PDA

View Full Version : cryptozoology things


massacre man
02-21-2005, 11:43 AM
i'm bored so i'm posting this
Caddy
Off the British Colombian coast of Cadboro Bay lives a monster, affectionately named Caddy or Cadborosaurus Willsi. It is described as a long, serpent like beast with flippers, hair on the neck, and a camel like head. It could be anywhere from 40 to 70 feet long in length. The monster has been seen less than 100 times in the last 60 years, but the sightings remain consistent and precise unlike sightings of the Loch Ness monster and Ogopogo in which sightings vary due to misidentification. Ogopogo has been described as having "a dark brownish-gray skin like texture" to "bluish-green-gray" scales. Yet all the sightings of Caddy remain consistent, usually because it was visible long enough to get an accurate description.
The first reported sighting of Caddy was in 1933 by a Victoria lawyer and his wife on a cruise in their yatch. They described a "horrible serpent with the head of a camel." This is generally what every sighting of the beast is like. The creature showed itself again in 1934 when two members of the Provincial Government reported seeing the creature, the same description as the first. Later that same year two fishermen saw TWO monsters in the bay, one about 60 feet long, the other half that size. A rather interesting sighting was made by two hunters as they tried to recover their wounded duck. The monster rose out of the water, swallowed the duck, snapped at some gulls then submerged. They noted the six-foot long head with saw-like teeth.
It was in 1937 that a photograph of Caddy was obtained. A whaling station in Vancouver just caught and killed a sperm whale in October of 1937. While removing the stomach contents at the Naden Harbor whaling station they came across a twenty-foot long carcass of an unidentified creature. It had the head of a horse, a snake-like body and a finned, spiny tail. A photograph was taken, but no one knows exactly what happened to its remains. No scientist can properly identify the creature in the photograph. It seems to have mammalian and reptilian traits, but which it is, no one is sure of. It is suggested that the creature is a Zeuglodon, but that explanation isn't 100% satisfactory seeing that it is much slimmer and the head is shaped improperly.
"We were headin' North, and, about thirty miles offshore, and saw this thing standing about four feet out of the water. So, I headed over towards it and took a look at it. At first, I thought it looked like a polar bear with its ruffles of hair. When we got right up alongside of it-and the water was crystal clear-there was just this column of this thing going at least forty feet and huge eyes. I had an old Newfoundlander as a mate and he said 'Do you see eyes on him?' Mouth and nose I have no recollection of at all, just those great big eyes. And the eyes seemed to open from top to bottom."
The sightings did not stop in the 30's, it continued into the 50's when ten people saw him on February 13, 1953. All of them watched it from different points of view and not one of the descriptions contradicted each other. The sightings continued into the 80's, but the sightings slimmed down considerably. Perhaps the creature had moved on, looking for warmer waters more plentiful with fish. They could also have died; perhaps the young were eaten by whales that frequent the coast. The real question is not where they have gone, but what they are.
The descriptions place Caddy as some sort of a mammal, long, slender, and with a bifurcated tail. This suggests that it is a Zeuglodon, an ancient whale thought to be extinct. The only problem is that the head of the creature is described as a camels or a horses, while a Zeuglodon, or Basilosaurus, head is more like that of a snakes. The monster of Lake Okanagon, known as Ogopogo, is believed to be a Zeuglodon, but the sightings are different of that of Caddy. It never raises its neck, nor does it have hair, nor is the head camel-like, it is more like that of a snake. My belief is that Caddy is a relative of the Zeuglodon, longer but slimmer. If we only had the body that was found we would have a good idea of what it was, but until another one shows up we will always have an unknown creature on our hands.

