Monsters and Myths

New London—As Tom and Bobbette Clapsadle of Waterford strolled along the water at Ocean Beach Park Sunday afternoon with their two sons, they spotted an almost alien-looking corpse lying amongst the seaweed.We said, ‘Oh my God, look at that,’ ” said Tom Clapsadle.

The first thing Bobbette thought they had discovered was the celebrated creature known as the “Montauk monster.”

About two and half feet long with powerful shoulders and a pointed, turtlelike snout, the Ocean Beach carcass looks very much like a fleshy, beaked creature found in July on Long Island. Stories and photos about that discovery appeared in newspapers and on television and there was rampant Internet speculation about what is was. Some joked it must have been the result of an experiment gone bad at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The Montauk animal was never identified with certainty.

The Clapsadles, who had seen a report on television about the Montauk monster, said it looked like the same thing to them. They reported the find to the Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, which said it might look at the creature today once it had seen photos.

Tom Clapsadle said the corpse had no strong odor and the seagulls did not seem interested in it, something he found strange. Others on the beach speculated it might be a sea turtle, dog, fisher cat or raccoon.

Maggie Jones, director of the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in Mystic, said Sunday night after examining photos that her best initial guess would be a raccoon.

“I’m quite certain of it,” she said. “The arrangement of the teeth look like a raccoon and the skull is pretty distinctive. It’s nothing else I can think of.”

Still, the find left Bobbette Clapsadle a little uncomfortable.

“I’m not going to swim in the ocean if there’s stuff like that out there,” she said.

theday.com/re.aspx?re=17dfab62-3211-44fc-b1ed-ef6cc2a1ff73

Whenever the subject of monster-hunting is brought up in conversation, there’s always a tendency to think that such things solely revolve around long treks into deep woods in search of Bigfoot and other hairy man-beasts, and expeditions to the shores of places like Loch Ness on quests for long-necked water-beasts.
But that’s not always the case. Sometimes, chasing monsters involves something far simpler: merely looking up.
Yep: we’re talking about giant birds, rumors of still-living pterodactyls, and even sightings of creatures similar to those portrayed in Stan Lee’s Harpies.

No-one can say that the subject of crypto-zoology is a dull one!
Without doubt, the most famous aerial beast that straddles the world of monster-hunting and the genre of on-screen entertainment is surely the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia: a truly sinister, glowing-eyed creature that terrorized the town in the 1960s, and that was immortalized in the 2002 movie starring Richard Gere: The Mothman Prophecies.
But Mothman has its rivals – and they can be found soaring around the skies just about here, there and everywhere.
Britain, for example, is home to the Owlman – a beast eerily similar to the Mothman, and which has for decades reputedly haunted the woods of Mawnan in the ancient county of Cornwall.

Jonathan Downes, who runs the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology (named after Charles Fort – an early 20th century chronicler of all-things-weird) spent years chasing the Owlman and tracking down witnesses to its activities.
Like so many of these monsters of the air, however, the Owlman has remained frustratingly elusive.
Then there’s the bat-winged, gargoyle-type creature seen flying over the English town of Glastonbury (the rumored resting place of King Arthur, no less), late one night in 2000.

Admittedly obsessed by the beast, the witness, a man named Colin Perks, went broke and nearly lost his mind trying to solve the puzzle of the Glastonbury gargoyle – such is the effect that encounters of the truly monstrous kind can have on people when they find themselves plunged into the domain of the beasts.
And let us not forget Popobawa: a creature eerily similar to that described by Perks and whose alleged nocturnal attacks on the populace sent shockwaves all across Zanzibar in 1995.

While there are a number of monster-hunters who have tried to resolve the mystery of what these many and varied winged-things might be, perhaps no-one knows more about the controversy than Ken Gerhard.
A good friend of mine who lives in San Antonio and who fronts the industrial rock band, Bozo Porno Circus, Gerhard is the author of the book Big Bird! Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, and has traveled extensively in search of countless sky-beasts, including the Thunderbird: a giant bird that features heavily in Native American Indian lore; and even creatures that sound suspiciously like surviving flying dinosaurs: pterosaurs.

