Breaking News

New Mothman Documentary

Why is this man smiling? Should this man be smiling? What movie were these two below in? If you read the first man’s column today in the Charleston Daily Mail you’d probably discover that the second man might not be smiling because guy number one, Dave Peyton, miswrote the name of the movie based on John A. Keel’s book as The Mothman Chronicles. Of course, Keel’s book is The Mothman Prophecies and so is the Richard Gere and Laura Linney movie. (Nice shirt Ms. Linney has on. I’m lucky enough to have it for my museum, and that does make [...]

Why Bear Lake Again?

In a look at Water Babies and, of course, the Bear Lake Monsters, D. Robert Carter has written a new article in the Provo, Utah Daily Herald, entitled “Mysterious Monsters Inhabited Utah Valley Waters,” published, according to google news alerts, a little after midnight, local time, Sunday, April 30, 2006. The “Pawapicts, or Water Babies, whom native Americans believed inhabited the waters of Utah Lake, Provo River and other aqua pura” are said to come “in various shapes and sizes. Most Ute accounts agree that they had long black hair and cried like infants.” The stories overlap with Merbeing lore. [...]

Maine Gators

Earlier this week, Cryptomundo made mention of crocs in Maine’s fictional Lake Placid, and now there’s been an actual report of an alligator found in the state. Thank goodness the Cryptomundo blog was just a coincidence. The coastal Village Soup online news source noted that on Saturday, April 22, 2006: Maine Game Warden Neal Wykes received an emergency call from Judy Walker, an employee at Maine Audubon. “A three-foot alligator had been found in a farm pond on Maine Audubon property in Falmouth,” she told Wykes. Wykes rushed to this unusual call, possibly wondering if it was a hoax. “When [...]

Cryptid Woodpecker Update

The search has begun for the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) on Cuba, late in April 2006. Cuban ornithologists have received permission to search for the long-lost, ivory-billed woodpecker in heavily wooded areas of the island that have been off-limits even to scientists since Fidel Castro seized power here almost 50 years ago. Backed by a grant from Birdlife International, a British conservation group, the search began in the pine forests of the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba this week. Report: Cubanet. Meanwhile, the active search for the Imperial Woodpecker (Campephilus imperialis) – pictured above – the world’s largest species [...]

More Monster Movies

According to Fangoria, coming soon in 2007 to the SciFi Channel, these movies will screen: Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon, an American World Pictures from a script by Rafael Jordan, and Lake Placid II, more about giant crocs in Maine, from Sony Pictures. Both sound enjoyable. Please, bring back more drive-ins. By the way, Lake Placid from 1999 was set in Maine, but filmed in North Carolina. We do have lakes, trees, monsters, and really not that much snow in Maine, especially from June to August. Actors actually like our state. So do writers. Hollywood, how about shooting in [...]

Increase in Mystery Cat Encounters?

Is there an increase in Cryptid Cat activity occurring in North America this spring? If so, local officials aren’t sure how to quite handle it yet – with humor or by setting traps. A video of a cougar or mountain lion taken in Willmar, Minnesota, lead to the capture of the animal on February 1, 2006. Most people didn’t believe the reported cat was anything more than a figment of people’s imagination before the video. On Wednesday, April 26, 2006, the mayor of Montgomery, New Jersey, cracked a joke, saying "We are the Land of the Cougars" (alluding to the [...]

New Coelacanths On Display

Two new exhibitions of coelacanths are worthy of noting. The celebrated story of the coelacanth has made it one of the darlings of cryptozoology. It embodies a true tale of a “living fossil,” not verified as a “real animal” by science for 65 million years, then discovered off Africa in 1938 and rediscovered, with great fanfare, again in 1952 (as shown above). The coelacanth was a fish known to the natives, and eaten, with some slight disgust because it was too oily. It was a part of the menu of fishing peoples for centuries off Africa, long before it became [...]