Hoaxes

Radio-Controlled Nessie Video

The Gordon Holmes footage newly taken at Loch Ness, which you can view the stablized version here, should have us looking with caution at the footage of an already existing radio-controlled Nessie. Recognize the above image? Is this one of the two photographs of the original “Surgeon’s Photograph” from 1934? Or is it something else? Since 2005, the year when the Japanese toy company Takara introduced their radio-controlled Nessie, we all have to be careful and questioning when looking at new loch and lake videos of cryptids. Here are some photos of the model, in two different color versions, with [...]

1983’s Megamouth Prank

Richard Ellis is one of the curators of the current 2007 “Mythic Creatures” exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. He once was part of a “new species” hoax back in the early 1980s. The long delay between initial discovery (1976) and the scientific description (1983) [of the Megamouth shark] became the focus of an elaborate practical joke by two friends of Leighton Taylor, Richard Ellis of the American Museum of Natural History and John McCosker, director of San Francisco’s Steinhart Aquarium. Ellis and McCosker photocopied random articles from Japanese scientific journals and inserted photographs of the megamouth shark [...]

Missouri River Monster Captured

A report from May for your consideration… A Terrible Fish Story A strange monster was captured recently [during May] in the [Missouri] river opposite Canton, by some fishermen, in their seine, while dragging for fish. We know not what to call it, or what it looks like, or how to describe it, for it is unlike any creature of earth, air or water, that we have ever seen. It is not a fish, nor is it an alligator, or crocodile, or a turtle, but resembles the pictures we have often seen in books of the mythical dragon. It is a [...]