The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[WildSybianRider]

Without being too much of a lickarse, I could read you talking about this all day, Hollywoyzick. Can it be a part of your modly duties that you have to? Or just cut out the middleman and get a job at the Fortean Times.

[Up Chuck]

Woy in "writing really well about something he's interested in" shocker.

[David]

What a load of horse shit on both points. If you're out there, and specifically if you're looking for this stuff, you will not be nervous about finding Big Foot or Loch Ness. You would jump at the chance to be "the one that discovered Big Foot" or whatever. Or you'd tell people about it or track it.

If I personally was out in the woods and think I see Big Foot, that shit would be up on Facebook from every angle at the drop of a hat and I would tell any one I was with or near me. Yeah I'd obviously see a giant ape-man and shit my pants, but Big Foot is a money ticket and fame waiting to happen, the fear of it would be outweighed I would imagine for most people, particularly like I mentioned those who are actually out there looking for it.

How many of the photos we see are taken by individuals or groups who are actually specifically looking for something like bigfoot though? It's usually just some guy walking his dog or whatever.

 

I'm a photographer by trade, and even with the best of equipment I can find it challenging getting a decent image of a reasonably fast moving animal, so some guy with an iPhone is going to be shit out of luck, so to speak.

 

Not to mention the shock and/or fear factor. That can't be underestimated.

 

There's been adequate technology to discover something like Loch Ness for decades now. It's not some small unknown species of fish that lives miles under the sea, it's a big fucking dinosaur thing that lives in a Loch a couple of hundred meters deep. It would have been found long before now if it was real, but it's not.

Personally, I'm not a big believer in the Loch Ness Monster stuff. I'm not sure if it's because I lived in Scotland and hearing about from tourists and suchlike can become tiresome, but I do know that the Loch has the largest volume of fresh water in Britain, and is somewhere around 700 square miles.

 

It's not a fucking puddle, that's for sure.

 

EDIT: Woy covered most of it already.

Edited August 27, 2013 by David

[Astro Hollywood]

If I personally was out in the woods and think I see Big Foot, that shit would be up on Facebook from every angle at the drop of a hat and I would tell any one I was with or near me. Yeah I'd obviously see a giant ape-man and shit my pants, but Big Foot is a money ticket and fame waiting to happen, the fear of it would be outweighed I would imagine for most people, particularly like I mentioned those who are actually out there looking for it.

 

I think you're missing the enormous Bigfoot Hunter subculture, which is every bit as in-fighty and insane as the IWC one. It's BritWres, but with people in camo gear, and it is up on Facebook and wherever else, every single day. It just rarely makes the news, because it's usually someone pulling a scam. The guy who perpetrated the very hoax that opens up this thread has recently pulled another stunt involving supposed DNA, a Bigfoot face-print on the window of a van, and a documentary or mocumentary or documentary where his own crew decided to fuck with him by faking a Bigfoot attack at the end. It's fucking exhausting. Youtube 'Bigfoot video' and there'll be dozens to rifle through, most of them utterly terrible. The waters are so muddy now, with WOLF! being cried every couple of weeks, even if you had a full corpse, I doubt anyone would listen.

 

There's been adequate technology to discover something like Loch Ness for decades now. It's not some small unknown species of fish that lives miles under the sea, it's a big fucking dinosaur thing that lives in a Loch a couple of hundred meters deep. It would have been found long before now if it was real, but it's not.

 

Which hasn't been used.

 

There was Operation Deepscan in 1987, where the Loch was swept, end to end, by 24 boats carrying echosounders. They picked up three hits of something way bigger than a fish, or a shark, that had all moved when they swept back the following day.

 

 

The Academy of Applied Science also did some a bunch of stuff, including underwater photography in the seventies which yielded a few famous shots. Most notably, the "flipper," which made everyone scream DINOSAUR

 

 

But the 'unenhanced' version is rather less dinosaury. This is an interesting one, as nobody knows (or is willing to admit) where the enhanced version came from, as the real enhanced version looks nothing like it, so its source is a mystery.

 

 

A later session produced two other shots. There was the "Gargoyle Head" photo.

 

 

If you don't know what you're supposed to be seeing, imagine its mouth is open, and its wearing a terrific pair of mutton chop whiskers (or a shadow), with an eye above the mouth, a neck going off the bottom of the frame, and nuddy little horn protrusions on the top of its head. Years later, someone dove down to below where the camera was fixed and found a rotting, but still familiar tree stump.

 

 

The second famous shot from that was this.

 

 

But the Academy of Applied Science is really just a fancy name some American dude with a bit of money gave his team when they rocked up to the Loch over the years. Other than this, and regular sonar, which has actually picked up a bunch of impressive and unexplained hits, science, and their many devices that might aid in solving the mystery, has stayed far, far away.

[Bellenda Carlisle]

Is the fact that it's a mystery not a good part of the appeal of the whole thing though? If every unexplained phenomenon was seriously researched by "real" scientists and conclusively proven one way or the other then none of this would exist. I'd like to believe there's an ancient sea monster in a Scottish lake but I am sceptical about it and surely when the mystery is solved there's nothing to hypothesise about and the fun of not really knowing is gone and it just becomes something else that either exists or doesn't like everything else on the planet.

