Monsters and Myths

The mystery of the “Waveney Monster” - an enormous beast more than 10 foot long and weighing more than a tonne - has been recalled by a former coypu trapper.

Noel Rochford, who was a member of Coypu Control, was able to explain the background to a “monster” hunt more than 25 years ago.

He and fellow trapper, Colin Denny, of Beccles, had seen the “monster” a couple of years earlier.

When officials at the Ministry of Agriculture refused to take their sighting seriously, they decided to ask the public for help to identify the mysterious creature.

It became such a sensation that Broads holiday company Hoseasons offered a £10,000 prize or reward to any member of the public, who could get a close-up photograph of the creature.

And so, the hunt for the “Waveney Monster” started in earnest in March 1984, said Mr Rochford, of Burgh St Peter, near Beccles.

He had seen a large creature, possibly 10ft in length, with rough, thick fur and big eyes, come out of the water with “almost a loud snort” near the cut on the river at Burgh St Peter.

“When I told the ministry, officials just laughed and said: ‘It’s another of your jokes.’ But I’d seen it a couple of years earlier,” said Mr Rochford, who worked for the ministry’s eradication programme for almost nine years until the task was officially completed.

He was persuaded by the EDP’s photographer to look for the creature. Together with Mr Denny, they “posed” for the pictures in the coypu control craft. But Mr Rochford remains absolutely convinced that he saw a large creature. “Colin and I both saw it when we down the river towards Haddiscoe and the Burgh marshes,” he added.

“It wasn’t a seal. This thing weighed a tonne or maybe more. It was a huge thing and when the head came out of the water, it was a bit frightening. It had brackish fur like a coypu and a big shaped head. It was enormous,” said Mr Rochford, who was holding the tiller.

“It certainly wasn’t a coypu or a larger relative,” said Mr Rochford. The last wild coypu was trapped on the Ouse, near St Neots, in April 1988 - three years ahead of schedule.

Coypu escaped from a farm at East Carleton Manor in 1937 where they were being bred for their fur. They rapidly became a major threat to river and flood defences and finally, in 1981 the Ministry of Agriculture was given £2.5m for a 10-year eradication programme.

Source: edp24

THE MYSTERY of what happened to the infamous Loch Ness monster hoaxer has finally been solved.

Frank Searle lived on Loch Ness during the 1970s and became a celebrity when he claimed to be the first person in history to capture real pictures of Nessie.

His most famous photograph, which many likened to a floating tree trunk, brought Searle base. He even inspired a monster-hunter character played by Keith Allen in the 1996 Hollywood film Loch Ness, starring Ted Danson.

However, rumours soon started to emerge that his pictures were a hoax and The Loch Ness Story, a book by the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell, labelled them fakes.

After being exposed as a hoaxer, Searle’s own life became a mystery when he seemed to disappear without trace in 1983 after leaving Loch Ness.

He went missing shortly after Adrian Shine, of the Drumnadrochit-based Loch Ness Project, was injured in a petrol bomb attack following a war of words with Searle.

Suspicion fell upon Searle and friends and fellow monster hunters placed adverts in newspapers in an attempt to track him down, but he remained missing for 22 years.

But now a film crew, making a documentary on Searle, has discovered that he died a few weeks ago, aged 84, in the Lancashire town of Fleetwood.

Andrew Tullis, the film-maker behind the documentary The Man Who Captured Nessie, which is to be broadcast by Channel 4 later this year, said: “Rumours on his whereabouts ranged from treasure-hunting in Cornwall to lecturing on monsters in the United States, or even lying at the bottom of Loch Ness.

“But, during the production, a lead brought me to Fleetwood where I discovered that Searle had lived quietly for the last 18 years. And, in fact, he had died a few weeks before my arrival.

“Searle was loved and loathed in equal measure, but his place in the history of Loch Ness hoaxes is assured.”

A former paratrooper, Searle gave up his job as a greengrocer in London in 1969 to relocate to Loch Ness and set up “The Frank Searle Loch Ness Investigation”.

He produced 20 supposed images of Nessie, one of which even showed a UFO in the same shot. A dossier produced on Searle’s work convinced many that his “monsters” were really constructed from fence posts, socks, tarpaulins and, on one occasion, the cutting and pasting of a dinosaur postcard on to an image of disturbed water.

Roland Watson, a fellow Loch Ness monster hunter from Edinburgh and friend of Searle’s during his stay on Loch Ness, said: “Frank lived permanently by the north shore of Loch Ness in various tents and caravans from 1969 to 1983, whereupon he upped tent pegs and left the loch for good.

“Since that day nothing was ever heard from him. It was as if he vanished as quickly as a sight of the monster herself.”

Source: thescotsman

WHAT makes so many people want to believe in fabulous creatures? Chris Lavers and Joshua Blu Buhs set out to explore this question, and although one tackles an ancient myth and the other a modern one, they come up with remarkably similar answers.

The Natural History of Unicorns might sound whimsical, but in fact it is an erudite, scholarly book which uses the unicorn to illuminate millennia of social and geographical change. Unicorns appear in many guises in many cultures - from the ferocious one-horned ass described by the Greeks to the courtly, Christianised goat of medieval Europe and beyond. Lavers’s achievement is to show how each of these is a chimera based on startlingly accurate reports of real animals, carried over trade routes stretching from the African jungle to the Arctic Circle.

The unicorn’s susceptibility to virgin maidens, the curative qualities of its horn, its elusiveness and temperament: Lavers explains how these properties were shaped to suit the ideologies and beliefs of different societies, throwing up - and answering - fascinating questions along the way. For example, did khutu, a material used in ornamental knife handles, come from narwhals, giant birds, musk oxen or woolly mammoths?

For those, like myself, who always assumed that our forebears more or less made up unicorns from folk superstitions and a pinch of rhinoceros, Lavers’s book offers revelations not only about mythical creatures, but about the extent and effects of globalisation in ancient times. It’s eminently readable, too.

One of the themes of Lavers’s book - that belief in mythical animals is a product of social change - is central to Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs’s book starts out in similar territory to that of Lavers, suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became “folklore for an industrial age” because it meshed well with Britain’s post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places - a kind of media-accelerated version of the same processes that created unicorns.

Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters’ desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change sceptics.

Popular culture eventually defanged Bigfoot, and unicorn-hunting has fallen out of fashion. But both Lavers and Buhs suggest that these myths, and others like them, will persist in one form or another. Tellingly, both trace their respective subjects all the way back to Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest fictional texts, in which the wild man Enkidu is tamed by female sexuality. If belief in fabulous beasts has such deep roots, it is unlikely to go away any time soon - although with the Earth becoming an ever-smaller place, Buhs suggests that future monster-hunters may have to turn their attention to the stars.

Source: Newscientist