Gerhard says: “During the summer of 2003, I became aware of a weird, winged beast that had been spotted mere miles from my home in Texas, and I was instantly swept into an investigation that would take me south to the Mexican border.

“Three decades earlier, Texas’ Rio Grande Valley had been the site of well-publicized events that revolved around a nightmarish creature described as being charcoal black and as tall as a man, with bat-like wings twenty feet across.”
Gerhard admits that “there are no recognized birds, either native to Texas, or indeed anywhere else, that can claim a twenty-foot wingspan. There were, however, such creatures in the distant past: animals that resembled flying dragons ruled the skies for nearly two hundred million years before disappearing into extinction.”
With this latter point in mind, Gerhard asks an intriguing question: “But are they really extinct?”
One monster-pterosaur that would certainly fit the bill was Quetzalcoaltus northropi, a huge creature with a whopping forty-foot wingspan.

Of course, mainstream zoologists and archaeologists scoff at the very idea that in some of the more remote corners of our planet such immense beasts just might still thrive. But try telling that to the countless witnesses to such creatures – and try telling it to Ken Gerhard, too.

So, if pterosaurs do still exist, then where are they hiding? Gerhard has a few ideas:
“It does seem within reason that a group of these animals could populate remote parts of Mexico’s unexplored mountains, or the marshes and jungles of Central America. There are native traditions and ancient engravings in Mexico that support the continued existence of such an animal. And an elderly settler in the Yucatan told an acquaintance of mine that prehistoric-animals could still be found living within its rainforests.”

And, with that in mind, if late one night you find yourself on some lonely stretch of road and hear above you the beating of what sounds like immense wings, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

mania.com/lair-beasts-monsters-skies_article_87474.html

Deep in the mountains of southern and central China there is said to exist a hairy humanoid creature known as the Yeren. Sightings of the Yeren, or Chinese Wildman, date back more than 2,000 years and are still reported today. Described as being a red haired bipedal animal, rising over six feet tall with a peculiarly fat belly and similarly strange pronounced buttocks, the Yeren bears a striking resemblance to many humans found in modern developed countries.

A popular seventeenth-century account from Hubei province reads:

“In the remote mountains of Fangxian County, there are rock caves, in which live hairy men as tall as three meters. They often come down to hunt dogs and chickens in the villages. They fight with whoever resists.”

Most of the sightings are in the counties of Badong, Xingshan and Fangxian, and therefore the Yeren are thought by most to originate from Shennongjia Nature Reserve in Yichang, but none have actually been discovered there.. or anywhere else for that matter.

A 1976 encounter witnessed by several local bureaucrats brought the Yeren into the international spotlight for the first time. It is reported that early in the morning of May 14, while on their way home they encountered a “strange, tailless creature with reddish fur” on a rural highway in the Hubei province. The driver pursued the creature with his car, forcing him to scramble up a hill. Roughly halfway up the hill he slipped and came to rest in front of the car, after which the passengers left the vehicle and approached the creature for a closer look.

They described the creature as being over six feet tall, covered in thick brown and purple-red wavy hair, having a fat belly and pronounced buttocks. The eyes were human-like, but the face bearing much more resemblance to that of an ape.

Interest in the Yeren had increased and the first official inquiry was launched in 1961, but was inconclusive as the body, (reported as being slain by road workers) was unavailable to inspectors and formally declared to have been a Gibbon. Later, another formal investigation by the Chinese Academy of Sciences put 110 investigators into the forests of Fang county and the Shennongjia area. No sightings were reported but local witnesses were interviewed and alleged Yeren footprints, hair, and feces were collected.

Over the years investigators have collected dozens of alleged Yeren hairs from all around China and through laboratory examination have found that “the wild man is in the middle between bears or apes and human beings.” Physicists at Fudan University, studying samples from all over China, found that the proportion of iron to zinc was 50 times that found in human hair and seven times that in the hair of recognized primates. Other studies of note have concluded that the hair was neither human nor known primate hair but from an unrecognized primate with a morphological affinity to humans, which seems to be congruent with witness descriptions of the creature.
Zhou Guoxing, one of the expedition leaders, believed there seemed to be two types of Yeren: “a larger one of about two meters in height, and a smaller one, about one meter in height.” He also reported two types of footprints: “One is large, 30-40 cm, remarkably similar to that of man, with the four small toes held together and the largest one pointing slightly outwards. The other type is smaller, about 20 cm, and more similar to the footprint of an ape or monkey, with the largest toe evidently pointing outwards.”??Zhou, believes that both living and dead specimens of the smaller Yeren are already in scientists’ hands.