massacre man
02-21-2005, 11:46 AM
Thunderbird
The Comanche tribe call it ba'a' and the Potawatomi use the name chequah, but most people know of this mystery animal as Thunderbird. Although gigantic birds are reported in the past and present from various areas of the globe, the Thunderbird is isolated to North America. Native Americans believed that these giant birds brought thunder and rain with them as they flew through the air by flapping their wings, and lightning by closing their eyes. Nevertheless, the distinction between the stories of the Native Americans and people of today are not too far apart. Modern reports of Thunderbirds arise from various locations in North America, with a large occurrence from Pennsylvania to the Central states. Mark A. Hall, one of the foremost investigators of the Thunderbird story, gives the following description of the avian cryptid drawn from numerous sightings:
"The bird is distinguished by its size and lifting capabilities exceeding those of any known bird living today anywhere in the world. Wingspan estimates are necessarily all guesswork. But observers sometimes have had the benefit of a measurable object for comparison or the benefit of time to observe a resting bird. The results most often provide sizes of 15 to 20 feet. The bird at rest or on the ground appears to be four to eight feet tall. Typically the coloring of the birds overall is dark.."
Remarkably, a bird of 15 feet in size would be the largest bird known in the world today. The largest wingspan known on a living bird is that of the wandering albatross (diomedea exulans) with a wingspan to 12 feet, and while not a predatory bird, it still boasts an impressive span. The Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) and the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) are among the largest predatory birds in the world, with the Andean condor reaching a wingspan of 10.5 feet and the California condor (the largest North American predatory bird) reaches a wingspan of up to 10 feet. These are all truly marvelous birds and respectable in their majesty.
But consider the Thunderbird, reputedly capable of lifting a deer or a person from the ground. The current predatory birds are not equipped with grasping feet that are strong enough to hold much weight, instead they live primarily as carrion eaters and are only seldom predatory, and then usually on smaller animals. Reports of the Thunderbird, however, describe lifting deer and humans off the ground.
Perhaps the most controversial inclusion of the Thunderbird capable of lifting a human comes from 1977 in Lawndale, Illinois. It was here that on July 25, 1977 towards 9:00 pm a group of three boys were in the backyard. They saw two large birds coming, and as the birds came in closer they went after the boys. Two of the boys escaped, but the third, Marlon Lowe, did not. One of the birds clamped onto his shoulder with its claws and proceeded to lift the ten year old boy about two feet off the ground for a distance of at least 30 yards. With screams of distress calling adults outside and coupled with a series of blows by the 65-pound boy, the bird finally released him. The boy was relatively unharmed, with psychological damage instead of physical.
Although viewed by some as a tall tale, the descriptions given by the witnesses of these birds describe a large black bird, with a white ring on its neck and a wingspan of up to 10 feet, traits oddly reminiscent of the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) which exhibits the same basic physical characteristics as that of the Lawndale bird. To this day, no one can explain away the incident from 1977 in any convincing manner, either the incident didn't happen or a large bird (of known or unknown status) attacked and carried a small boy one summer night to his and his family's terror.
The evidence thus far for the existence of a large undescribed predatory bird in North America is based on historical and modern anecdotal evidence with no physical evidence. There are however two tantalizing images of the Thunderbird, or at least of a large bird. The first was taken in the same year as Marlon Lowe's attack and in the same state. On July 30, 1977 John Huffer, an ex-marine and photographer, took a 100 foot roll of color film of two birds taking off from a tree in an inlet of Lake Shelbyville. The film concentrates on one of the birds only. Highly controversial, and thought by many to be of a turkey vulture, it sits as a little known film of a possible mystery animal. To date little, if any, evaluation of the birds in the film has been done. The Discovery Channel in their program "Into the Unknown" did give the film some mention, with a dismissal of a medium sized bird, probably a vulture.
The other possible photographic evidence is even more of a mystery, as it may not exist at all!! The image in question is the "Thunderbird Photograph" taken at the end of the nineteenth century in Texas. The image is said to depict six western clothed adult men, standing fingertip to fingertip in front of a barn where a large bird is nailed to the wall. Many have claimed to have seen or held this infamous image, including the late Ivan T. Sanderson who reportedly had acquired a photocopy of the image in 1966, the same year in which Sanderson gave the image, later lost, to a couple of men from Pennsylvania who were searching for the Thunderbird. The image has yet to surface, and may well not exist at all. The image was reported to have been published in 1886 in the Tombstone Arizona Epitaph, however this was somewhat dubiously reported in a 1963 article by Jack Pearl called "The Monster Bird That Carries Off Human Beings!" in Saga magazine. Searches of the Tombstone Epitaph have come up empty, aside from an article from April 26, 1890 of a 16 foot bird found in the desert by a couple of ranchers. So the mystery of the "Thunderbird Photo" is no closer to being solved then it was nearly 40 years ago during its first mention.
What then is the Thunderbird? It is a mystery. It has been reported by Native Americans and people today from all walks of life as an enormous bird, larger than any known species, but similar in appearance to a condor. Theories as to what the Thunderbird may be have run the gamut from surviving pterodactyls to the teratorns. The teratorns were large predatory birds from the Pleistocene that exhibited wingspans of upwards of 25 feet. Although thought to be extinct, their general presumed appearance is that of a giant condor-like species, similar in appearence to the Thunderbird. North America has many mysteries, among them the Thunderbird. These creatures are surely one of the most enigmatic cryptids in the world. With misinformation abounding, such as the "Thunderbird Photograph," and the lack of support in searching for these birds, it is no wonder that these creatures have evaded discovery like so many others from around the world.

