Artifacts

Skeptical Monster Hunting

Dinah Voyles Pulver, the environment writer at the Daytona Beach News Journal has a good overview of the debunking of "sea monster" beachings at Tasmania, Bermuda, Nantucket and Chile. All were cetaceans, of course. She also lumps in the nearby 1896 St. Augustine beaching, as a whale too, but my emails with Roy Mackal tell me there may a surprise on the horizon about that one, in a new analysis being conducted. Could it be a giant octopus, after all? Also highlighted by Pulver is the work of cryptozoologist "Charles Paxton, a researcher with the wildlife population assessment department at [...]

Hair of the Yeti

In a comment to an earlier blog, delfin asks: “Would you please tell me if genetic analysis has been used for ‘identification’ of the hair brought by Slick and Hillary? If yes, what the results are? If no, why still not?” I’ve discussed this question, in depth, in Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology, but here’s a summary and a few other thoughts. The Hillary hair samples from 1960 were mostly from only one of the Buddhist monasteries they visited, the Khumjung Lamasery. The famed supposed Yeti scalp from this Buddhist monastery was brought back to Paris and Chicago [...]

Barnum and Bates

Mark Baard’s article, "America Goes Cryptozoology Crazy," in Wired News certainly was reflected in the Bates Conference and during the month of October. Cryptomundo’s launch, the Texas Bigfoot Conference, Duel Masters’ Bounty Offer and present photo prizes, Weird Travels’ Nessie and Champ program, the Dover Demon Boston television programming, and the Bates Cryptozoology Symposium all occurred in a concentration that fed into each other and the media’s growing national fascination with cryptozoology. One of the positive benefits of the Bates College intellectual gathering was some open sharing between artists outside the mainstream and outside cryptozoology. Their energy, thoughts, and insights [...]