According to source:

“One was killed on May 23, 1957, near the village of Zhuanxian in Zhejiang province. A biology teacher had the presence of mind to preserve the hands and feet. When Zhou learned of this in 1981, he went to the site and collected the specimens. After some considerable study he concluded that they “belonged to a kind of large stump-tailed monkey unknown to science.” Subsequently he identified the animal as a stumptailed macaque. Not long afterwards just such an animal was captured in the Huang Mountain region and taken to the Hefei Zoo. Zhou wrote that this specimen is mainly ground-dwelling…. The body is large, about 70-90 cm in standing height. A tall individual could reach one meter. Its extremities are strongly built. It weighs more than 20 kilograms. A large male could weigh over 33 kilograms, while females would be smaller. The back hair is brown in color. The adult male has whiskers, and has a reddish color on the face.”

Anthropologist Frank Poirier of Ohio State University has suggested that many Yeren reports are probably sightings of the rare Golden Monkey, which is believed to inhabit the same region. An ironic anecdote tells us that Poirier himself was once mistaken for a Yeren, after villagers who had never seen a Westerner encountered a near-nude Poirier napping by a river.

Even with all of the reports (some claim over 400 reports in the last 20 years), scientists haven’t definitively proven what the creature is, or even the concrete existence of the Yeren. When theorizing about what the Yeren could be, many zoologists believe the creature is a surviving Gigantopitliccus, a giant bipedal primate believed to have gone extinct roughly 300,000 years ago, and today would share the same habitat.

Another popular theory is that the Yeren are in fact, a small pack of evolved orangutans. A source points out:

“Bipedalism has evolved independently in the ape family at least two times, so it is at least slightly possible that this has happened yet again with an isolated population of orangutans.”

However plausible either of these theories may be, isn’t it likely that there’s yet another, less colorful explanation invoked by the ironic tale of Mr. Poirier? To us, the tale of an ape-man so closely resembling our friends and family coupled with the cultural ignorance of the locals greatly increases the chance of the recent sightings being an embarrassing tale of a remote vacation gone wrong.

paranormala.com/tale-chinese-wildman/

Here in the United States, UFO researchers and ordinary people alike talk a lot about what happened in Roswell, N.M. in July 1947. It has become a part of American folklore. But something also very weird happened in Suffolk, England in December 1980 and it has become known at “Britain’s Roswell.”

Located about eight miles east of Ipswich, England, Rendlesham Forest covers about 3,700 acres. The forest is also located close to two military bases, called RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge. In 1980, both bases were being used by the U.S. Air Force and were under the command of Col. Gordon E. Williams. Remember, this was during the Cold War and more American servicemen were stationed in England at that time.
At about 3 a.m. on Dec. 26, 1980, a security patrol near the East Gate of RAF Woodbridge reported seeing a unidentified flying object in the dark woods. At first, the servicemen thought it was a downed aircraft. But as they entered the forest to check it out, the servicemen saw numerous strange lights moving through the trees, as well as a bright light from an unidentified object. Shortly after 4 a.m., the local police were also called to the scene but reported that the only lights they could see were those from a nearby lighthouse.

Some of the airmen who were there that night later claimed to have seen a metallic object shaped like a cone and suspended in a yellow mist. It reportedly hovered over a clearing in the forest. The UFO had a pulsating red light on top and a bank of blue lights underneath. One airman claimed to have seen triangular landing gear on the object which left three impressions in the ground that could be seen the next day.

The airmen also reported that the weird hovering object seemed to move away from them as they approached it. The airmen followed the object as it hovered over a nearby field. The UFO then disappeared into the night sky, according to a Web site. At daybreak, the airmen returned to the small clearing where the UFO had first been seen. They found three small impressions in a triangular pattern, as well as burn marks and broken branches on nearby trees. In addition, they found extremely high levels of radiation where the branches were broken. At 10:30 a.m., the local police were called out again, this time to see the impressions on the ground. The English police concluded that they might have been made by some kind of animal, according to the Web site.