massacre man
02-21-2005, 11:53 AM
Kongamato - Flying Demons of the Forbidden Swamps
In the Age of Dinosaurs there existed flying reptiles called Pterosaurs. The fossil record suggests that they appeared in the Jurassic and lived into the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. Nearly all the fossils found have been in marine deposits, which means they probably were fish eaters and spent most of their time over coastal waters. These flying reptiles apparently managed to fly with no feathers, their main aerodynamic feature being wings of membrane supported by an enormously elongated fourth finger. They had hollow limb bones and a large keeled breastbone for attachment of strong wing muscles, needed for true flight and not just gliding. The large expenditure of energy required to remain in flight for long periods of time, and the resultant loss of heat caused by the surface of their wings exposed to moving air, means that they must have had some method of regulating body heat, although it is doubtful they were truly warm-blooded as mammals are. Although popular media has usually described pterosaurs as huge menacing creatures, most of the pterosaurs were much smaller, from the size of a sparrow to the size of an eagle. There have been some very large species discovered, however: the pteranodon with a wingspan of 27 ft. and the colossal quetzalcoatlus, with a wingspan of 50 ft. (and possibly up to 60 ft.). Some pterosaurs actually had fur, although they were not related to mammals.
It would seem impossible that these creatures could have survived to the present day. After all, if they existed surely people would see them flying about as they hunted for food. How could a flying population of reptiles remain hidden? There are reports that people have been seeing flying creatures that match the description of pterosaurs for a long time. People have even been, reportedly, killed by them.
In 1923 a traveler by the name of Frank H. Melland worked for a time in Zambia. He gathered native reports of ferocious flying reptiles. The natives called this creature kongamato ("overwhelmer of boats"), which was said to have lived in the Jiundu swamps in the Mwinilunga District in western Zambia, near the border of Congo and Angola. It was described as having no feathers at all, smooth skin, a wingspan between 4 ft. and 7 ft., and possessing a beak full of teeth. They were usually described as black or red. It had a reputation for capsizing canoes and causing death to anyone who merely looked at it. When showed drawings of pterosaurs
"... every native present immediately and unhesitatingly picked it out and identified it as a kongamato. Among the natives who did so was a headman from the Jiundu country, where the kongamato is supposed to be active, and who is a rather wild and quite unsophisticated native."
In 1925, a distinguished English newspaper correspondent, G. Ward Price, was with the future Duke of Windsor on an official visit to Rhodesia. He reported a story that a civil servant told them of the wounding of a man who entered a feared swamp in Rhodesia known to be an abode of demons. The brave native entered the swamp, determined to explore it in spite of the dangers. When he returned he was on the verge of death. He had a great wound in his chest. He recounted how a strange huge bird with a long beak attacked him. When the civil servant showed the man a picture of a pterosaur from a book of prehistoric animals, the man screamed in terror and fled from the servant's home.
In 1942 Colonel C. R. S. Pitman reported stories the natives had told him of a large bat/bird type creature that lived in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in a dense swampy region--supposedly to look upon it was death. Tracks of the creatures were seen, with evidence of a large tail dragging the ground. These reports were not limited to Zambia, but also came from other locations in Africa such as Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya.
Skeptics suggest that these fantastic sounding tales derived from the fanciful imaginations of natives who were hired to work at archeological digs where fossilized pterosaurs were uncovered in Tendagaru, Tanzania, in the years prior to World War I. These digs, however, took place over 900 miles from Zambia. Why did no reports of living pterosaurs come from Tanzania, where these imaginative natives lived?
