# Explanation for cryptid monsters



## takadote26 (Jun 18, 2022)

So I was thinking of making a new series about some characters that explore their urban environment to investigate local mysteries (urban fantasy), but I would like an explanation for various cryptids from world folklore. When I was a kid I had an old magazine which discussed discovering local mysteries such as finding bigfoot and the loch-ness monster, psychic powers, the bermuda triangle, the ghost ship (Mary Celeste), crop circles in random corn-fields and UFO sightings.


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## Louanne Learning (Jun 20, 2022)

Google using the search word _Cryptozoology_

I came across this article Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds


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## CyberWar (Jun 21, 2022)

I would suggest reading into North American lumberjack folklore. It features an assortment of bizarre and ludicrous creatures, most of them no doubt conceived by seasoned lumberjacks to make fun of the ignorance of gullible new guys.

My personal favourite is the splintercat, created to explain trees killed and stripped of their bark by lightning. Occasional young and adventurous city boys with little knowledge of the wilderness would take up work as lumberjacks.  When one of these ignorant new guys would ask what happened to such a tree, the older co-workers would explain it was done by a splintercat, a vicious creature who likes to eat wild honey and uses his head to smash open trees with beehives before sliding down, stripping bark from the tree with his claws. This habit would leave the splintercat with constant headache and a very bad temper, so new guys would be advised not to stray far from the camp lest they encounter the dreaded splintercat. Tales like these would both let the old-timers amuse themselves at the new guys' expense (variants of this existing in probably every profession), and also discipline the new workers, as the forests of North America hide very real dangers besides imaginary beasts.


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## takadote26 (Jun 24, 2022)

Is there a reason why people back then took black and white photos of the Bigfoot's footprint? It could be easily replicated by making an imprint of another person's big foot. (I am extremely punny today xD) Also, what about all of the earlier UFO photos?


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## Xander416 (Jun 24, 2022)

takadote26 said:


> Is there a reason why people back then took black and white photos of the Bigfoot's footprint? It could be easily replicated by making an imprint of another person's big foot. (I am extremely punny today xD) Also, what about all of the earlier UFO photos?


I'm not sure I entirely understand the context of your question. People tend to want to document things they don't understand and the further back we go in our history, the less we understand. A Greek from 2,500 years ago would have seen this as definite proof of the cyclops' existence.







But to us today, it's just the skull of a regular elephant.


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## takadote26 (Jun 24, 2022)

Oh, basically I was asking about stuff I saw in the magazine years ago, which documented the UFO sightings photos as 'evidence' and also the cornfield crop-circles, which went unexplained... I also want an explanation for the loch-ness monster, the bermuda triangle and the "ghost ships"


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## RGS (Jun 24, 2022)

takadote26 said:


> Oh, basically I was asking about stuff I saw in the magazine years ago, which documented the UFO sightings photos as 'evidence' and also the cornfield crop-circles, which went unexplained... I also want an explanation for the loch-ness monster, the bermuda triangle and the "ghost ships"


The thing that always amazed me about the Loch Ness phenomenon is that it's not restricted to Loch Ness. These creatures have been seen all over the world, and the similarities in the descriptions are striking. It's usually a plesiosaur-like creature with a long neck and large body.


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## takadote26 (Jun 24, 2022)

I am not sure if there are many cryptid monsters in Australia though...


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## Xander416 (Jun 24, 2022)

takadote26 said:


> Oh, basically I was asking about stuff I saw in the magazine years ago, which documented the UFO sightings photos as 'evidence' and also the cornfield crop-circles, which went unexplained... I also want an explanation for the loch-ness monster, the bermuda triangle and the "ghost ships"


You likely won't find definitive explanations for any of these anywhere on the Internet, much less on this forum.



takadote26 said:


> I am not sure if there are many cryptid monsters in Australia though...











						Top 10 Australian Mythical Creatures
					


With one of the world’s most unique environments and ecosystems, is it any wonder that Australia is full of strange and mythical creatures?  While they may not be as famous as their European or Asian counterparts, Australia has their fare share of cryptids, creatures from folklore, and...




					www.toptenz.net


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## VRanger (Jun 25, 2022)

takadote26 said:


> Oh, basically I was asking about stuff I saw in the magazine years ago, which documented the UFO sightings photos as 'evidence' and also the cornfield crop-circles, which went unexplained... I also want an explanation for the loch-ness monster, the bermuda triangle and the "ghost ships"


Crop circles were debunked LONG ago. For the most part, college-age kids' pranks. You can find confessions explaining exactly how they made them ... mostly involving driving in a central stake and then using rope and other tools to mat down the crop.

There are numerous TV series in the genre ... Kolchak, the Night Stalker, Friday the 13th-the Series, The X-Files. Warehouse 13, The Librarian ... to name five. That's not to say you can't do original work, you just need to know what's come before and make a perpendicular creative move.


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## PiP (Jun 25, 2022)

Actually, not ALL circles are man-made...








						Are Crop Circles Real? Alien Crop Circles Decoded | Gaia
					


Crop Circles are a stubborn mystery: They continue to appear and the controversy rages on. Are they real? Is there a hidden agenda?





					www.gaia.com


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 25, 2022)

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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 25, 2022)

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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 25, 2022)

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## takadote26 (Jun 26, 2022)

Maybe the Loch ness monster was a reptilean creature that hides in the Scottish loch and only comes up to breathe the air ocassionally? Then it stays underwater the rest of the time?