On the night of Dec. 28, Lt. Col. Charles Halt, who was the deputy base commander, assembled a large team of airmen to investigate the sighting and hopefully put an end to the wild rumors.
Instead, Halt and his men ran right into another UFO. They supposedly encountered a “red sun-like light” that moved about and pulsed in the Rendlesham Forest. Then, the UFO divided itself into five separate white objects and disappeared into the night sky. Immediately after that, the airmen noticed three star-like objects maneuvering in the sky, one occasionally beaming down a narrow stream of light.

It was during this investigation that a flashing light was seen across the field to the east, almost in line with the nearby farmhouse. Halt also recorded a narrative of what he was seeing as it happened by using a voice tape recorder.
According to one account, small alien beings with domed heads supposedly left the UFO and Col. Gordon Williams communicated with them using sign language, like something out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” However, this tale comes from an unconfirmed rumor.

As part of the legend about the Rendlesham Forest incident, the airmen were allegedly debriefed and ordered by their superiors to keep silent about what they had seen. One of the eyewitnesses claimed to have been forced to sign a document stating the UFO was really a lighthouse. Some accounts state that they were threatened to keep quiet with the warning that “bullets are cheap.” But in recent years, some of the eyewitnesses have come forward with what they saw. The American shows “Unsolved Mysteries” and the History Channel’s “UFO Hunters” have devoted programs to the Rendlesham Forest incident. British journalists have also looked into what happened.
Today, the forest appears quite different from the way it looked in 1980 because of a massive storm that hit England in 1987. But there is a UFO trail that goes through there informing visitors of what occurred during those cold nights in December 1980.

mcdowellnews.com/content/2008/sep/24/britain-has-its-own-roswell-incident/

Templar Seal

In the small town of Royston, Hertfordshire, there stands a stone that signifies the intersection of two straight roads orientated to the cardinal directions. This ‘Roi Stone’ or ‘Rose Stone’ has been moved a short distance to rectify hindering traffic, but what remains in the same place is the artificial cave below it, a circular beehive-shaped chamber some 26’ high, with a 17’ diameter, discovered accidently in 1742 by workmen who dug around the curious stone and discovered a shaft leading below into the chalk. It was more than half buried beneath soil, similar one might say to a time capsule, and when emptied revealed medieval carvings of the Knights Templar, who founded nearby Baldock.

To this day the carvings, suspected to tell a story best kept secret, remain open to interpretation, apart from a singular and reservedly conventional attempt. More excited devotees of the KT, who prefer to view the Order as one who were custodians and guardians of a great secret and who had somehow gained an access to knowledge way ahead of their time - ‘a complete and absolute knowledge’(obviously related and allied to the explosive secret they kept) - still await an induction into the ancient hieroglyphic language of the ‘Rabbit’ and how Druids and the Templars used this veiled and coded language to communicate. Perhaps, employing what amount I do know of this codex, the time to brave a wider scope attempt to have the story of this well preserved frieze at the Royston cave, is now. We are going to see how the Templars code hid the very thing that the Roman Catholic Church feared discovery of the most – the workings of the female body, and a sacred marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the woman they character assassinated to paint as a ‘whore’, and in doing so desecrate the concept of the sacred feminine and the spiritual act of the Heiros Gamos. To initiate us into how the Rabbit language works, we shall look at the symbol of the Templars, two knights sharing one horse.

If we resort to the code, and ‘say what you see’, this will transform into ‘Knights (2) on a horse’ and furthermore into ‘Knights to honour whores’….in an ironic statement to play the Church at their own game by returning what they had instigated as a negative term and desecration of women in general. In more nobler terminology, the Templars were to honour females, and in particular keep the secret of the Magdalene and the Grail.

Hoping that nobody will be too offended if I bypass most of the orthodox assertion regarding the carvings, I will move straight into ‘the Rabbit language’ of visual puns and play-on words (similar to the popular British TV programme ‘Catchphrase’). The pictorial record starts at the right hand side where we see some figures involving a crucifixion and leads us into a figure seemingly holding a sword pointing to a further twelve figures above.

