villagers built stockades to protect themselves. Officials from the government looked into the attacks and examined the bodies of the victims, but failed to find the monsters.
In the same year, Lindsay Green and Fred Kleckhan, administration agricultural officers, were shown skin and part of a jaw from a giant lizard.
Robert Grant and David George were exploring the Strachen Island district in 1961 when they saw a grey lizard some 26 feet long lying on a log. Its neck alone was 3 feet in length.
In 1969, explorer David M Davis was shown Papuan cave paintings of a giant bipedal lizard.
Fast forward to the mid 1980s and our own Colonel John Blashford Snell was told of an upright walking, fire-spitting dragon on New Guinea. The locals called it Artrellia. One story concerned a warrior who sat on a 'log' that turned out to be a giant lizard that reared up ten feet tall.
On a baited stakeout, the Colonel himself caught a glimpse of a lizard with a head the size of a horse’s head. A local shot a young specimen of an Artrellia some 6 feet long. It turned out to be a salvadori dragon (Varanus salvadori). They are the world’s longest lizard growing to 15 feet. But most of that is taken up by the lengthy tail, so they do not have the bulk of a Komodo dragon. Could the salvadori dragon grow far bigger than we know?
In 1999, two separate groups of people spotted a monster at Lake Murry near Boroko. It had crocodile like skin, a long tail, thick hind legs and smaller front ones. Varanids or monitor lizards can rear up on their hind legs using the tail as a support. The spitting flames could refer to the red and orange fork tongue they shoots in and out like a flickering flame.
CFZ member Bry Morgan visited New Guinea a couple of years back and was told that the truly giant lizards were not Artrellia but the war (pronounced whaar) dragon. One chief told him of seeing a war dragon 25 feet long. It had grey scales. Bry was also allowed to take home a small piece of preserved skin from one of these beasts. Our friend Dr Lars Thomas examined it at the University of Copenhagen, but sadly the DNA was too badly damaged from being in direct sunlight to be of use.
Could a giant 20-30 foot monitor lizard be existing on New Guinea? It makes more sense than a living dinosaur, especially a flesh eating Iguanodon!
'Monster Hunter' is a waste of time and money. Despite having all the financial backing anyone could want, an amazing array of equipment and transport, Josh achieves nothing. The reason? He spends so little time actually looking for the cryptids. In the New Guinea episode, he wastes time searching for the supposed 'Ri' mermaid. This was identified as a dugong well over a decade ago. In another episode, where he is searching for the Kongamanto, a supposed living pterosaur, he films what any ten year old could tell you is a bat. He excitedly takes this back to experts in the States who tell him 'it’s a bat'.
To add insult to injury we have expeditions backed by creationist loonies who think that finding dinosaurs will prove their crackpot young earth theories. It seems that everyone except the CFZ, the ones who really deserve it, are getting funding and wasting it. If I had half the budget of 'Monster Hunter' I think I would have found at least one cryptid.
Indeed, so fascinated am I by it, I even wrote a book about the damned critter!
The story essentially had its origins in 1879, when a man walking home late at night, and with his horse-and-cart in-tow, claimed to have been attacked by a bizarre ape-man style beast with shining eyes that ultimately vanished into the night.
Not only that: the beast was distinctly spectral in nature, as can be evidenced by the fact that the man said that as he struck it with his horse-whip, the whip actually passed right through its hairy body!
More intriguing: sightings of the Man-Monkey have abounded in the area ever since. Indeed, I think my current count of cases, sightings and incidents is upwards of 30 - and which covers the period from the early 20th Century and right up until September 2005.
But now, there is a fascinating development in the saga - and maybe, just maybe, it may open some doors to the question of what the Man-Monkey really was, is, or may have been.
The story comes via Fortean expert and author Mike Dash.
As Dash says, just recently he was leafing through a copy of the December 8, 1878 edition of Sheldrake's Aldershot & Sandhurst Military Gazette, and came across the following story in its pages:
CAPTURING A GORILLA IN SHROPSHIRE
For a fortnight past the district around Madely Wood, Salop, has been in a state of intense excitement, by the alleged depredations committed by a gorilla, which is said to have escaped from a wild beast menagerie travelling to Bridgnorth.
The animal was stated to have first made his appearance in the neighbourhood of that town, where in the darkness of the night it was severally seen by a clergyman and a policeman, both of whom fled.
