Here be sea serpents?

Extraordinary footage of a rarely seen giant deep sea fish has been captured by scientists. Using a remotely operated vehicle, they caught a rare glimpse of the huge oarfish, perhaps the first sighting of the fish in its natural setting. The oarfish, which can reach 17m long, has previously only been seen on a few occasions dying at the sea surface, or dead washed ashore. The scientists also filmed for the first time the behaviour of a manefish. Oarfish (Regalecus glesne) are one of the world's longest fish reaching 17m. Their strange appearance may have provided the basis for the sea serpent myths told by early ocean travellers. Not only are they elongated, they also have a prominent dorsal fin which gives it an unusual "serpent" appearance. Recalling the event Professor Benfield explained how at first, they thought the fish was simply a drilling pipe called a riser being lowered into the water. "We saw this bright vertical shiny thing, I said 'are they lowering more riser?' as it looked like they were lowering a huge pipe." "We zoomed in a little bit and we said 'that's not a riser that's a fish!' Professor Benfield said this may be the first time the oarfish has been filmed alive swimming in the so-called mesoplagic layer of the ocean. Usually, they are seen dying at the sea surface or washed up dead. Professor Benfield is excited by the potential for further discoveries and revelations from the deep that the Serpent project may bring. "It's all very exciting, my vision for the Gulf Serpent Project is to establish a Gulf-wide deep sea biological observation system, with hundreds of ROV-equipped ships and rigs in the deep Gulf." "(We can) get a good idea of what species are present, where they are present, and what are they doing."

Full story and videos of the fish here :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8501000/8501251.stm

Bigfoot and Belief.

In view of the controversy over the thermal image bigfoot film (Discussion of the same can be found at crytomundo:http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/nc-video-update/) I thought this was a nice piece to include in the blog about belief in Bigfoot.

Source: http://media.www.thebatt.com/media/storage/paper657/news/2010/02/02/Opinion/Believing.In.Bigfoot-3862251.shtml

Believing in Bigfoot By: Richard Creecy Issue date: 2/2/10 Section: Opinion

Sasquatch draws a metaphorical line in the sand and, like other "monster" sightings, beckons the masses to cross the line and assert their belief or stand in opposition to it. Upon reading the word "Bigfoot" most people automatically kick into one of two modes: rabid believer or dismissive. The majority of people would fall into the dismissive scoffer category, but there are many misconceptions about the majestic primate known as Sasquatch. The perception most people have of Bigfoot exists only in grainy photographs and tabloid papers. Publications like the "Weekly World News," who tout articles such as "I was Bigfoot's Love Slave" paint the portrait that the Yeti exists only in the minds of crackpot loonies that photograph shadowy creatures in the more out of focus areas of the Pacific Northwest. But it might surprise you to know that Bigfoot sightings happen all over America, especially in Texas. One of the first reports from Texas dates back to 1837 in the lower Navidad area, which is northeast of Victoria, Texas. In this encounter a group of men chased down a large furry bipedal creature, but their horses were reported to be so frightened they refused to get close, leading to the creature's escape. The Karankawa America Indian Tribe, which once hailed from the coastal areas of Texas have stories that told of a tribe of hairy creatures that inhabit the woods that are now called the Piney Woods. But the question still remains, why do so many people disbelieve so adamantly in the possibility of Bigfoot? Among the many arguments, two stand out in frequency. Some people will say that they cannot believe in a creature that has never been conclusively photographed or captured on video. But to answer this challenge, let us look to another elusive creature, the Colossal Squid. The Colossal Squid was a creature chalked up to superstitious sailors, conjuring stories of a vengeful sea that held vast merciless creatures. Skepticism was rampant until 2007, when a live specimen was inadvertently captured by a New Zealand fishing vessel off the coast of Antarctica. Previous to this encounter the only evidence that existed was a few severely decomposed specimens - tentacles and beaks found mostly in the stomachs of Sperm whales.

"The most common reason given for discrediting the possibility of an undocumented primate in North America is the absence of a body or other compelling forms of physical evidence," said Alton Higgins, assistant professor of biology at Mid-America Christian university and board member at the Texas Bigfoot Research Center, TBRC. But this argument is truly unfounded, according to Higgins because of the habitat that the Bigfoot species seems to favor. Heavily forested areas, with rainfall and dense vegetation do not preserve remains well, not to mention forest scavengers, insects, bacterial and fungal agents that break down and decompose bodies very quickly. "In my opinion the best evidence exists in the form of the body of sighting accounts that have accumulated since the early days of European settlement," Higgins said. "These reports correlate closely with the prehistoric oral histories of nearly all American Indian tribes that include clear descriptions of Sasquatch-like creatures." Higgins, a wildlife biologist, isn't the only scientist convinced of the existence of Bigfoot in North America, but for many scientists the stigma that comes from voicing their beliefs on the subject is not worth the ridicule. But support and evidence for Sasquatch exists, with sightings throughout the country. It not too far-fetched to believe that another ape-like species could exist, and like the Colossal Squid, is only waiting for the day when mankind documents it.

