The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[HarmonicGenerator]

DNA sampling reveals Yeti specimens to mostly be bears

[BomberPat]

Not all that surprising, though I'm disappointed that it seems to have debunked the notion of a remnant species as common ancestor to the Polar Bear and Brown Bear, or an otherwise unknown branch of that evolutionary tree. I liked that, because it meant there was still something extraordinary out there even if it wasn't an Abominable Snowman.

People will go on believing, though. These Yeti samples might have been bear, and all the samples before it too, but it's just because we haven't found the right sample yet!

[Carbomb]

Yeah, but aren't the mental and logical gymnastics done by said people a big part of the appeal of this subject? They're certainly entertaining; it's why the Flat Earthers are so funny.

[BomberPat]

21 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Yeah, but aren't the mental and logical gymnastics done by said people a big part of the appeal of this subject? They're certainly entertaining; it's why the Flat Earthers are so funny.

I jump from one side of that argument to the other, really - on one hand, absolutely. It's why I'll still sometimes read Fortean Times, and always keep an eye on this side of story, I find the mental gymnastics either funny or genuinely interesting.

On the other hand, though, I find it all more infuriating as I get older. I think it started with conspiracy theories - fun and interesting when it was moon landings and JFK, depressing and infuriating when it was mass shootings as "false flags" and seeing all this bullshit play out in real time. Then I think that frustration with the mindset just seeped into all other things Fortean a lot of the time.

On the cryptozoology side of things, it was Thlyacines that did it for me. I was working in conservation at the time of one or two big money projects to try and "prove" that the Thylacine wasn't extinct, and it just pissed me off that we were struggling to raise enough money to save species from extinction while people were prepared to spend millions chasing ghosts.

 

On a good day, this stuff all fascinates me, though. And I would love for so much of it to turn out to be true - which I think is something "true believers" miss; when I say there almost definitely isn't a Yeti or a Bigfoot, I don't take any real pleasure in that, I'd be over the moon if these things existed, I just don't let that blind me into thinking they must exist.

Edited December 1, 2017 by BomberPat

[chokeout]

I'll just remain skeptical, yet hopeful, that there's loads of undiscovered monsters out there until some evil loggers get attacked by a giant dinosaur in the Amazon

[BomberPat]

14 minutes ago, chokeout said:

I'll just remain skeptical, yet hopeful, that there's loads of undiscovered monsters out there until some evil loggers get attacked by a giant dinosaur in the Amazon

It would be bloody brilliant, wouldn't it, if just once, you could wake up, click on the BBC website, and one of the top headlines was, "Mokele Mbembe discovered".

I so want some of this stuff to be true. And so many people I know that have worked/do work in conservation have a bit of a yearning for it as well, just because it recreates this wild world of the imagination, where there are still lost lands to discover - and, more importantly, where we might not have fucked over nature quite as much as it looks like. Even Gerald Durrell, one of my heroes, early in his career as an animal collector desperately clung to stories of Pteranodons in the Amazon.

 

This has been discussed before on here, but always worth bringing back it up - and we can probably expand it beyond cryptozoology as well - but what cryptozoology/general Fortean thing do you most want to be true, and which do you most believe could be true (if they are not one and the same)?

Most likely I would think would be something like the Ahool - a giant carnivorous bat in Indonesia - whereas the ones I most want to believe in would have to be some kind of ape or hominid; Orang Pendek, in particular, but I'd love for Yeti or Bigfoot to exist.

[Keith Houchen]

The one I'd love to be true is "Montreal was a work"

[Astro Hollywood]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

Most likely I would think would be something like the Ahool - a giant carnivorous bat in Indonesia - whereas the ones I most want to believe in would have to be some kind of ape or hominid; Orang Pendek, in particular, but I'd love for Yeti or Bigfoot to exist.

Most likely for me is the Orang Pendek. The eyewitness reports and the environment there make it super plausible to me.

I most want any of the living dinosaurs. Nessie has always been my boy (girl?), and even though I'm not on board the plesiosaur train any more, I so badly want there to be something there that's not just a big eel or sturgeon. But Mokele Mbembe or just a pterodactyl screeching out of a fracking hole would be magic too. Imagine firing up Twitter in bed one morning and seeing #Plesiosaur trending, after some trawler catches one in a net. Like this, but not just a rotten shark.

I've spent many hours daydreaming of press conferences where one of the big mysteries is finally confirmed as true (mostly with me standing at a podium in a pith hat). A genuine dead Bigfoot carcass would so thoroughly change the world in terms of belief, we'd forever be living in a place where anything was possible, and no wacky tale could ever be dismissed again. As evidenced by how embarrassingly excited I got at the very beginning of this thread. On that note, I'd love it if someone caught a fairy. That would fuck everything up.

[Keith Houchen]

22 minutes ago, Astro Hollywood said:

I've spent many hours daydreaming of press conferences where one of the big mysteries is finally confirmed as true (mostly with me standing at a podium in a pith hat).

Nicholas Witchell standing next to you cosplaying as a two legged Kamala, please.

[Loki]

There's a couple of Fortean-y things I'd like to be true.