 

I'm really into endangered animals so the issue I have with it is if Bigfoot or Nessie, or a British big cat colony or those hairy midgets in South America are definitively discovered I think it would ruin their previously secret undisturbed existence.

[Surf Digby]

The thing that screams complete bullshit for me with any photo of bigfoot/huge cats/loch ness/etc, is that the people who get the photo only ever get maybe one or a few really badly-taken and zoomed out/far away photos, and none of them actually approach what they see.

Why is Facebook jam packed with badly taken, blurry photo's? There's plenty of folk that can't take a recognisable picture of their mate from 2 meters away when they're posing for it, expecting them to get a shot of Bigfoot that's clear enough for scientific study is pushing it a bit.

 

For photo's taken pre-1990, you have to consider the type of cameras that people had. Unless they were specifically equipped for a crypto-zoological expedition, or just happened to have the ideal set up with them, then there would always be a massive compromise. Cameras simply weren't anywhere near as versatile as the ones we take for granted now. If you wanted high speed, then you got photo's that were grainy as fuck. If you wanted more clarity and no grain, then you had to rely on your monster standing still for you. And that's assuming you're not in thick forest with shit light.

 

If you're out there, and specifically if you're looking for this stuff, you will not be nervous about finding Big Foot or Loch Ness.

Plenty of wildlife photographers shit themselves when they come face to face with a big fucking bear or a Komodo dragon for the first time. Specifically looking or not, that adrenalin is going to flow.

[Egg Shen]

Dunno if anyones seen it yet but Renny Harlins movie The Dyatlov Pass Incident based on the errrm Dyatlov Pass Incident is out on DVD overhere now.

[Pinc]

Plenty of wildlife photographers shit themselves when they come face to face with a big fucking bear or a Komodo dragon for the first time. Specifically looking or not, that adrenalin is going to flow.

Yep, that's why we don't have any clear photos of either of those animals.

[Surf Digby]

Some of them go back a second time.

[David]

Plenty of wildlife photographers shit themselves when they come face to face with a big fucking bear or a Komodo dragon for the first time. Specifically looking or not, that adrenalin is going to flow.

Yep, that's why we don't have any clear photos of either of those animals.

You'll note that he said plenty, and not all.

[Loki]

As with all crytpozoological stories, you have to sift the dross out of reports on British Big Cats.

 

Every year or so some drunk person will report a lion or something. Any report that includes heavy drinking can usually be discounted.

 

There are verifiable cases of individual wild cats being caught or shot but they are usually escaped or released pets. There've been half a dozen such cases in the last 30 years, including Pumas and leopards.

 

 

Then you have reports of eurasian lynx, where it's much more possible that breeding populations exist in the wild, either as remnants of a native breed or as new colonies based on escaped Lynx. An 18 month old Lynx was captured in Cricklewood in 2001 -http://scotcats.online.fr/abc/realcats/larathelynx.html

 

Finally, you have the mysterious Black Cat sightings. These could be sightings of normal cats in shadow, of escaped or breeding black panthers, or a previously unidentified British wild cat. It's interesting that a lot of the video footage is of seemingly black cats.

[Pinc]

Plenty of wildlife photographers shit themselves when they come face to face with a big fucking bear or a Komodo dragon for the first time. Specifically looking or not, that adrenalin is going to flow.

Yep, that's why we don't have any clear photos of either of those animals.

You'll note that he said plenty, and not all.

I was meaning to imply, through sarcasm, that photographer fear/ineptitude isn't sufficient to account for the lack of clear images of famous cryptids like Big Foot or Nessie as there are innumerable well known species which would have been similarly frightening on first encounter but nonetheless been photographed without problem. Like fucking bears and Komodo dragons.

[Richie Freebird]

I may be wrong, but I'm sure that new species are being discovered quite regularly, so it's not as easy or clear cut as you may believe.

I

[HarmonicGenerator]

The cryptozoology discussions are always my favourite part of this thread when they come up. I want to believe!

[Loki]

The US seems particularly rife with cryptids. I reckon there's two explanations for this, not entirely contradictory.

 

First off, the US is a vast country with large sections of deep forest right next to modern urban populations. Because it's a relatively young country, there are still some creatures not yet formally discovered knocking around.

 

The other explanation is similar to that often posited about the UFO phenomenon. The US doesn't have mythology in the European sense, where tradition stretches back tens of thousand of years, even into deep prehistory. The only sort of myth stories it has are those told by settlers as they pushed West. That's why a lot of cryptid legends start back in the 19th century as small groups of people moved into completely unknown areas and sat in the dark in their log cabins. Those stories have become the foundations of a sense of local identity and continue to resonate today.

 

I don't believe in Bigfoot, but I do believe in Orang Pendek. Cyptids often come in from the cold, but some of them are just too implausible, and in between is all the wonderful mystery.

 

My favourite ones are animals that are officially extinct but still occasionally sighted, like the Giant Sloth, or Moa or Orang Pendek. There you know it DID once exist...

Edited August 28, 2013 by Loki