Monsters and Myths

Planet-wide legends and reports of physical evidence persist around the topic of wild giants living outside human civilization, and one place the Sasquatch legend is particularly vivid is at Folsom’s Pacific Western Traders gallery.

On Wool Street, painters and sculptors affiliated with the American Indian culture-oriented gallery are displaying Sasquatch-themed works, and plan a gathering around “The Sasquatch Chronicles” for Saturday evening – to celebrate a modern consciousness that can embrace meaningful ancient legend.

Sasquatch is a Coast Salish Indian word referring to a wild giant that European settlers of the Pacific Northwest call Bigfoot. Near El Dorado Hills and Folsom, Miwok tribespeople have the story of Che-ha-lum ‘che, “rock giant.”

One painter, gallery owner Gayle Anita, is talking these days of wild giants as at least a metaphor for a watchful eye monitoring a now-perilous course of European civilization. A colleague, Jack Alvarez, said several of his works whimsically explore the idea of wild giants as a god-like heroes that are also human-like – but had better keep a distance, because their semi-divine nature would be corrupted by immersion in human culture.

“In Native American cultures, people make allowances for an area of ambiguity,” Anita said.

Some people find troubling “the idea of something so spectacularly different from what we believe that we can’t conceive of it walking next to us in our world,” she said.

Walking leaves footprints, and footprints – some 700 of them photographed over the years – are the chief element of what is called evidence that Sasquatch and his relatives do inhabit areas of the earth remote from civilization. Less well-regarded claims of evidence involve photographs and film footage. Anita doesn’t get excited by physical evidence, but she keeps track of it. A television station last month broadcast film submitted as a record of a snow-colored giant encountered recently, high in Asia’s Himalaya mountain range, Anita noted. The corresponding legend is that of the yeti, whose mistranslated name wound up rendered in English as “abominable snowman.”

“I’ve never seen him,” Alvarez said. “I believe in a spiritual indigenous way. I approach Sasquatch from within. The value in Sasquatch or any other myth important to a culture is the magical, mystical sense of a creature hiding from us.”

In addition to Asian yeti lore, American Indian cultures from coast to coast – from the Iroquois, Creeks and Susquehannocks to the Sioux and Shoshone to the Hopi, Yupik, Salish and Miwok – have stories of wild giants watching civilization.

“It seems to exist in our subconscious,” Anita said. “Then, it becomes a tribal entity.”

Many accounts say that the wild giant smells bad – which helped create the misnomer “abominable snowman.”

Anita offered an interpretation.

“That’s a warning, to keep men and hunting dogs off,” Anita said.

But, with the artists who’ve rendered Sasquatch in Folsom, there’s no touchy-feely attitude around the wild giant.

“It’s respected and feared,” they said.

edhtelegraph.com/detail/100630.html

A SHOTTON man is baffled after witnessing SIX UFOs in one night.

Town councillor William Barton saw the strange spectacle in the town’s skies last Friday evening at about 7.44pm.

He rushed to grab his binoculars and called on neighbours to show them the phenomenon.

Coun Barton, of Mill View, said: “They seemed to come from the Ewloe area and float towards Shotton. There were about six of them and they appeared and then vanished for a while.

“They were bowl-shaped, orange blobs, with a glow of light around them.”

Coun Barton says the objects appeared to be flying higher than 1,500ft, which means they would have been breaking air traffic regulations.

The councillor is keeping an open mind on the origins of the UFOs.

He said: “If this has been a prank, it is very irresponsible, it could have caused a terrible aircraft accident.

“I thought these objects may have been created by a glider towing fireworks, but there was no smoke.

“It is very alarming to think what they could be.”

A spokesman for Air Traffic Control at Liverpool John Lennon Airport said: “Nothing out of the ordinary was seen at this time.”

dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2008/12/05/

councillor-i-watched-six-ufos-over-north-wales-55578-22409099

The legend of the Loch Ness Monster is normally found in fiction and fairy tales, not usually in an art exhibit. The ICA (The Institute of Contemporary Art) is currently featuring “Momentum 12″ by Gerard Byrne that opened Nov. 12 and features pictures of objects that could be mistaken for something else, with a strong focus on the fabled Nessie.