The interesting feature here is that the ninth ‘figure’ along squeezes in, unlike all the fairly regularly spaced others. The reason is because we are not looking at a figure or person at all. The shape of the ninth representation is that of a biological spermatozoa, and it is situated in 9th position to draw attention to the illustration not being of twelve people but twelve months, and with the sperm being drawn attention to at the 9th month we are here discussing gynaecology and pregnancy. The figure is not holding a sword as one would automatically think. It is intended to be perceived as a beam..a ray..a shaft of light…the origin of the word ‘beam’ coming from the Anglo-Saxon and meaning ‘tree’ ‘stock of a tree’… a ‘stock’ from Old English stocc, a stick, is the rooted trunk that receives a graft, and also means family, ancestry, descent. A ‘graft’ is the place of junction of stock and scion..’scion’ a word from Old French ‘sion’, ‘scion’, meaning a young member of a family, a descendant, an offshoot. To the right of the figure holding the beam is a defaced circle which upon closer inspection resembles a biological cell.

Alongside the twelve month calendar we see a two rowed section with 15 along the top and 16 below it.

The total designates a calendar month of 31 days. The bottom line shows us scored vertical marks in sections number 17-22, both numbers key to mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. In pregnancy the corpus luteum begins to develop on the 22nd day. (When a woman ovulates, the egg bursts from the follicle, and what is left becomes corpus luteum.The luteul phase is the 2nd half of the menstrual cycle). There is a figure at the bottom left of this monthly calendar, allegedly Templar Grand Master Jacques Molay being burned at the stake, or on fire. However, what we are meant to see is a figure ‘on heat’, the phase when a female is sexually receptive ‘in heat’ or ‘on heat’. The puzzling illustration below this is another table with five graduations - with more to the right than the left and with a period or interval between - which shows us that the fertile period starts 4-5 days before (more) ovulation and ends 1-2 days after (less).

We move next onto a figure associated with a grid, and it is St Lawrence who is said to have been martyred on a gridiron. The story goes that Lawrence was dispatched with the Holy Grail amongst other treasures of the Roman Catholic church and that he sent it to his parents in Spain where it lay hidden and unregarded for centuries before finally arriving at a monastery for safe keeping. The figure below Lawrence is an example of ‘say what you see’, it has it’s hands up in the air, or is a figure ‘up in arms’ at the above suggestion of Lawrence being Grail custodian. Alongside Lawrence is the Holy Family, but not as we regularly know them. The secret of the Templars prefers Jesus, Mary Magdalene and child.

Below them we see not a horse as some think, but a dog, the symbol of the Dog Star ‘Sirius’, which stares over at the centre of the cross of a presumed sword in the same way as Mary Magdalene stares at the centre of the cross in the bas-relief in the RLC church. Between them is a figure with exaggerated vulva. This figure is Sheela-na-gig, a Celtic figurative carving of naked women displaying exaggerative vulva, who is associated to ‘Caillech Bhaerra’ who was blinded in one eye. The tribe neighbouring the Dogon, the Bozo, called Sirius B, ‘the Eye Star’, and if we look closely at the only other scored out and defaced circle in the vision of the dog we can see it duplicates the orbit of Sirius and Sirius B.

The apparent sword, as there is no scale to go by, is a dagger, and a dagger, in printing, is also a ‘mark of reference’, to draw attention to the Sirius connexion. The next illustration shows us a bud, a knob-like shoot, or offspring.