Well said ! I believe in keeping an open mind until something is proven or disproven to a point where there can be no argument. With new creatures being discovered all over the world , we live in hope of a cryptid being found.

Lough Fadda Interview

As promised when I did the first blog on Lough Fadda here is the interview about the sighting as recorded in The Dragon and The Disc by F.W.Holiday (1973 ed pub by W.W. Norton. New York). If you click on it it can made bigger to read easily. I also included the passage on the attempt to dynamite the lough and what happened.

A Florida River Monster

Florida is often said to be a place of high strangeness with sightings of the Skunk Ape etc. There is also a story about a River monster.

Between 1955 and 1961, there were reports in Florida newspapers, of a creature in the St. Johns River. The reports came from a variety of people from fishermen who made their living there and from visitors and new residents. They all reported seeing a large creature but some said it was like a dinosaur, some like a giant manatee. Most sightings occurred between Astor Park and Lake Monroe, the majority at Blue Spring. (this is important to note you will see why at the end of the posting)

One Lake County man claimed to have seen the monster on land grazing on plants. He reported that the monster left a beaten down path through the bushes. The animal's skin was described as elephant-like and grey coloured. Two bass fisherman claimed that the monster had almost tipped over their boat.

In 1975, Five people in a fishing boat were frightened on the morning of May 10 on St. Johns River near Jacksonville. They claimed to have seen a dragon-like creature, that reared its head from the river, then disappeared into the deep water. It was described as having a head like a giant snail, with two horns. This is the testimony of two of them:

“We saw it had a neck about 3 feet long,”Mrs. Dorothy Abram reported . “It had two little horns on top of the head like a snail.” She described the head as about the size of a human head. Mrs. Brenda Langley had a better view of the creature than Mrs. Abram had. “It was about three or four feet out of the water and about the color - a pinkish color - like boiled shrimp,” she said . “It had a real ugly looking face on it. It had snail like horns, and it had this little jagged thing going down its back. ...The head turned on it. It just turned and looked around at us.”

It is not the first story about strange marine creatures in that area. In 1885, A ship's anchor brought up the carcass of a creature with a long neck which resembled an extinct plesiosaur, from the New River Inlet. It may have been the corpse of a basking shark or it may have been an unknown creature. There was no DNA testing in those days. There is apparently an 1891 newspaper report of a sea-serpent chasing bathers from the ocean on Jacksonville beach.( I couldn’t trace it unfortunately) The creature was reported to have had a dog-like head and a long thin neck. There is also another story, but it may be an urban myth, said to be reported by some scuba divers in 1962, off the Gulf coast near Pensacola. A monster apparently attacked the divers and over turned their boat, and supposedly killed all but one of the men. The surviving victim claimed that the creature had a long, ten foot neck (3.3 metres) , like a telephone pole. The head had small eyes, but a very wide mouth and whipped about like a large snake.

Before we get overexcited I should point out that the largest spring on the St. Johns River, Blue Spring is a Manatee Refuge and the winter home to a population of West Indian Manatees. So some sightings could be manatees as often people don’t realise how big they can be or what they really look like. What is interesting is that the 1975 description said it had horns. There have been lots of other sightings, including in Loch Ness, where people mention horns or eyes on stalks. The colour is also intriguing, bright red/pink, and I am sure someone can come up with a list of marine creatures that colour that could be responsible for a mis-identification. Some thing to spend your Sunday afternoon researching if you are bored!

More on the Giant Salamander (warning long post)

