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The God Damn Loch Ness Monster
26 Plays2 years ago
Josh decides that episode 350 of the podcast should be devoted to a joke from South Park no one remembers...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction and Audio Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, let me just sort these level-outs. Can you turn your game down just a little?
Joshua's Loch Ness Monster Tale
00:00:07
Speaker
Look, before we start, I need to tell you something. Ominous. Joshua, what's on your mind? Well, I mean, there's no easy way to say this, but I...
00:00:22
Speaker
I've been lying to you from the very beginning. From the very beginning? What, a recorded history of all time since the Big Bang? From the beginning of this podcast. I haven't been honest about my motivations for getting into it.
00:00:38
Speaker
You see, back in 2014, when you first suggested we start a podcast, I was actually going to say no. But the next morning, as I was on my way to the train station, I heard a voice calling to me from a shadowy side street. And when I went to see who it was, I found myself confronted by a giant crustacean from the Paleolithic era. It was the lock.
00:01:00
Speaker
Ness Monster. The Loch Ness Monster? The goddamn Loch Ness Monster. And the monster stood above me, looking down with these big red eyes, and it told me that it needed me to join a podcast, one about conspiracy theories. And I didn't want to say no, I was so scared. So instead I asked it, Monster, Monster, I said, how long must I keep doing this podcast? How many episodes do you need? And the monster said to me,
00:01:27
Speaker
I need about 350. 350? 350 episodes. Uh, hold on. Have you been waiting 350 episodes, almost eight years of podcasting, just to have an excuse to work in a reference to an outdated Sales Park episode from 1999? I have, yes. You know, I don't think I've ever been so proud of you in my entire life.
The Podcaster's Guide Introduction
00:02:01
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Sweltering Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Zhuhai, China, it's Associate Professor of Philosophy and probably not a vampire, Dr. M. R. X. Tenter. Is the probably not a vampire thing, one of the interesting facts you're trying to bring in, one of which is going to be a lie?
00:02:31
Speaker
Interesting. Interesting. Now Joshua, that intro was a pile of lies, but I do want to know, how long have you been thinking about the idea that episode 350 had to be a reference to a South Park episode that I only very vaguely recall? Not that long, to be honest. For as long as I've been aware of the fact that episode 350 was coming up,
00:02:56
Speaker
I figured, because we usually, the 50 episodes, we usually do something a little avant-garde, a little unexpected, but I thought, no, no. This 50-50 episode milestone should be a throwback to an episode of South Park that's 23 years old. Now, I'm 46 years old, which means that joke is half my lifetime ago. Also, I'm pretty sure that's number one.
Dr. Denton's Absence Due to Conference
00:03:21
Speaker
So yeah, we're going to be talking about the Loch Nees Monster and possibly other cryptids this week. But before we do, we can't ignore the fact that there was no episode last week because the good doctor was hosting a conference. How did that all work out? I wasn't hosting the first international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories.
00:03:40
Speaker
with merely helping Brian Alkeri of Pitzer College, friend of the show, listener of the show, patron of the show, and his hosting duties of the first international conference on conspiracy theories. But I did spend the entire weekend
00:03:55
Speaker
sitting at that conference. I did spend a goodly part of the few days before the conference started helping Brian out with the administration of that conference. That is the official line. I was helping Brian Alkely out.
00:04:11
Speaker
with the organisation and running of the first international conference on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Maybe in a hypothetical patron bonus episode, where we talked more about the conference, I might talk about the reason why I was not hosting the conference, but really only helping Brian out. But that is the kind of information that only patrons would ever find out about.
00:04:37
Speaker
Because officially, I was simply Brian's helper, officially. Fair enough. Yes, OK. Well, but it went well. It went well is the point, I think. It did. It did. Now, the other thing we should note. So we have a new patron and we have a new patron who would normally get name checked in the intro to an episode.
New Patron and Listener Engagement
00:04:59
Speaker
But because of Josh's obsession with a 23 year old episode of South Park that virtually no one remembers.