Perhaps the most striking report of living pterosaurs comes not from natives, but from white explorers in the employment of the British Museum. In 1932-3 the Percy Sladen Expedition went to West Africa. In charge of the team was Ivan T. Sanderson, a well-known zoologist and writer. While in the Assumbo Mountains in the Cameroons, they made camp in a wooded valley near a steep banked river. They were out hunting near the river when Sanderson shot a large fruit-eating bat. It fell in the water, and as Sanderson was carefully making his way in the fast moving current, he lost his balance and fell. He regained his balance when his companion suddenly shouted "Look out!"
"And I looked. Then I let out a shout also and instantly bobbed down under the water, because, coming straight at me only a few feet above the water was a black thing the size of an eagle. I had only a glimpse of its face, yet that was quite sufficient, for its lower jaw hung open and bore a semicircle of pointed white teeth set about their own width apart from each other. When I emerged, it was gone. George was facing the other way blazing off his second barrel. I arrived dripping on my rock and we looked at each other. "Will it come back?" we chorused. And just before it became too dark to see, it came again, hurtling back down the river, its teeth chattering, the air "shss-shssing" as it was cleft by the great, black, dracula-like wings. We were both off-guard, my gun was unloaded, and the brute made straight for George. He ducked. The animal soared over him and was at once swallowed up in the night."
Sanderson and George returned to camp where they asked the natives about the creature. Sanderson asked them, spreading his arms, what kind of bat is this large and is all black? "Olitiau!" was the response. They asked Sanderson where they had seen this creature. Sanderson pointed back at the river. The natives fled in terror in the opposite direction, taking only their guns and leaving their valuables behind.
While it may be suggested that the creature that attacked Sanderson and George was merely the mate of the bat they had shot, it is somewhat dubious. Fruit bats are not known for attacking humans, and Sanderson, a highly knowledgeable and internationally respected zoologist, clearly indicated that he did not recognize the creature. Fruit bats are a brownish or yellowish color. Sanderson described the creature as all black. He, however, did describe it as a bat - and pterosaurs are bat-like.
In 1956 in Zambia along the Luapula river, engineer J.P.F. Brown was driving back to Salisbury from a visit to Kasenga in Zaire. He stopped at a location called Fort Rosebery, just to the west of Lake Bangweulu, for a break. It was about 6:00 p.m. when he saw two creatures flying slowly and silently directly overhead. He, bewildered, observed that they looked prehistoric. He estimated a wingspan of about 3-3 1/2 feet, a long thin tail, and a narrow head, which he likened to an elongated snout of a dog. One of them opened its mouth in which he saw a large number of pointed teeth. He gave the beak to tail length at about 4 1/2 feet. After this report came out, a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. D. Gregor reported that they had seen 2 1/2 ft. long flying lizards in Southern Rhodesia, and a Dr. J. Blake-Thompson reported that natives of the Awemba tribe had told of huge flying creatures resembling rats that would attack humans. They lived in caves in cliffs near the source of the great Zambezi River.
In 1957, at a hospital at Fort Rosebery (the same location J. P. F. Brown had reported seeing strange flying creatures the year before) a patient came in with a severe wound in his chest. The doctor asked him what had happened and the native claimed that a great bird had attacked him in the Bangweulu swamps. When asked to sketch the bird, the native drew a picture of a creature that resembled a pterosaur.
Soon afterwards the Zambezi valley was flooded as a result of the Kariba Dam hydroelectric project. Daily Telegraph correspondent Ian Colvin was at the scene, when he took a controversial photograph of what might be a pterosaur. [It has recently been discovered that the photo was a hoax].
Reports of prehistoric looking flying creatures are not just limited to dense swampy regions. There are also reports of giant flying lizards from the deserts of Namibia. In 1988 Professor Roy Mackal led an expedition to Namibia where reports of a creature with a wingspan of up to 30 ft were collected. The avian cryptid usually glided through the air, but also was capable of true flight. It was usually seen at dusk, gliding between crevices between two hills about a mile apart. Although the expedition was not successful in getting solid evidence, one team member, James Kosi, reportedly saw the creature from about 1000 ft. away. He described it as a giant glider shape, black with white markings

