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New hiding place for Nessie…

Photo of the Loch Ness MonsterLast week we introduced a report about the search for Bigfoot that resulted from four years of study. While it doesn’t have the indisputable evidence that we crave, it brought up a number of ideas about why we could look and look and look for something and still not be able to find it.

This week brings us another case where we thought we knew something and there’s more to find. People have been searching for Nessie (the mysterious Loch Ness creature) since 1933. Even though there have been numerous sightings, photos and even video to support the idea that something is in the Loch, no one has been able to locate the creature. How is that possible? Loch Ness only covers about 22 square miles. Yes, it’s a lot of space, but it’s all boxed in. With all of the sophisticated sonar equipment we have along with satellites and everything else that we use to explore we must be able to see everything in there, right?

You would think so, but even with all that a new discovery was made about Loch Ness, a discovery which could make all the difference. There are parts of the Loch that we haven’t yet seen! According to this article from the Daily Record, Keith Stewart, captain of a tourist sightseeing boat, did some new soundings and found an area that is 76 feet deeper than anything that has been measured before. This newly discovered trench could certainly be a hiding place for Nessie and other similar creatures. Here is video of Captain Stewart as they made their historic find.

https://youtu.be/BdkjiGpTVJw

This discovery calls much into question. Is this the only such trench in the Loch? Could there be other such hiding places? Does this give more credence to the idea some have had that there may be hidden channels between Loch Ness and other bodies of water, allowing creatures to move between others?

Also, it is reasonable that whatever this creature is that it could prefer living at depths. This National Geographic gallery shows a number of creatures that are rarely encountered because they stay deep beneath the surface. We just don’t know!

Perhaps this discovery will lead to a different picture of Loch Ness and different approaches to searching for Nessie.

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Report released from 4-year Bigfoot search

bigfootWhy don’t we have Bigfoot in a cage yet? Why hasn’t he been captured? When do we get definitive proof? How hard can it be?

As it turns out it’s harder than we might imagine. Few of us are actually privy to the painful process of discovery. We find out the results, the path that worked out. We usually aren’t told about the failed theories, the false trails, the dead ends. So, when we look at things like finding Bigfoot it’s easy to get discouraged.

This video, courtesy of KTUL in Tulsa, Oklahoma, outlines the findings of some dedicated Bigfoot after four years of looking. Some of their observations are pretty interesting. They’ve found signs of primate activity. They’ve also found some logic to why it’s difficult to capture the creatures on camera. This video leads you briefly through everything. The full report is available in PDF format.

Does this get us closer? Maybe. They certainly provide some food for thought that other Bigfoot searchers might consider, especially when it comes to technologies. They might even be on the track to get us the proof that we crave. Time will tell, as it always does. We’ll keep watching and waiting.

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Is this how it all ends?

''Four Horsemen of Apocalypse'', by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887.

''Four Horsemen of Apocalypse'', by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887.In the midst of the big holiday season there’s nothing like giving a little thought to the end of the world. While wars, pestilence, disease, and alien invasion are still the favorite stories, there is a danger lurking out there that we can’t really do anything about.

It’s the sun! This video talks about how the sun might take us out.

Pretty scary stuff, eh? Of course, if it was to happen, what could we do? Would we even have time to react? The sun is eight light minutes away from the earth, which means that its light take eight minutes to reach us. An event might be hurling something slower, but it’s likely to come quickly.

There might be signs, though. Who’s keeping an eye on this? SOHO, or the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, has been keeping an eye on things for 20 years. They even have software you can use to see what’s happening with the sun. The video said that we could get about 15 hours of warning if a serious event were to occur. Since a lot of the damage is more to our infrastructure and our electrical system than to our persons it’s likely we could just shut down for a while and everything would be fine. Of course, we’ve never really been through it like this before so we don’t know exactly what will happen.

So, just go about your business, and pay no attention to that big yellow ball that is watching and waiting in the sky.

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Chupacabra proof found in Chile?

Drawing of a chupacabra, a small humanoid creature with large black eyes and spikes coming out of its back

Drawing of a chupacabra, a small humanoid creature with large black eyes and spikes coming out of its back
Chupacabras” by LeCire [Public Domain]
The Chupacabra is perhaps one of the most mysterious creatures that we follow. A newer addition to the cryptid list, these strange, blood-sucking creatures were first reported around 1995 in Puerto Rico. Variations of the creature have ranged from a small humanoid with large teeth and a spiked spine to a dog-like creature seen around Texas. In all cases the appearance of the chupacabra includes death to livestock with a mysterious lack of blood on the scene, as though the predator was thirsty for it.

After much conjecture, the Daily Mail reports a farmer in Chile who has actually found and preserved two corpses of the legendary creature. Javier Prohens, a goat farmer, had his lunch suddenly interrupted by farmhand 54-year-old Bricio Saldivar who was very agitated. He took them to the corpses of these bizarre creatures outside of Monte Patria. The remains were unlike anything they had ever seen.