--

The first one is I'd like it to be definitively confirmed that human civilisation is older, away older than current thinking.  Recent archaeological discoveries at places like Göbekli Tepe push large structure building back into the 10th millennium B.C which is in itself extraordinary and I'd be surprised if that is an isolated site.

I'd be very happy if archaeology went all Fingerprints of the Gods and started discovering ancient monuments in places we haven't looked yet, like the Mediterranean basin, or under the Black Sea, or Antarctica.  Our understanding of our ancient roots is incredibly patchy, so there's a lot of history to be filled in from when we first left Africa as homo sapiens up until recorded history.

--

Related, but a little separate, the possibility of undiscovered pyramids is also one I'd love to come to fruition.  There are whole cities and eras of Egyptian history that we've completely lost apart from references in histories, and some sites in Egypt that have been suggested as possible extant pyramids (like this)


 

Again, realistically it's very unlikely that any more lost pyramids, cities etc lie still undiscovered but the romance of that sort of Indiana Jones style exploration really appeals to me... and there's a lot a desert out there!

BONUS: the Javan Pyramid with really stupid computer voice, because conspiracy theorists are embarrassed by their reedy virginal voices presumably:
 

 

[Linus]

The appeal of the Fortean for me is mostly gonzo - I like reading about people who believe/try to prove these things exist. There is some genuinely inexplicable stuff in the world but most of it has a mundane explanation. However, the adventures of (sometimes, sometimes not so) rational people seeking them both out is fascinating.

[BomberPat]

18 hours ago, Linus said:

The appeal of the Fortean for me is mostly gonzo - I like reading about people who believe/try to prove these things exist. There is some genuinely inexplicable stuff in the world but most of it has a mundane explanation. However, the adventures of (sometimes, sometimes not so) rational people seeking them both out is fascinating.

Yeah, I think I've got a fair amount of this - it's that old Victorian explorer vibe, uncovering undiscovered lands, this idea that just about anything could be out there. It's got a romance to it, and all feels a bit Jules Verne.

I think it's part of the reason I dislike today's Bigfoot hunter types so much - I don't want the people searching for this stuff to be gun-toting rednecks, I want them to be blokes with pith helmets and pipes, translating local folklore and trekking through uncharted jungle.

 

Love the idea of some undiscovered city or massive historical anomaly, though. Just trying to imagine the discovery of something massive that would completely upend our entire understanding of history, or how the world works, and how we even cope with that - do we just quickly adjust to the "new normal", or does it really change everything overnight?

Edited December 4, 2017 by BomberPat

[Carbomb]

There's definitely an appeal to the "Mysterious Cities of Gold"-type notion that there are remains of incredibly-advanced human civilisations from thousands of years ago, that perhaps suffered some great cataclysm, burying the secrets of their knowledge for aeons.

As to the existence of humans, I was under the impression that it was consensus that homo sapiens as a species have been around for roughly 2 million years? Not civilisationally, but just as a biological strain of primate. Or have I confused that with the overall evolution of humans from ape through Cro-Magnon to homo sapiens?

 

[BomberPat]

1 hour ago, Carbomb said:

There's definitely an appeal to the "Mysterious Cities of Gold"-type notion that there are remains of incredibly-advanced human civilisations from thousands of years ago, that perhaps suffered some great cataclysm, burying the secrets of their knowledge for aeons.

I think people will always cling to this sort of idea - the Atlantis myth, basically - because it just feels right. It's a very obvious "too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing"/"don't fly too close to the Sun" moral message, isn't it? Especially in the midst of climate change and a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric, the idea that a civilisation can be wiped out and forgotten about entirely - especially if it can be blamed on their own hubris - is a very useful metaphor.

But bloody hell I want it to be literally true. It's why I love stuff like the Baghdad Battery, or the Antikythera Mechanism - devices and innovations that feel completely alien for the time period.

The problem is that you still get people - as I overheard at the pub not that long ago - saying stuff like, "we still don't know how they built the Pyramids, or what they were for" as shorthand for "well, sciences doesn't know everything" woolly thinking. Well, no, actually, we know exactly what Pyramids were for, and we've got a pretty good idea of how they were built. But there's definitely still this pop culture association with Ancient Egypt as something mysterious and almost magical in a way, because I think we desperately want it to be this Mysterious Cities of Gold story. I feel sorry for genuine Egyptologists that are probably sick to death of all that, though!

 

On "wanting it to be true" again, I want Pyramids to be magical. I get annoyed at the suggestion that there being pyramids all over the world is proof of some connection between all these places - it's like saying there must have been a mysterious precursor race that taught cultures all over the world how to build houses, because we all build houses. Structurally, Egyptian Pyramids and South American Pyramids are pretty much nothing alike - they just share a similar shape, and that's because it's the most logical shape for a large building to end up as given the construction methods of the time. If cultures all over the world had spherical buildings, they might be on to something!

But even knowing all that, I want someone to find a Pyramid in Antarctica, and for it to share characteristics with Egyptian and Aztec or Mayan art. And I want it to keep razor blades sharp, and be perfectly aligned with some constellation or other, the works.

[Carbomb]

True, it's a very seductive idea. The Atlantis myth has been fuel for a lot of creativity, and I love all the studies around the Minoan civilisation, and also around Thera/Santorini as a result. Fascinating stuff.