Alongside the Holy family to their right is a female figure. Her left arm and hand, we are told, holds a wheel, but instead we can see a representation of a fallopian tube, also known as an oviduct, which leads from the ovaries into the uterus. To her right there is a crucifixion scene with a hand containing a heart on either side. The hand is to be seen as being on the heart, to reveal the idiom ‘hand on heart’ for if you put your hand on your heart and say something you say it knowing it is the truth. With Jesus responsible for fathering a child with Mary, we are being informed that he survived the crucifixion, and this is the truth known and kept secret by the Templars. Below this scene we see a gathering and a figure being taken down from the cross. To the right of the main crucifixion scene there is the sepulchre with Mary Magdalene sitting on a rock. Above the sepulchre there is a hand appearing to release a dove and a falling object. The ‘Hand releasing dove’ is a common wedding release ceremony in which bride and groom hold two doves which are then released together. The object falling appears to be an egg or yolk (the non-living material contained by the ovum) again indicating that Jesus and Mary were married and that a child resulted from their union….the corpus luteum we learned of earlier in the calendar section of the frieze, or, as Rabbit Language would have it…’corpse….loot…tomb’ -corpus luteum - as Jesus’ body was removed from the tomb by his bride. Next to this amazing pictorial representation we see a woman carrying a child. Those who would prefer the conventional argument that it is the traditional representation of St Christopher should know that this Templar carving predates that particular Christopher image.

There is an even greater irony here and little wonder that the imagery is interchangeable - many of Christopher’s earliest images, show him as having the head of a dog again hinting at a Sirius connexion. The staff she holds can be viewed as testicles with erect penis. Below this sepulchre and Mary with child scene is a larger gathering of people which is telling us that there are many people who are aware of this story, the marriage of Jesus to Mary and a resulting child….the secret held by the Knights Templar and recorded for posterity in a once concealed beehive shaped cave 26’ below the ground at Royston, the symbol of the bee, we learn, being one of the two most common Dogon symbols.

ellisctaylor.com/dgroystoncave.html

lthough stories of sea serpents, and mythical sea-dwellers, abound in Orkney, there have actually been a surprising number of documented, historical creature “sightings” that have now entered the lore of the islands.

Perhaps the most famous of these encounters took place in Stronsay.

There, in 1808, the first, and perhaps best-known, of a series of episodes relating to the carcasses of, what appeared to be, long-necked sea creatures were washed ashore.

The Stronsay beast was first sighted on September 25, 1808, lying on rocks at Rothiesholm Head, in the south-east of the island.

There, John Peace, a local man, fishing off the coast, was puzzled by the sight of seabirds flocking around what looked like an animal’s corpse on the rocks.

Turning his little boat, and watched by another Stronsay man, George Sherar, Peace made his way to the carcass. But what he found was unlike anything he had encountered before. Lying on the rocks were the remains of a large serpent-like creature, with a long, eel-like neck and three pairs of legs.

At the time, the corpse was inaccessible, so closer examination was impossible. However, ten days later, one of Orkney’s notorious gales blew the decomposing remains ashore, where they were found just below the high water mark.

Sherar now had his chance to examine the corpse, which he did - meticulously studying it and measuring the dimensions of the “sea monster”.

The beast was described as serpentine, measuring exactly 55 feet long, with a neck measuring ten feet three inches long. The head was like that of a sheep, with eyes bigger than a seal’s. Its skin was grey and rough to the touch. However, if stroked from the head down the back, it was said to be as “smooth as velvet”.

Six “limbs” extended from the body and a bristly mane of long, wiry hair grew from the beast’s shoulders, down to its tail. These silver coloured bristles were said to glow eerily in the dark.

“Its flesh was described as being like ‘coarse, ill-coloured beef, entirely covered with fat and tallow and without the least resemblance or affinity to fish’. The skin, which was grey coloured and had an elastic texture was said to be about two inches thick in parts.”
Account of the Stronsay Beast as reported in The Orcadian newspaper.

By the end of September, news of Stronsay’s monster had spread far and wide.

Because the remains had rotted away to practically nothing, the four men who had originally examined the carcass were taken to Kirkwall. There, they had to swear to the magistrate that their information was the truth.

 A decomposing shark?

Before long, details of the incredible find reached the ears of a Natural History Society in Edinburgh.

At the society’s meeting in November 1808, the creature was given the Latin name Halsydrus Pontoppidani. The name, meaning Pontoppidan’s Water Snake of the Sea, was in honour of the 18th century Norwegian bishop, who collected reports of sea-monsters.

Shortly afterward, the naturalist Sir Everard Home read of the Stronsay Beast. Intrigued by the tales of a sea-monster, he viewed what was left of the evidence. He was convinced, however, that the creature was nothing more than the remains of a decomposing basking shark - an animal fairly common in the waters around Orkney.