00:05:07
Speaker
Josh wrote a script which didn't really allow us to slide the patron in. And we like to slide our patrons in. We do. And we like to slide them out. I mean, we like to slide with our patrons a lot. So next week, the new patron will of course be slid in. Now, of course, what normally happens when we have a backlog
00:05:29
Speaker
is that then someone else decides to donate to the podcast and we have to find a way of working things around it so you know this is the perfect time if you're thinking about becoming a patron of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy to get that three dollar a month patronage in because it will really screw with our schedule and we know how you like to screw with our schedules that's what makes our patrons so great they're always screwing with us
00:05:56
Speaker
So if you like us enough to want to give us money but hate us enough that you want to make our scheduling difficult, sweet smile to become a patron. Yeah, it'll teach us to be whatever. I don't even know. I thought I was going somewhere with that and it just turned out it wasn't. So should we just go into the episode then? I should say I have a feeling this is going to be a short episode purely because it's that period of Auckland summer when the humidity is sort of hovering around 90
00:06:23
Speaker
percent and I'm in a small room with all the windows shut so there isn't too much room outside. So I think we better keep this one relatively brief. Too much noise outside. It could be a room inside a room. We've been recording for 11 minutes and already I can barely get an English sentence out of my head.
00:06:43
Speaker
Now, I also want to point out that this just shows you how weak Josh as a physical specimen is. Because, of course, when I was broadcasting from Zhuhai in the middle of last year, in an office where I turned the air conditioning off, because I didn't want any air conditioning noise interrupting the sound quality of the podcast, it was 36 degrees outside. And I was, so Josh complaining about, oh, we've got the humidity. That's that's that's what
00:07:12
Speaker
Well, still somewhere between 60-70%. Oh, for sure. 60-70. I wiped my nose with 60-70%. Anyway, having just said we're going to keep this episode short, we've now been rabbiting on about stuff that has nothing to do with the topic. Oh no, I just want you to suffer in the high humidity and heat of Auckland. Fair enough.
00:07:29
Speaker
So the more that I vamp around the fact that you are a weak specimen of a human being means the more uncomfortable both psychologically and physically you become. And because I'm a trained public speaker and thus can actually just keep talking for long periods of time, I could in fact keep this vamping up for a good 40-45 minutes before I even leave you on another continent where I can't reach over and slap you. Well, precisely. But because I'm also not a cruel person at heart,
00:07:58
Speaker
I'm going to now say, let us slide into a chime and then slide out of the Loch Ness Monster.
00:08:11
Speaker
there we go, your benevolence astounds. So yes, for no reason other than an ancient pop culture reference, we're going to talk about the Loch Ness Monster and other cryptids and the field of cryptozoology in general,
Is Cryptozoology Pseudoscience?
00:08:25
Speaker
I guess. Now, I had the first one of the first places I looked just for an overview was good old Wikipedia.
00:08:30
Speaker
And I couldn't help but notice that on the Wikipedia page of cryptozoology, right near the start, it says there's a broad consensus among academics that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience. And it has a long list of references of various people saying that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience. And right near the top of that list was one, Conspiracy Theories, a Primer by a Mr. Joseph Jusinski, 2020. So how about that? Philosophers are right. Well, actually, he's not a philosopher, he's a social scientist. And I have to say, as a friend of someone,
00:08:58
Speaker
As someone who does the philosophy of science, I actually don't think there's a broad consensus among academics that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience because, like chiropractic, there are kind of two forms of cryptozoology. So there are chiropractors out there.
00:09:16
Speaker
who believe in theories of subluxation and the idea that a well-aligned spine allows your chakras to move up and down, blah blah blah blah. And then there are the chiropractors who go, yeah, we're just kind of into spinal manipulation in the way that someone who does a kind of physical manipulation of the body does to remove discomfort. We don't believe in all that supernatural jazz. I don't know why the jazz is supernatural. No one ever talks about, you know, that supernatural goth opera.
00:09:44
Speaker
But we don't believe in all the supernatural stuff. We simply believe that fixing your spine will make you feel better about the world. So they're basically just doing physical manipulation. In the same respect, there are serious zoologists and biologists out there
00:10:07
Speaker
two of a kind. I can just feel the anger of a certain listener as I conflate zoology. The position of the podcasters guide to the conspiracy and thus it
00:10:22
Speaker
Anyone who is a patron of the show is to accept that zoology and biology are exactly the same science. And if one is pseudoscientific, the other is as well. But there are zoologists out there who do engage in the study of rumoured animals, which is what cryptozoology is.