As we pull into Toyohira, an unusual and unexpected welcome committee is lined up ready to receive us. The group of primary-age children breaks into a song about the bonds of friendship between human and salamander. "It's everyone's friend," they warble through the chilled afternoon air.A small river burbles its accompaniment - a river flowing past their school, which contains along its length a number of concrete structures designed to make sure the Japanese giant salamanders, or hanzaki, are still around by the time the next generation of children stands in the same spot and sings the same song. The "hanzaki holes" are a key conservation tool in a land where many rivers are now sculpted not by nature, but by the hand of man. When I ask Professor Masafumi Matsui from Kyoto University, a leading Japanese authority on all matters amphibian, to name the single biggest modern threat to this animal that has been around roughly unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, he answers without demur: "The construction of dams and roads, which destroys the habitats". "We can't do without constructing such things; and [the habitat] will be cut upstream and downstream." Many Japanese rivers are now, in reality, canals - boxed in concrete, guided down valleys to keep floodwaters away from homes and secure a supply to the irrigation systems. To breed, hanzaki need to find nesting dens in the riverbanks. Without dens, there will be no more hanzaki; hence the holes. And while the idea of a concrete nest might not seem very appealing to the human constitution, the salamanders themselves seem OK with it. Lifting the lid on one of the dens, we see the rear half of a big, mature male. Its head is poking through a small connecting tunnel into the river, where it can protect the nest from any would-be usurpers. The breeding plan appears to be working; along the river we can find larvae just a few months old, and presumably some at least have sprung from these nests. Is keeping the species alive with such a surgical strike a valid substitute for the much wider restoration of these concreted channels that would also help everything else in the ecosystem? "Obviously in these kinds of managed landscapes you do need to do some management, and what they've been doing here in these artificial nests and so forth is a tremendous management approach," says Claude Gascon, an amphibian specialist with Conservation International. "But obviously that's not sufficient, and you do need to protect some of these natural habitats, these watersheds, in their natural form so that you're protecting all of the needs of this animal, which is a tremendous animal." Move a curious finger down the Red List of Threatened Species, and the factor you see more often than any other as a cause of decline for just about every kind of creature - amphibians, birds, mammals - is precisely what is facing the Japanese giant salamander: loss of habitat. Its sister species in China, by contrast, must contend most urgently with the wiles of poachers - hardly surprising, when the meat from an adult giant salamander can fetch upwards of $1,000 on the black market. Hunting has brought the Chinese giant salamander to the unwelcome status of Critically Endangered. After protection was conferred in the 1950s, some bright spark had the idea of importing the Chinese species, farming it, and supplying the meat demand that way. In the inevitable way of these things, the idea quickly proved a busted flush. But the Chinese animals escaped; and though the farm itself is long gone, the once farmed salamanders are thriving. With Masafumi Matsui and his team of assistants - one sporting the perhaps inevitable soubriquet of "ninja turtle" - we clamber out into the bed of the Kamo river as it hurries down a narrow valley between wooded slopes. They find one larva, small and black - then two, then three - and finally a roseate miniature of the real thing, several years old. Without DNA analysis it is impossible to be sure, but the professor is pretty sure this is a hybrid. "Last year, more than 50% were hybrids," he says. Back in his lab at Kyoto University, he demonstrates the extra aggressiveness of the Chinese species. With a fish dangled in front of its nose, it turns in a flash from dopey sloth to snapping tiger. The aggressiveness is helping the Chinese males take over the dens of the local rivers - and with the dens, the right to breed. The Japanese giant salamander may soon be extinct as a separate species in these waters.
Source and video:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8498023.stm

I will be speaking at the Weird Weekend this year

I am going to be a speaker at the weird weekend in August this year (see link below) so this a blatant plug , and I am going to talk about my experiences at Loch Ness as it is 40 years this summer since I first went up there aged 14 and met the LNIB people. So what’s the big deal; you might think. Well the big deal is that for all the years I have been going up there and all the years investigating stuff , this will be the first time I will be coming out in public about it. The reasons I can now do this is that I no longer work as an academic as ill health has forced me to leave work and now my daughter is getting established in a career of her as a plant scientist , it won’t effect her. I didn’t want her teased at school because her mother was a monster hunter and in academia, having what was termed strange hobbies meant you would be passed over for jobs and even lose your job. It is thanks to Jonathan Downes from CFZ , who encouraged me to write for the CFZ blog and now I am attempting a book about Loch Ness. If it passes muster CFZ will publish it. So it will be a big thing for me to be able to talk about Loch Ness and the characters I met there over the years and the whole experience. May be some of the blog readers on here will be going, if so please come up and introduce yourselves. I would love to meet you.

http://www.weirdweekend.org/

New bigfoot sighting?

Police probe "Big Foot" sighting

By Larry Chambers

Big Foot in Grayson County?

No one knows for sure but the Grayson County Sheriff’s Department received a call last Thursday night reporting Big Foot or some other furry, upright creature.

Sheriff Richard Vaughan said the sheriff’s office received a call about 9:30 p.m. from a Grayson County man who said his wife, another woman and a young boy were traveling north on Route 89.The caller reported that while traveling between the Blue Ridge Parkway bridge and Edmonds Road they spotted a huge creature that was about 7 feet tall, hairy all over and black.The creature reportedly came up to the edge of the highway and when he saw car lights disappeared into some pine trees nearby.Vaughan said he reported the incident to Virginia Conservation Police Officers, Jason Harris and George Shupe, who went to the scene last Friday to investigate but didn’t turn up anything. Reported sightings of Bigfoot or Sasquatch vary a good deal, but there are several details that remain consistent. Eyewitnesses describe a tall primate, at least 7 feet tall, that walks on two legs. It stands upright like a human being and is covered in long, dark fur. It has a face that is a cross between a gorilla and a human being. The Internet is littered with reports of alleged Sasquatch sightings and experiences in the Appalachian Mountains, particularly along the Appalachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway; however, the scientific community does not acknowledge the alleged creature’s existence.

Read more about “Big Foot” at www.independencedeclaration.com.

Source: http://www.lcni5.com/cgi-bin/c2.cgi?144+article+News+20100203100543144144003