Comparing the vertebrae of the “monster” with those known to belong to a basking shark, Home found them to be identical.

But how could the long necked creature washed up on a Stronsay beach be the remains of a basking shark? The answer lies in the physiology of the basking shark, and, in particular, how it decays after death.

First the shark’s jaws - which are attached only by a small piece of flesh - drop off leaving what looks like the remains of a long neck and a small skull.

Then, as only the upper half of the animal’s tail fin carries the spine, the lower half rots away and provides a convincing serpentine tail. When the dorsal fin begins to decompose, the remaining rays can have the appearance of a hairlike mane. The monster’s six legs can simply be explained away as the remains of the shark’s lower fins.

But the mystery doesn’t end there.

Even if the Stronsay Beast was nothing more than a dead basking shark, an element of mystery still surrounds the saga.

The longest recorded basking shark measured a mere 40 feet - 15 feet smaller than the remains of the Stronsay Beast. At 55 feet long from tip to tail, the shark that decomposed to form the Stronsay Beast must have been a monster in its own right.

So was the Stronsay Beast really a shark? Or is there another explanation? An unknown species of giant shark perhaps?

With all tales such as these, sometimes it’s better not to know.

orkneyjar.com/folklore/seabeasts.htm

Since the first sighting reported in 1889, 79 accounts of a large-sized objects have been documented (click on the map for a larger map). Most (92 percent) observations have occurred during the months of April through September.

What is it the people see? The object most frequently (70 percent) described is a large eel shape creature that reachs in length from 20 to 40 feet. It is round, brown to blue-black in color, and possesses very obvious stee-black eyes and undulating hips. Others identify it as a large-sized fish from 6 to 10 feet in length.

The most obvious point made during the recorded narratives is that the sighters were not drinking or on drugs and that they hate to talk about it to anyone for fear of being identified as a “weirdo” or worse.

Since I worked on the lake more than 30 years, one of the most often asked questions was, “Have you seen the monster yet?” While conducting year around fisheries investigations on the lake with nets and using sophisticated acoustic sounding equipment or during my 17 years of sailing on the lake, I have yet to see my first Flathead large creature. Although, I have stated many times that I have observed several unexplainable large sized holes in the nets we pulled from the lake.

It wasn’t until I met Dr. Eugene Lepeschkin (a proclaimed Cyptozoologist) did I take more than a casual interest in the monster issue. When visiting the Flathead on his journeys to Scotland’s Loch Ness and other large lakes obtaining first hand accounts, he asked me to collect and report any future sightings to him.

Much to my surprise, within a week I received a letter from a person hearing of my interest on the subject and he describred his sightings of the creature. He had observed not once but twice a creature swimming next to shore in 1985 and 1987.

Thereafter, not much happened in the monster line until 1993 when I received 7 reports of creatures in the lake. Because of the unusual high number of reports, I contacted Paul Fugleberg of Polson, a long time historian of monster sightings and a former editor of the Flathead Courier. He stated that he also had several reports for that year. We collectively massed thirteen reports of creatures during 1993, which was by far the most productive year of sightings.

Was there anything different about the year, weather, lake conditions, etc? Nothing — perhaps more interest in the subject. Sightings have only occurred in 36 or 31 percent of the 113 years of record. Normally sightings number less than two per year.

The majority (80 percent) of the sightings were made while there was more than one person present, with over 100 persons sighting a school of large fish off the Lookout Point. Sightings while on land or from a boat occur with equal chance of seeing the creature. The frequency of large fish sightings were most frequent within ten years of the 1954 report of an angler catching the fictitious 6-foot sturgeon from Flathead Lake.

There are several interesting facts about the sightings in 1993. The only sighting of two creatures together was reported on May 24 in Big Arm Bay. One of the creatures was considerably larger than the other. Both were swimming in the same direction and suddenly separated, each going off in its own direction. Two reports describe sightings that occurred on the same day.

On July 13th, two sightings occurred within 25 minutes of each other but were some 15 miles apart. On July 17, both reports were from the same area, but were seen 13 hours apart. Six sightings during 1993 describe bait fish swarming near the vicinity of the creature. They appeared to be jumping out of the water to avoid being eaten by…whatever.