Byrne is an artist who is interested in telling stories about personal or historical events and how something is seen in the historical context especially when people are unsure exactly what is being seen. One piece makes the viewer wonder if the picture is a log or the legendary monster.

The legend of Nessie’s existence has long been debated. Byrne’s artwork explores one of the most famous mysteries of our world, which according to a biography accompanying the exhibit, is the reason why Byrne got interested in art. Byrne was inspired to do art on the mystical creature when he learned that in the early thirties British newspapers would boost sales by having reports of sightings and images of monsters.

Byrne has an interesting series of shots of the lake Loch Ness that show how at one moment of time there can be dozens of interpretations of the same situation. This series proves how one person could have seen the Loch Ness Monster but another person could have seen a piece of wood, or nothing at all. His pictures are in both black and white and color which illustrates how the different interpretations can occur. The more famous pictures are black and white like most of the photography in the early 1900s which led to many of the ‘false’ sightings.

Byrne also presents stories in the exhibit, the most memorable of which were short poems and one-line quotes from eye witnesses of the Loch Ness Monster. What makes the stories of the mythical creature so fascinating is not only the creature itself but the reactions of the people who saw it.

The exhibit also uses film to tell the story of the monster. The film is played using a wind-up film projector that is audible from outside of the room. It is shot entirely in black and white, and the narrator describes his numerous accounts of the monster. It’s not very informative, however, since the narrator speaks over the first-person accounts, rendering it rather pointless.

Although this was an interesting exhibit that featured different types of art, true mystical creature fanatics will be more satisfied by the Mythic Creatures exhibit at the Museum of Science.
The Gerard Byrne exhibit is open until March 1.

media.www.suffolkjournal.net/media/storage/paper632/news/2008/

12/03/Arts/Nessie.Spotted.At.HarborSide.Museum-3574345.shtml

Throughout London’s dark history and ghost lore, the case of the Enfield poltergeist remains one of the most bizarre and astonishing. Between 1977 and 1979 this haunting was investigated by one Maurice Grosse who, two years previous had lost his daughter in a crash. He felt that the Enfield mystery was meant for him, but little did he realise just how potent and everlasting the story would remain.

The three-bedroom semi-detached house was was run by single parent Peggy Hodgson, and inhabited by her four children. Eleven-year old Janet was the first to recognise strange utterings in the form of odd knocking noises but such disturbances were considerably minor in comparison to what was about to occur.

Larger objects in the house began to be pushed around, doors slammed, windows opened, loud banging noises reverberated around the home, alarming the children more and more as they intensified. Then, the unknown shifter of objects dealt a violent blow to one of the young children, a small boy, and WPC Caroline Heaps visited the house, and was shocked to see a chair floating in the middle of a room. Then, things became extremely serious as children, particularly young Janet, were attacked in their beds, strangulation was attempted, bed sheets were strewn and Peggy’s nine-year old son Billy had a lucky escape when an iron grate crashed onto his bed as he slept, thrown by an invisible assailant.

Despite the serious nature of incidents, many locals believed the ‘ghost’ to be nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by the family, but the Society of Psychical Research, and leading member Maurice Grosse, suggested something unknown to blame. When Janet, and her sister Margaret began speaking in demonic tongue, the case took a disturbing turn. Pools of water began appearing throughout the house, and in the end more than fifteen separate cases were witnessed by many people.

Why Janet was singled out we’ll never know, but investigators believed that it was the spirit of an old man who died in the house which may have caused the torment. His name, a Bill Hobbs from Durant’s Park graveyard. Unfortunately for Peggy Hodgson, she had to put up with the awful phenomenon until one day it ceased, never to return, making the Enfield poltergeist one of London’s most fascinating yet eerie events.

londonist.com/2008/12/the_saturday_strangeness_25.php

On October 19, 1865 the Missouri Democrat newspaper printed a truly extraordinary article. Not prone to exaggeration, this paper would spend the next few decades as the flagship conservative newspaper for the St. Louis area, before merging with another paper and becoming the famed St. Louis Globe-Democrat, one of the nation’s foremost papers until ceasing operations in 1986, but not before launching the career of a young Pat Buchanan in the early 1960’s.

