Folklore

Again, Bear Lake

I enjoy reading stories about new sightings of Lake Monsters as much as the next guy, but what is up with retreading stories from the 1800s, so often? There’s been another local Utah article written about the Bear Lake Monsters. It revisits the same old stories that you perhaps have read before. What I find surprising is they hardly ever talk about the Utah Lake Monster sightings that are known from the 21st century, as documented elsewhere and mentioned by, for example, Karl Rose. There is no disputing that evidence for the Bear Lake Monsters was established by early leaders [...]

Dzungarian Bare Knees

Why do some unknown hominoids have bare knees? Wooden representation of a Proto-Pygmy from Africa. Witness drawing of a Yowie from Australia. In 1913, Muscovite V. A. Khakhlov submitted to the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences his extraordinarily detailed report about the unknown hairy hominids of eastern Asia. In one section of the document, Khakhlov gathered reports from the native Kazakhs of Dzungaria. Dzungaria is named after a Mongolian kingdom which existed in Central Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, Dzungaria is a geographical region within the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwestern China. The area is a largely [...]

Emela-Ntouka: Killer of Elephants

Click on above image, by Corey H., to see full-size version Flashback and Update… The Emela-ntouka has been an unknown animal of some confusion in Africa. A few chroniclers have felt it was merely another named cryptid representing the sightings of the Mokele-mbembe. But as revealed by a carving (below) seen here for the first time earlier this year, it appears to be a beast unlike the saurapod-like Mokele-mbembe. On page 219 of one of my recent field guides, written with Patrick Huyghe, we noted, among several different kinds of alleged “dinosaurs” in Africa, “one animal is called by locals [...]

Exhibition Closes Forever

On December 20th, 2006 Over at Boing Boing, David Pescovitz has added his comments to the growing chorus of praise for the apparently out-of-print Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale. Pescotvitz writes: I have the catalog and it’s quite wonderful. Of course, there are reproductions of the artists’ works from the exhibition and provocative essays, but taken as a whole, the catalog’s look, feel, and organization offers its own sense of curiosity, wonder, and mystery. Boing Boing also links to Craig Heinselman’s review and more. Artist Michelle Souliere with Mark Swanson’s Yeti at Bates. The photographs on this page were [...]

John A. Keel: Demonologist?

Artist John Frick (below) of Cumberland, Maryland, stands under his creation, a Mothman replica that hangs from the ceiling of the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The belief system that underlies the sidetracking of 1966′s Mothman sightings from cryptozoology into the “dark side” has a lot to do with John A. Keel’s apparent framing of the case. But some folks still don’t get it. Good guy John Frick, a list moderator on the Mothman Lives email list, innocently writes: As far as Keel being a demonologist. He really isn’t as far as I know. Keel has mentioned that [...]

Alligators-In-The-Sewers Are Real

In the early 1970s, I did quite a great deal of library archive research on out-of-place alligators. That resulted in the publication of various Fortean articles, such as "Showers of Alligators," (Fate, Vol. 26, September 1973) and "Erratic Crocodilians and Other Things" (INFO Journal, 12, Summer 1973). Finally, I made a unique discovery that alligators-in-the-sewers were not all just legendary, and were not merely a figment of smoking too much weed in the 60s. I tracked down articles that noted real alligators were found and killed in New York City, specifically in that city’s sewers in the 1930s. My formal [...]

Who Were The Dogheads?

Click on the above image of a doghead to make it grow larger. Dogheads were more than mythological creatures, according to some ancient sources. One of them even became a Saint, as per: St. Christopher the Doghead Who were the dogheads? What is cynocephaly all about? Wikipedia (not a source that should be the only one a person ever uses), in discussing cynocephaly, has this piece of modern trivia: “In the USA there are tales of dog-headed creatures, including the Dogman of Michigan, and the wolf-like Beast of Bray Road of Wisconsin, which terrorized a neighbourhood in the early 1990s.” [...]