Reports have been submitted by first time visitors as well as from life-long lake residents and from drinkers and non-drinkers. Details of the creature have been described by mothers, doctors, lawyers, biologists,engineers, anglers and policemen. No one seems to be exempt, so keep your eyes open and be extra alert when traveling in the areas around Skidoo Bay, Polson Bay, The Narrows and along the west-shore road. You never know when it could happen!

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Jesse Marcel, Jr: In the summer of 1947, falling debris of an unknown object came to rest on the Foster Ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico. I was 11 years old at the time and my dad was the base intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Field. This was the same base that was home to the 509th Composite Bomb Group, responsible for the ending of WWII with the atomic bombing of Japan. The base itself was privy to some of the most closely guarded secrets in the nation at that time. My father, Major Marcel, was deeply involved in the most sensitive intelligence at the base. The Roswell Legacy is the story of his involvement in the now famous event triggered by the crash of a mysterious object on the Foster Ranch. The timeline started when the ranch foreman, Mac Brazil, recovered portions of an unidentified flying object that he subsequently turned over to the local sheriff, who, in turn, contacted Colonel Blanchard, commanding officer of the air base at Roswell. Colonel Blanchard ordered my father, Major Marcel, and a CIC agent to the crash site for investigation and recovery of representative debris samples. Thus the Roswell saga began.

For years after my dad’s death I wanted to write a book confirming his credentials and relevance to the story. When stationed as a flight surgeon in Iraq and being subject to eminent danger from mortar attacks, I was reminded of my own mortality and thought it was high time to get the project underway. At one point, my computer with book notes was damaged by a nearby mortar strike so I took the precaution of protecting the computer with my flack vest if I was not wearing it at the time. I figured that if my hooch took a direct hit at night at least my computer would survive even if I did not.

I am hopeful that The Roswell Legacy will confirm the fact that my dad knew what he was talking about, and the fact he kept the secret of Roswell for over thirty years before divulging it primarily to a noted UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman. It is so frustrating to read articles written by close-minded skeptics who have the attitude that says, don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up. They have almost totally ignored his service record, which confirms his trustworthiness and honesty. What they did with his service record was to take statements out of context to undermine his basic character.

My father had no financial interest in the story, but thought it was high time to let the American people know the true circumstances of the Roswell event. To his dying day, he never wavered in his conviction that the debris recovered from that ranch so many years ago was, in fact, parts of an extraterrestrial craft. For all that was known in 1947, there was no such thing as extraterrestrial civilizations and certainly not visitations to Earth by them. It was a total surprise that there were such things as extraterrestrial civilizations and moreover, that they had the ability to cross the vastness of space to study more primitive civilizations such as ours. One of the biggest lessons learned from the event is the fact that interstellar space travel is possible and eventually, we will have the technology to be able to do so.

Having personally seen the crash site debris that my father brought home that night in 1947, I compared notes with my dad, in later years, and confirmed his feelings that this was certainly something not of human manufacture. He, as well as others, described characteristics that were not present in known metals and materials of the time. The Roswell Legacy goes into detail about the official position on the nature of the debris and the government’s effort to cover up what was actually found.

The government first said that the debris was from a weather balloon, and then from a top secret project called Project Mogul. They alleged that the remains of a Mogul Balloon could have been confused with debris from what was called a flying saucer. While there was some resemblance, the debris could not have come from a top secret project such as the Mogul Balloon.

While we are far from being able to do so, The Roswell Legacy confirms how it is possible for interstellar space travel to actually be accomplished. There are theoretical possibilities of a space warp drive that can travel at any arbitrary velocity with the energy for the drive coming from the fabric of space itself. Like the old saying goes, the proof of principle has been established and all it takes now is the engineering. With the advancements we have made in the last 100 years, who’s to say we will not conquer space itself in the next 500 years? Breakthrough propulsion could come at any time, relegating chemical rocket travel to the back pages of ancient history. The skeptics love to keep parroting the old saw that because we cannot travel in interstellar space in any meaningful manner, no one else can either. How wrong they are!

Warwick Associates