This particular article tells the tale of a man by the name of James Lumley. We know little about Lumley, other than the Missouri Democrat seemingly finding him credible, but what we do know was that sometime in September of 1865 he was making his usual living of trapping fur somewhere in the mountains on the upper Missouri River, about 75 to 100 miles above stream of the Great Falls
of the Missouri.

Just after sunset, Lumley claims he saw a bright light travelling rapidly through the sky in an easterly direction, where it exploded. Lumley reported that he then heard a rushing sound, felt the ground shake, and smelled sulfur in the air. Normally, one would consider this a classic case of a meteorite, but it gets better. The next day, about two miles from his campsite, Lumley reports that he saw felled trees leading to an object that had partly embedded itself into a mountainside. The object was “rock-like”, and divided into “compartments”, and most notably, it was covered in what appeared to be Egyptian-style hieroglyphs. Liquid leaked from areas of the craft, and glass-like material littered the immediate area.

There is something very modern-sounding about this UFO account. Remember the time period; the 1860’s. UFOlogy of that time was not yet even in its infancy. The concept of men from mars was only just beginning, and was well before talk of Schiaparelli’s canals and Percival Lowell’s advanced Martian civilization, but all this business of their ships crashing into our planet, covered in hieroglyphs and
leaking fluid, would not be discussed until the late 20th century and incidents like Roswell’s mysterious I-Beam and reports about the appearance of the Rendlesham Forest UFO.

The first Perhaps the best perspective of the times are the conclusions of the Missouri Democrat article. It continues to theorize that alien beings used natural meteorites to travel to other worlds, perhaps intending to enslave the population. No UFO needed, just hitch a ride on a small asteroid, wait a few thousand years, and voila, you land on a planet you can conquer. Of course, the logistics of this transcend even planets: its much easier to build a spacecraft that can make a controlled voyage, than wait around for an asteroid to eventually hit a planet. But the theory does illustrate that the concept of an alien spacecraft as we know it, never entered the mind of the author of this enigmatic article. Yet, it sounds extraordinarily similar to accounts of UFO crashes of our time.

We don’t know what ultimately happened to Lumley, or if other versions of his account are out there somewhere. It can be reasonably said he probably did not recover the UFO. Does that mean its still out there? A century and a half later? Lumley gave the location of the crash at around 75 to 100 miles above the Great Falls of the Missouri in the mountains, implying that he probably was upstream in a mountainous area near the river itself. Presuming the Great Falls being at the location of Ryan Dam, built on the largest of a series of falls collectively called the “Great Falls” but only those at Ryan Dam being properly called that, it would place his location in the area of Canyon Ferry Reservoir.

There are indeed mountains in that area, and Lumley’s lost UFO might just still be sitting there, partly buried in a mountainside, with its hieroglyphs perhaps now slightly eroded waiting for some intrepid explorer to find and reveal to the world. Unless, of course, the government or the originators of this UFO didn’t get to it first.

paranormala.com/lumleys-ufo

bclocalnews.com/news/35547269.html

Located near the village of Cannock Wood, Staffordshire, England, Castle Ring is an Iron Age structure known as a Hill-Fort, and which may have been constructed as far back as 500 BC. And it’s an ancient location that has had more than its fair share of encounters with strange beasts.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt whatsoever, the strangest report on record of a weird creature seen at Castle Ring is that of Pauline Charlesworth. According to Pauline, it was a bright, summery day in July 1986 that her strange encounter occurred. As she worked on Saturdays, Pauline explained, she had a regular day off work during the week, and had chosen this particular day to prepare a picnic basket, and take a trip to Castle Ring.

On arriving, she prepared herself a place to sit, stretched out a blanket on the ground and opened up her picnic basket that contained drinks, fruit and sandwiches. For more than an hour she sat and read, but then something curious happened.

It was as if, she explained, she was sitting within the confines of a vacuum and all of the surrounding noises, such as the birds whistling and the branches of the trees gently swaying, stopped. Pauline also said that “what was there wasn’t quite right.”

By that statement, she explained: “The best way I can describe it is to say it was like I wasn’t really on the Chase but it was as if I was in someone’s dream of what the Chase should look like: as if it was all a mirage; but a good one.” Then, out of the trees, came a horrific form running toward her. It was, said Pauline, a man. The man, however, was unlike any that she had ever seen before. He had long, filthy hair, a matted beard, and a face that was more prehistoric than modern.