Picture of two animal bodies found in Chile, thought to be chupacabras
Two mysterious bodies might be the mysterious chupacabra
Close-up view of chupacabra corpse head
Closeup of the mysterious corpse shows vicious teeth and human-like ears.

In the Museum we have a display of several pieces of evidence for Bigfoot. We reported recent evidence where people have heard the creatures in Canada, yet many still deny their existence. Will these bodies help people to take the chupacabra legends more seriously?

More updates as they become available. Come visit the Museum of the Weird to see our evidence for mysterious creatures.

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Live two-headed pig born in China!

At the Museum we have a number of specimens of animal oddities, including a number of two-headed animals. Many of these animals had no life. Nature was just too brutal to them. It’s wonderful to see someone who is a survivor.

A Chinese man holds a two-headed piglet
This amazing animals was adopted and is still alive

According to this story in the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the animal was  left outside a temple in Xinkou town, Tianjin. Because of the weight of his head he is unable to stand up and requires significant care. He was discovered and adopted by a Yang Jinliang. Because it is so young it must be fed with a bottle and Jinliang says it is able to eat from both mouths.

This is truly a miraculous story. We hope that the pig has a chance to grow up. We will provide more information as we hear it.

Visit the Museum this weekend and see our own amazing collection of animal oddities, including a number of two-headed creatures.

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Walking through the woods when you hear this

Imagine you are enjoying a pleasant walk in the woods on Vancouver Island.  Suddenly, the air is pierced by a terrible howl. Your blood runs cold as you try to imagine what it could be. Is that a dog? Is it a man in agony? Is it something unearthly?

Residents of Alert Bay don’t have to imagine. They are experiencing it. Several residents have reporting hearing what some believe are vocalizations from Sasquatch in the area. A young man named Mackenzie Mountain managed to get a recording on his phone. CTV, Vancouver had this video report where you can hear some of the recording.

I have been searching for the original, but have had no luck so far. If anyone has a pointer to it I’d be much obliged.

British Columbia has historically had more sightings of Bigfoot than anywhere else in Canada according to records at the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. (California has the most recorded sightings in the world.) As the news story reported, people have not only heard these calls but they have seen creatures.

Also noted in the video, Vancouver Island does not have the sort of wildlife that is normally given as probable explanations for Bigfoot sightings. There are no bears or other such creatures on the island. It’s also remarkable that something could manage to stay hidden in such a small place. Vancouver Island is less than 3 miles across. This gives some weight to the idea that it could be some sort of inter-dimensional being.

Bigfoot researchers have taken an interest in the sightings and CTV had a follow up story with John Bindernagel who traveled to the area to get his own recordings. (See his web site. We have the Bigfoot cast he shows on his home page in our Museum!) You might be interested in his latest book, The Discovery of the Sasquatch.

Will this lead us closer to answers about Bigfoot? I’m always hopeful. As always, we wait and watch to see. Have you had a Bigfoot encounter? Tell us!

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Officer trapped by swarming bees

On Tuesday afternoon (9/29/2015) officers responded to an overturned truck in Garvin County, Oklahoma. This had a difference, though, as the truck was carrying bee hives. You’ve heard of situations when police show up to help at a scene and find those they want to help turning on them? That was the experience of officer Carl Zink who found himself trapped inside his cruiser while thousands of unhappy bees swarmed his vehicle.

What did he do? He did what many of us would do with a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He filmed it on his phone. Here is dramatic video.

Incredibly, Officer Zink was only stung once. Beekeepers showed up to cleanse the vehicle and get the bees safely reorganized.

Were the bees really attacking his truck in anger? Probably not. When bees have trouble with their hive they will swarm. The traffic incident probably put the bees into a defensive mode in the beginning, but very quickly their priority became to find a new home.

image
Swarming bees collect on a tree
Photo by fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au [GFDL 1.2], via Wikimedia Commons
According to this Washington Post article a swarm of bees can happen under many circumstances. When a hive grows too large the old queen will fly off with a contingent to find a new home and a new queen will be formed in the existing hive. Of course, if the home is threatened the bees will have to swarm to find a new one.

In fact, bee expert Thomas Seeley says that honeybees are at their safest when swarming. He explains that a swarm of bees has no home to defend, they are simply in transition, so they are less likely to be aggressive. If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.

If you encounter a warm of bees you should do what they did in Oklahoma. Contact a beekeeper who can deal with them safely. Our bees are currently in decline with a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Because of the importance of the bee in agriculture (and much of our other plant life) loss of bees would have a serious impact on our future. Any time you can save a colony of bees you help to maintain and grow that population. Look for a local beekeeper association for help.