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 26, 2022)

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## Xander416 (Jun 26, 2022)

Cornelius Coburn said:


> The Scottish Lochs have a maximum depth of about two football fields, and the asteroid strike that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was an ocean impact about five thousand miles southwest. I was thinking that maybe there was something there that survived, and yeah, stays under the water most of the time like you said and maybe even living off of things in the deepest parts of the lochs that were also not terminally affected by the asteroid strike.


Loch Ness didn't exist when the KT extinction happened. It's only about 10,000 years old.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 27, 2022)

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## Megan Pearson (Jun 27, 2022)

VRanger said:


> Crop circles were debunked LONG ago. For the most part, college-age kids' pranks.


Yep... some folks I knew, many, many years ago, while on a class trip for college, got bored and since our bus was parked at the edge of a field, they disembarked and proceeded to make a giant crop circle. (Was I part of them? No way--I grew up in an agricultural community. You just don't mess with people's livelihoods.) Man, was the professor _mad_ when he saw that!


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## Megan Pearson (Jun 27, 2022)

Cornelius Coburn said:


> The Scottish Lochs have a maximum depth of about two football fields, and the asteroid strike that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was an ocean impact about five thousand miles southwest. I was thinking that maybe there was something there that survived, and yeah, stays under the water most of the time like you said and maybe even living off of things in the deepest parts of the lochs that were also not terminally affected by the asteroid strike.


Have you read about the theory that the lochs are suspected to be connected to the sea? The idea is that Nessie appears only in lochs and is connected to the sea, and this is why it disappears for long periods of time where there are no sightings.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 27, 2022)

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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 27, 2022)

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## RGS (Jun 27, 2022)

Cornelius Coburn said:


> As for Bigfoot. I recall that really old footage, like maybe from the late sixties or so, way before CGI. It wasn't very good quality. So, on that one I'm going to presume it was just a big guy in a gorilla suit, but it was done well, and they had the 'walk'(or stride) down pretty good.


That's been exposed as a hoax.

Food for Thought: He had the stride down pretty good because he actually established it. That stride/pose became the iconic way we look at Bigfoot.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 27, 2022)

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## RGS (Jun 27, 2022)

Also, just for giggles.... I'm sure you've all seen the classic "surgeon's photo" of Nessie. It was also faked, as confessed by the perpetrator on his deathbed. He and a friend used a toy submarine with a fake dinosaur head on top:






I saw a documentary about Loch Ness (I've seen many, actually) where they went to a museum of Natural History. A Paleontologist showed a skeleton of a plesiosaur and pointed out that there's no way its bone structure would have allowed it to protrude its head and neck straight up out of the water while the hump of its back was also at the surface. In short, it simply couldn't bend that way.


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## Louanne Learning (Jun 27, 2022)

Well I've travelled to the Scottish Highlands, and I have never seen such an other-worldy place.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 27, 2022)

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## Xander416 (Jun 27, 2022)

Cornelius Coburn said:


> Bermuda Triangle. Maybe some sort of electromagnetic anomaly, or perhaps even a spacetime portal that opens and closes at random times - just a guess on that one.


Weather can be ... sudden and unpredictable in that region. The supposed mysterious happenings are mostly sensationalism overblown from being repeated over and over again (the generally accepted explanation for Flight 19, for example, is that their flight lead got turned around and lead the formation out into the larger Atlantic Ocean where they ran out of fuel, ditched, and subsequently drowned) and significantly outnumbered by normal, uneventful traffic through the area. Jumbo jets and cruise ships traverse it thousands of times every year without incident.



RGS said:


> Also, just for giggles.... I'm sure you've all seen the classic "surgeon's photo" of Nessie. It was also faked, as confessed by the perpetrator on his deathbed. He and a friend used a toy submarine with a fake dinosaur head on top:
> 
> View attachment 29047
> 
> I saw a documentary about Loch Ness (I've seen many, actually) where they went to a museum of Natural History. A Paleontologist showed a skeleton of a plesiosaur and pointed out that there's no way its bone structure would have allowed it to protrude its head and neck straight up out of the water while the hump of its back was also at the surface. In short, it simply couldn't bend that way.


This popular Plesiosaur image (the raised neck) can most likely be chalked up to the then-current knowledge of dinosaurs that also lead to this depiction of T-Rex.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jun 29, 2022)

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## takadote26 (Jul 2, 2022)

Also, I noticed that in a lot of traditional media, "it's magic" was often a sufficient enough explanation for things happening the way they do, but in more modern media 'supernatural happenings' aroundthe world are often given the explanation of "sufficiently advanced technology" or "science fiction tech/alien tech"


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## Xander416 (Jul 2, 2022)

"Magic is just science we don't understand yet." - Arthur C. Clark


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## RGS (Jul 3, 2022)

Xander416 said:


> "Magic is just science we don't understand yet." - Arthur C. Clark


This is sort of covered in my first novel.


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## Cornelius Coburn (Jul 3, 2022)

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## takadote26 (Jul 5, 2022)

About the psychics bending spoons with their minds, is it possible to bend a spoon with the power of your mind? It must take a LOT of concentration! xD 

It  also claimed in the paranormal magazine I previously read that the infamous psychic called Uri Geller also had the power to stop wristwatches in their tracks (at the time), which meant that his own psychic powers 'worked at a long distance'.


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## Triffids (Jan 7, 2023)

Loch ness monster was just giant eels that reside in the lake


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