He was relatively short in height, perhaps no more than five feet two inches, and was clad in animal skins that extended from his waist to his knees and with a long piece of animal skin that was draped over his right shoulder. In his right hand he held what were undoubtedly the large antlers of a deer that had been fashioned into a dagger-like weapon.

Pauline said that it was difficult to ascertain who was more scared: her or the man. While she stared at him in stark terror, he eyed her curiously and in what Pauline described as a disturbing and sinister fashion. On several occasions he uttered what sounded like the words of an unknown language: “It was like he was angry and firing questions at me,” she added. But that was not all.

In the distance, Pauline could hear other voices getting closer and closer that collectively grew into a veritable crescendo. And then she found the source of the noise: through a break in the trees came perhaps thirty of forty more similarly clad people, some men and some women, all chanting in an unknown tongue.

It was clear to Pauline that some sort of ceremony was about to take place inside Castle Ring and she was right in the heart of the action. The men and women all proceeded to sit down at the edges of the Ring. One man, much taller than the rest and who she took to be the “leader of the group,” marched over to her and said something unintelligible; but that she understood by the wave of his arm meant that she should get out of the circle.

This she did and retreated with shaking legs to the tree-line. For more than fifteen minutes she sat, transfixed with terror by the sight, as this curious band of people continued to chant. Then out of the sky came the most horrific thing that Pauline had ever seen in her entire life.

It was, she recalled, a creature about four feet in height, human in shape with oily black skin, thin arms and legs and a pair of large, bat-like wings. And it had two hideous, red, glowing eyes. “It was like the devil,” recalled Pauline, perhaps with a high-degree of justification.

It slowly dropped to the ground and prowled the Ring for a minute, staring at one and all and emitting hideous shrieks. Suddenly, seven or eight of the men pounced on the creature, wrestled it to the ground, and tied it firmly with powerful ropes. It writhed and fought to get loose and tore into the flesh of the men with its claws but was finally subdued and dragged into the forest by the same group of men.

The remainder of the party followed and Pauline said that the strange atmosphere began to lift and the area returned to normality. For several minutes she stood her ground, too afraid to move, but then finally returned on still-unsteady legs to her blanket and quickly scooped up both it and her picnic basket and ran to her car.

Of course, the skeptic would say that Pauline’s experience was merely the result of a bizarre dream – or nightmare. And, indeed, perhaps that is all it really was.

More than twenty years on, however, Pauline herself is still convinced that something very strange and diabolically evil occurred on that summer day in July 1986 at the Castle Ring. And, who knows, maybe she’s right…

mania.com/lair-beasts-creature-woods_article_111368.html

Ridiculous is a meaningless word until you’ve seen Thomas Steenburg, Bigfoot field researcher, taking giant strides across Harrison Lake’s beach wearing replica creature tracks moulded to a pair of Chuck Taylors. He is conducting an experiment, see, to find out whether or not convincing Bigfoot tracks can be easily faked. They can’t. Even in the softest sand, Steenburg’s tracks—replicas of the 1958 Bluff Creek, California, prints that catapulted the term Bigfoot into public consciousness—mark only an eighth of an inch of the surface. The tracks he claims to have discovered at Ruby Creek the week before, in late September this year, were three times that deep, indicating a foot structure designed to carry a very heavy animal. He says.

Here’s the story: a man from Chilliwack went hunting in the forests around Ruby Creek, about 50 kilometres up the Fraser River from Agassiz. He was in very difficult terrain, a bog so moist and so deep that Steenburg later sank waist-deep while exploring the area. The hunter told Steenburg that something threw a rock at him. When he turned to look, he saw a manlike creature covered in hair walk into a thicket of trees. He believed it was a Bigfoot (also widely known in this part of the world as Sasquatch, which means “hairy man” in Halkomelem, a Salish language).