Just like our friends, the spiders (who may rain down upon us or build giant creepy webs) bees have a special place on the planet. They may be weird, but they are important.

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Amazing discovery inside “living fossil”

1024px-Undina_penicillata
65-million-year-old fossil of a Coelacanth
Photo by Haplochromis [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers studying the Coelacanth, a mysterious living fossil, discover something amazing.

Thought extinct, the deep-ocean-dwelling creature was found alive and well when fishermen caught one in 1938. The bizarre fish has a number of unusual qualities. It has matching pairs of lobe fins that stick out like legs and even move like the legs of a four-legged animal. It has a hinged skull which can widen it’s mouth to eat larger prey. It has an electrosensory organ in it’s snout that may help it hunt.

Now we find that it once had lungs!

Photo of a diver swimming with a Coelacanth
Living fossil swims with a diver
Photo by Mordecai 1998 [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
An article in Discover News tells how researchers exploring the body of a Coelacanth have found what appears to be an obsolete lung. Humans have an appendix, an organ that seems to serve no real purpose for us, but might have been important long ago. Similarly, it appears that this fish may have once used lungs to breath air and that the organ has faded back over time.

This suggests that the Coelacanth was once an air-breather that evolved to become a creature of the deep. This may be what saved this species while other creatures of the period were wiped out, possibly by a single event.

Earth’s history is a  strange array of creatures, and discoveries like this just fuel the imagination. Will we ever get a clear picture of it all without a time machine? Perhaps not. However, each clue shows us that it was all weirder than we thought. Weird is good!

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There be dragons

Photo of Alvin the bearded dragon
Alvin, a bearded dragon, was our official lucky lizard. He was 8 years old.

This has been a sad week for us at the Museum of the Weird. Our official lucky lizard, Alvin, succumbed to old age and went to wherever it is that good lizards go. You might not think that you would grow affectionate for a lizard, or that you would miss feeding him cockroaches, but you would be mistaken. I will miss everything about him terribly.

So, in tribute to Alvin, we’re going to talk about dragons today.

You might been told that dragons are all made-up stories, but there are some that suggest that it’s not as simple as that. We may not have the exciting, fire-breathing dragons of Harry Potter, but it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that ancients had contact with large lizard creatures that have been distorted by time. This article, on the Forbidden History site, references accounts by such names as Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Marco Polo. While it’s easy enough to pass off early writings as possible fiction or exageration, the city of Troy, once believed to be fiction, was discovered thanks, in part, to information provided in the Iliad by Homer. We often think of historical people as being gullible or not observant. It’s true that they did not have some of the references or tools that we have to capture and describe things today. It’s also true that they helped us to develop what we use today. They weren’t fools. So, it’s possible that there is more to these stories than we imagine.

This image from livepterosaur.com shows a sketch of what might be a living dinosaur.
This image from livepterosaur.com shows a sketch of what might be a living dinosaur.

Of course, if it’s living dragons that you are interested in, there are stories of giant flying lizard reported around the world. The Ropen, a flying creature said to resemble a pterosaur, has been reported around Papua, New Guinea. Other reports come from around the United States, including Texas. Other investigators believe that these are not creatures that resemble pterosaurs, but actually dinosaurs that have survived to the modern day. 

While this is a fantastic idea, it would not be the first time that a creature has emerged from the clouds of myth. We’ve done plenty of stories lately about newly discovered species. Is it impossible that these creatures might still exist in some capacity? Time will tell.

Finally, we’ll share one example of a living, flying dragon. He doesn’t breath fire, but this amazing lizard, Draco volans—actually commonly called the “flying dragon”—has folds of skin that open up into wings that carry it away from predators. It’s able to glide the length of a football field and come to a graceful landing at the end. Watch this National Geographic Video.

Regardless of which type of dragon captures your imagination, fantastic, historical, cryptid, or natural, we hope that you will help us all raise a toast to the sweetest dragon we ever knew and wish him wings—and maybe even a little fire-breathing—as he travels beyond our reach.

Rest in peace, Alvin.

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Bat looks like something from a horror movie

drawing of a bat with long canine teeth
Artist rendering of the Hypsugo dolichodon

A newly discovered bat is the stuff of nightmares! This article by Mongabay introduces the Long -toothed Pipistrelle or Hypsugo dolichodon that was recently classified in Vietnam. Basically, that’s a mouthful describing a bat with a mouthful! It has enormous teeth, like something from a horror film!

The picture on the right shows an artist rendering of this amazing bat, but you can see the photos in the original article. Why such large teeth? Scientists speculate that these bats feed on beetles and other insects that are a little tougher to get into.

The new  classification is the result of 17 years of research. We can imagine that in that time there were plenty of people who told stories of monster-toothed bats who were just not believed. Let us know how this fellow turns out in your nightmares tonight.