massacre man
02-21-2005, 12:00 PM
Bergman's Bear
In 1920, a Swedish zoologist, Sten Bergman, saw the skin of a Kamchatkan bear which he noted was exceptionally large, far beyond the size common to bears in the area. The hair covering the skin was short, in contrast with the long hair associated with normal Kamchatkan bears. It was also a deep black in color.

Bergman also recounted several tracks which were found. The tracks were an astounding 14.5 x 10 inches in size, suggesting a truly monstrous bear. He described the bear as Ursus arctos piscator, but it is more commonly known as Bergman’s bear. Bergman’s bear, sadly, may be extinct, as no sightings were reported since Bergman described the species in 1936.

But it has been noted that throughout the Cold War and possibly beyond, much of Kamchatka was closed off by the military. Could it be possible that the huge bear still thrives, protected from hunters by the military’s cordon? I’m not suggesting any conspiracy here, merely that a fortuitous (for the bear) circumstance may be involved. The saga of the Kamchatkan bears dies for years.

Only to be resurrected. Rodion Sivobolov, a huntsman living on the shores of the Bering Sea in northern Kamchatka (Russia), revealed another of the world’s cryptozoological mysteries in the late 1980s. Sivobolov had heard native descriptions of a strange bear known as Irkuiem (‘trousers pulled down’) or Kainyn-Kutho (‘god bear’). The Korjak and Chukchi natives described a beast with forelegs far longer than the hind, and a bulge of fat between the hind legs which often reaches to the ground, giving the appearance of a pulled-down pair of pants, and the creature its name. The beast’s numbers were declining, the hunter said, since the introduction of rifles to the area.

N.K. Vereshchagin was one of the Russian biologists who received a description of the Irkuiem from the hunter. Vereshchagin advanced a radical theory that the mysterious ‘trousers pulled down’ was a surviving remnant of Arctodus simus, a truly monstrous prehistoric bear native to North America and Russia. The bear stood nearly six feet tall at the shoulders, and was twice as large as the largest ursine when it reared up on its hind legs. Vereshchagin wrote a 1987 article in the magazine Ohota in which he advanced the Arctodus theory.

Other biologists, even those who believed Sivobolov’s story, did not agree with Vereshchagin’s theory. They pointed out (and rightfully so, I might add) that the prehistoric bear did not at all resemble the fabled Irkuiem. In fact, it had quite long legs, legs considerably longer than those attributed to the Irkuiem, in any case.

And so the saga of the bear died down, for two years at least. In 1989, another biologist, Valerij Orlov, wrote of a Kamchatkan mystery bear. The geologist Oleg Kuyaev launched a hunt for the bear, which was feared by Kamchatkan reindeer herders and was said to cross the Chukchi Sea from Alaska via ice floes. Orlov’s account was published in Vokrug Sveta.

Unlike Vereshchagin, Orlov felt that the possibility of an unknown bear was miniscule at best and felt that the mystery bear was likely a polar bear Ursus maritimus which strayed into the Bering Sea and thence Kamchatka. He even theorized there could have been a permanent colony of polar bears in Kamchatka, accounting for the prevalence of the Irkuiem in legend (George M. Eberhart does, indeed, recount a sighting of a mysterious bear known as the Qoqogak, said to be a giant polar bear, from Barrow, Alaska in 1958).

Orlov was soon contacted by F.R. Shtilmark. Shtilmark was one of those who had received a letter from Sivobolov. Still skeptical, Orlov wrote to the huntsman, asking for more information and at the same time writing to a Kamchatkan game inspector. The inspector noted that there were no reports of a strange bear in the region; he theorized that a freak specimen of polar bear was responsible. Meanwhile, the hunter wrote back to Orlov; he enclosed a photograph of an Irkuiem skin.

Orlov and the inspector both felt the skin was that of a common brown bear. In subsequent letters, the hunter sent more photos of skins and even estimated there were only 120-135 Irkuiem left. However, he produced no convincing evidence such as a skull or teeth.

The saga of the Irkuiem, sadly, seems to end there. In 1993, a work on Russian bears definitively put a stop to the question of Arctodus survival, and in 1996, Orlov had the last word on the Irkuiem, when he stated that no news had come from Kamchatka in several years.

So the question remains: did Sten Bergman actually describe a cryptozoological legend? Was Ursus arctos piscator the true culprit behind stories of the Irkuiem and the Kamchatkan god-bear? And a question begging to be asked: is the bear, indeed, extinct? Or does it still lurk out in the Kamchatkan wilds?

massacre man
02-21-2005, 12:08 PM
more later and i would like to the www.cryptozoology.com where i got the articles i posted

urgeok
02-21-2005, 12:20 PM
i found a silverfish in the bathroom once.

we call it Ted, the Toronto Tub Monster

Vodstok
02-21-2005, 12:22 PM
Almost as good as the Delaware Sandwich Stealer