So the hunter was spooked, of course, and called Steenburg. After 30 years in the field, Steenburg has become B.C.’s go-to guy for this sort of thing. Fellow trackers Bill Miller and Christine Marie went with Steenburg to investigate and they found a few tracks in the forest where the hunter saw the creature wander. They cast one of the prints in plaster and unveiled it, placed upon a trash bin, at the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club/West Coast Sasquatch conference on the shore of Harrison Lake on October 4—the event at which Steenburg was taking giant strides across the sand. Harrison Hot Springs is a hotbed of Sasquatch activity, and the creature is ever present in the locals’ psyches: there are Sasquatch murals and statues and a restaurant and a provincial park named after the elusive (many say mythical) animal.

The cryptozoologists were crowding around the nine-inch cast. It was a mediocre print, at best, covered in bog gunk, and hardly proof that Sasquatch is alive and kicking. Then again, there’s more to it than just this print.

“There are two facts,” says veteran B.C. Sasquatch tracker John Green, sitting in the living room of his Harrison Hot Springs house. “There is something out there making those prints.

“Second, thousands of people, including university professors, have said they have seen a large, bipedal animal covered in hair. If we get a team together, we’ll discover that humans have been faking it throughout history—an interesting human activity—or there’s really something out there.”

Green is a pioneer in Sasquatch field research and was one of the first to investigate the location of the famous and controversial 1967 so-called Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film shot at Bluff Creek. There have been more than 3,000 sightings in B.C. since 1920, by his count. (In July this year, two people separately claimed they saw a Bigfoot on Mt. Archibald near Chilliwack within three hours of each other.)

Green has written three books during his half-century search. He says he has seen many footprints but has never seen the animal, something he chalks up to “bad luck” but something that cynics use as proof that he’s running a fool’s errand.

“People don’t believe because they have not actually delved into the subject themselves,” says John Kirk, chair and cofounder of the BCSCC and author of In the Domain of the Lake Monsters. “They have never done any research; they have never done any comprehensive analysis of the evidence there. They’ve never really looked into it.”

Kirk says that when he began investigating British Columbia’s unclassified species, or cryptids, in the 1980s, he faced “incredulity from the public at large”. He got used to it a long time ago. He finds value in his work, even if most think he’s nuts—new species are discovered all the time, after all. The Congolese mountain gorilla inhabited the same mythical realm for westerners as Bigfoot until it was officially discovered in 1902, Kirk says. Cryptozoologists have a long list of such creatures, and Earth is a big place. Just because we don’t know it’s out there doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

The scientific community has refused, Kirk says, and still refuses to tackle a “fringe” subject that could compromise careers. There are superstars in Bigfoot’s corner, however: such highly regarded wildlife experts as Jane Goodall and George Schaller have acknowledged publicly that Sasquatch may exist and that science should invest more resources in looking for it.

But they’re a very small minority. Most scientists find the hunt pointless: why not devote our research to helping animals that are known to exist instead of dedicating time and resources to an animal that, if it exists, hasn’t affected humanity in any way?

“Well, humans want to understand our environment and we want to understand nature as best as we can. It’s like any other animal that hasn’t been discovered yet,” Kirk says.

“I’m not out to prove that it exists,” says Gerry Matthews at his home in Chilliwack. Matthews is the founder of West Coast Sasquatch, an on-line forum where Bigfoot enthusiasts share information. “I wouldn’t be terribly heartbroken if it was proven not to exist.

“But the mystery is still out there. There’s enough going on to say, ‘Ya know, there’s something happening here; there’s something on the go.’ It would be nice to get to the bottom of this, once and for all.”

The more one looks into it, the deeper the mystery gets. The Sasquatch conundrum defies logic. The creature’s potential existence is about as baffling as the lengths that presumed hoaxers will go to so they can fool what is, essentially, a very small cult following. One thing is clear, however: anyone who does a little research soon learns there’s a lot more going on than media reports of hoaxes.

“A lot of Sasquatch tracks are found where nobody goes; it’s simple as that,” Kirk says. “I always get very doubtful when they’re found close to human habitation, and I quadruple-check those to ensure that the footprint shows flexibility, otherwise I’m out of there in two minutes flat. It’s a waste of time. If every print is exactly the same, thanks but no thanks.”

There have been plenty of hoaxes over the years, the latest by three men from Georgia who claimed to have a Bigfoot carcass stored in an icebox. It turned out to be a gorilla suit stuffed with possum guts. But that doesn’t mean all sightings and tracks are fabricated.