It is also said to have appeared at several places in the immediate neighbourhood. A few evenings since the occupier of a house in Madely Wood went to bed at a reasonable hour, with the greater portion of his family, leaving his “gude wife” up, who took the opportunity to visit a neighbour, leaving the door open and a candle burning.
Returning in a short time, she was horrified at seeing a bent form, with a goodly array of gray hair around its face, crouching over the expiring embers of the fire, apparently warming itself, the light having gone out.
Too frightened to shriek, she ran to her neighbours, who quickly armed themselves with pokers, iron bars, guns, and pitchforks and other instruments of a similar character, and marched in a body to capture the gorilla.
The form was seen sitting at the fire, but evidently aroused by the approaching body, rose to its full height and revealed the figure of an eccentric character well known in the neighbourhood as “Old Johnny,” who seeing the door open had quietly walked in to light his pipe, accidentally “puffed” the candle out, and was very near being captured, if not exterminated, in mistake for an escaped gorilla.
The animal has not been heard of since.
Well, this is indeed fascinating: the story surfaced only one month before the Man-Monkey was seen - and in the same English county of Shropshire, no less.
And as Mike astutely notes:
"Old Johnny and his humorous encounter make for an interesting story, and it's easy to see why the journalist who wrote the piece focused on him. As published, though, the article ignores the central question of what became of Shropshire's mysterious 'gorilla'. The wild-beast-escaped-from-a-travelling menagerie is a common motif in out of place animal stories, as Mick Goss demonstrated years ago in a Fortean Times article on the mysterious crocodile of Cefn Caves - itself just over the border in north Wales. But it would be an ambitious showman who kept an animal as dangerous as a gorilla in a travelling show."
Indeed, Mike is right: numerous stories, tales and rumors of "circus escapees" (in Britain , in the U.S. and elsewhere) have been trotted out time and again to account for sightings of exotic animals having been seen in areas where they have no business roaming.
A perfect case in point is Britain's big-cats.
For example, in his classic title Cat Flaps, British Fortean author Andy Roberts discussed a wave of "big-cat" sightings in the English county of Yorkshire in the 1980s. One particular series of encounters led one commentator to tell Andy that: "They all come from Knaresborough Zoo, you know."
Of course, there was no evidence at all that the zoo had lost any big-cats - yet such tales and theories often spring up in such situations.
So, is that what happened back in 1878?
Had someone - or, as the Gazette's story suggests, several people - seen a weird Bigfoot-like entity that was subsequently explained (without any actual evidence to support the notion), as having escaped from a "travelling menagerie"?
Or, incredibly, was the story actually true?
Could there really have been a travelling menagerie from which a gorilla made a successful bid for freedom? And if so, did it ultimately find its way one dark and winter night in January 1879 to the heart of the Shropshire Union Canal, where it scared the you-know-what out of the man who had the misfortune to encounter it?
Perhaps further digging will unravel the puzzle.
Could it really be the case that a fully-grown gorilla briefly made its home in the wilds of Shropshire before probably succumbing to starvation and the effects of a harsh winter? Of course, that would not explain the seemingly spectral nature of the beast reported at the canal - nor would it explain how sightings of the same beast have continued until the present day.
Unless, that is, what people are seeing today could be the ghostly-form of the long-dead gorilla; forever doomed to haunt and wander the tree-shrouded, old canal...
But, bringing animal ghosts into the story is a whole different kettle of fish that I will keep for another day!
Suffice to say for now, however, Mike Dash has made a highly significant breakthrough in a story that - despite its age - never seems to go away.
For further information, see the following links:
1. Mike Dash's original article.
2. A post on this development at Cabinet of Wonders.
28th February: CRYPTOZOOLOGY: In the wake of yesterday's posting about the Borneo giant snake pictures, we take a look at just how difficult it is to fake such an image.
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28th February: CRYPTOZOOLOGY: The latest developments from Falmouth Bay re. the cattything
Click here for further details...
28th February: CFZ NEWS: Oll Lewis brings you yesterday's news today! The puns are worse and the tea better
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28th February: CFZ PRESS: Warning - A pirate edition of Karl Shuker's book
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We will keep you up to date with what happens as and when we can.....
The latest news stories are: Ancient whale bones found in San Diego, an orang-utan that whistles, a pretty groovy looking new fish species, a mobile phone found in a fish (a new spin on the old missing ring being found in a fish story?), Turtles under threat, elephants being put to work in a circus, pictures of the massive stingray and cows taking over a Chinese railway station.
Seriously, no ‘bull’ about that, the cows are just roaming around that station and showing no signs of ‘cow’towing to convention.