The reason Bigfoot field research continues is that convincing tracks are found every year around the world—tracks that change with each step, indicating that something organic, not rigid, is making the impressions. The Willow Creek Museum in California has a $100,000 reward for anyone who can demonstrate how to replicate footprints in dense terrain that reflect the gait and girth of a heavy, bipedal animal. So far, no one has come forward to demonstrate how convincing, organic-looking prints can be fabricated.

“Whenever I hear that [footprints are impossible to fake], my bells go off,” says B.C. Society for Skeptical Enquiry chair Lee Moller. “Impossible to fake? People are very, very smart. If they want to see a toe that seems to splay, all it takes is a spring, a little bit of intelligence, and they can do it. Don’t underestimate people’s ability for fakery.”

Moller, a software designer by trade, wonders why, in an age when “just about everybody and their dog” has a digital camera or a camera phone, not a single convincing photograph has been taken.

“It’s virtually impossible to believe that an 800-pound primate…could have not [only] gone unnoticed, but could have left no evidence behind. We have fossils from our predecessors that are three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half million years old,” Moller said. “This leads me to believe that it’s a figment of our collective imagination.”

Stanley Coren, a UBC psychology professor, says, “If you believe there’s a Sasquatch, then you’re going to find more material out there that would suggest to you that you really did see the Sasquatch than if you don’t believe it.” Coren explains that in the 1950s, UFO sightings were a hot topic. Not surprisingly, reports of UFO sightings skyrocketed during that time but have since tapered off as public interest in the phenomenon wavers. “If you didn’t have the idea of a Sasquatch in your memory then you wouldn’t have the Sasquatch to interpret something you weren’t expecting.”

Science, of course, requires a dead body or, better, a live one. Even bones or hair will do. Moller says that anything would be better than “cheesy footprints” or a video of what he describes as a man in a furry suit that could easily have been faked. He says that the likelihood of finding any previously unknown bipedal land-going mammal weighing more than 100 pounds is “slim to none, and slim just left town”.

Vancouverites tend to have this skeptical attitude, but the farther one gets from the city, the more one finds people inclined to believe in Bigfoot. For them, the creature appeals to that childlike belief that fantastic possibilities do exist on our planet. Bigfoot is the cryptid mascot. And if it really does exist, Earth is a very different world than we know.

But as with any other puzzle, we’ll never know the answer unless society keeps an open mind about it.

“There’s no place in the universe for cynicism,” Kirk says. “Skepticism, yes. As we say in the Bigfoot world, when you’re out in the field, keep your ‘skepticals’ on.”

Bill Miller swears he’s seen one. He took a picture of it, too, in broad daylight, back in 2003, about 4,200 feet up a mountain near Harrison Lake. The picture shows something hairy standing upright, half obstructed by the surrounding trees, about a half-mile away, across a valley. The figure’s arm is extended behind it, indicating it’s in mid-step. Miller points out the sunshine gleaming off the arm. The picture is blurry, of course—Bigfoot photos always are—but it’s sharp enough to show that it’s not a bear. He’s spent the past five years investigating what that furry blur was.

“I want to get close,” he says. “Not so close that I can feel its breath in my face—I don’t want to be that close. That’s a nervous thing to even think about.”

He’s steering his Polaris Ranger six-wheel-drive up Mt. Archibald—the site of the double sightings back in July—scanning the trail for tracks or anything out of the ordinary. There’s no special skill set for what he does: just be in as many places as possible as often as possible and hope for the best. The truck bed is loaded with rope, some tarp, his camera. There’s bear repellent in the cup holders.

He pulls over and stops where one man claimed he saw a Sasquatch cross the forest service road in front of his truck, coming from terrain so steep and so dense that any man roaming around in there wearing a monkey suit is about as plausible as a Sasquatch actually crossing the road.

Miller has been hunting Bigfoot for more than 10 years, but he says not to call him a hunter. That would imply that he has caught something. It’s tireless, thankless work, and the minute Miller catches a good picture or a video, he says, he’s retiring for good. He’ll let the scientists handle it from there.

“I have other things I would love to do,” he says. “I would love to get it over with tomorrow. When I get a film, I’m done. I am done.”

straight.com/article-173197/immortal-sasquatch-still-immune-cynics