00:10:41
Speaker
and they engage in rigorous study looking at folkloric tales and then comparing those tales to existing species looking at areas of the world where there hasn't actually been much a zoological capture over time and then going well maybe some of these stories which usually always come from the fringe of cultures are referring to things that we haven't yet catalogued
00:11:06
Speaker
So there are serious cryptozoologists out there, like Carl Zimmer and the like, who are serious zoologists who take cryptozoology seriously. I mean, it would be a bit like saying that up until the last 10 years or so, people would treat this academic study of conspiracy theories as fringe and weird. In case of yeah, sure, some people in what we might take to be the mainstream rump
00:11:34
Speaker
of an academic discipline or poo-poo particular sub-disciplines, but that doesn't actually make them unworthy of academic investigation, it just tells you something about the prejudice of the people who make up the rump of a profession. And I've used the word rump now twice and I quite like it. Rump.
00:11:55
Speaker
So no, I don't think that cryptozoology is necessarily a pseudoscience. I think it's one of those things where there are certainly pseudoscientific practitioners of cryptozoology. But you find the same thing in biology, physics, and chemistry as well. People who come up with weird theories without the right background. But that doesn't mean we then go, oh,
00:12:20
Speaker
looking into phenomena X is pseudoscientific, you just go, look, some of the people who engage in looking into phenomena X are pseudoscientists. And of course, yes, it has to be said that there are numerous cases of animals or, for instance, animals that were thought to have been extinct turning up alive and animals being discovered all the time. I don't know what the numbers are on the
00:12:47
Speaker
the ideas for the numbers of species of the world that we've actually catalogued. I think insects, I think one of the numbers being bandied about a few years ago is we've probably catalogued about 20% of the insect species around the world to the point where you can literally go into your backyard.
00:13:09
Speaker
and potentially discover a new kind of insect which doesn't appear in the textbooks, because there are just so many of them. But I think when it comes to the sorts of things that people call cryptids, they're usually things that are big enough that it would be hard to miss them. And often, sort of, we could maybe draw an analogy with Brian's
00:13:32
Speaker
mature unwarranted conspiracy theories, the idea that these supposed animals have been, people have been talking about them for long enough that you would expect them to have found them by now, and yet they haven't, and yet people still continue to talk about them. But of course, before, we can't go any further without talking about your personal connection to the world of cryptids.
Dr. Denton's Cryptid Radio Show
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, it's my personal rejection from the world of cryptozoology. Well, yes. Now, a local journalist and friend of the show, David Farrier, used to have a podcast with comedian and actor Rhys Darby, who's his... And buttons. Don't forget buttons. Well, you can't forget buttons. Who was buttons?
00:14:15
Speaker
It was the third person on the radio show. And I should be pointing out The Cryptid Factor, the show we're talking about, still does exist, but it seems to be sans David these days. Is Rhys Darby still doing it? Yes, Rhys Darby and Butter. It's what we might call a very occasional podcast. I think they produced exactly one episode last year.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yes, because Rhys Tarby's off being famous in Hollywood these days. Which I don't understand, but that's another matter entirely. Yeah, um, fly to the concords, I think. It was off the back of that. But anyway, so yes, before it was a podcast, though, it was a regular show on the Auckland University student radio station BFM.
00:14:55
Speaker
Now, did you actually take... Were you a cast member of it at all? Or were you just sort of proposed and then cruelly cast aside before actually recording anything? I was in two episodes. So basically, after Jose Barbosa left BFM to go off to take over the world of visual...
00:15:14
Speaker
media, The Cryptid Factor kind of came in as the replacement show in that time slot. And I was always doing a 15 minutes every two weeks appearance on Jose's show. So the idea was I'd continue doing that about conspiracy theories. I did two sessions of The Cryptid Factor, and then David invited me out for coffee one day and said, oh, by the way, we're ditching your segment, no hard feelings.
00:15:44
Speaker
Well, there we go. So possibly this is some sort of a sign that cryptid discussion and conspiracy theories should never be mixed, and possibly we're tempting the fates by doing this episode. But too late now, I guess we've started, so we'll finish. Now, of course, David Ferrier, who you probably better know for Dark Tourist in the tickled documentary and so on. Before all of that, I was... I better know him from
00:16:11
Speaker
accidentally joining in a protest march in Prague because that was something we did want whilst trying to find Sushi. Very confusing. But in the middle of the 2000s, he actually went off to Mongolia to research a documentary about the Mongolian death worm, a popular cryptid.
00:16:30
Speaker
Now, when I was looking about it now, all I could see was news articles saying journalist David Ferri has gone off to film a documentary or journalist David Ferri has just got back from filming stuff for his documentary. But I haven't didn't see anything about the documentary actually being released. So I'm not sure. Are you aware if he ever actually made that documentary?
00:16:50
Speaker
So I know he went to Mongolia to film material for it, and he did filming and interviews there. As you say, no documentary has ever been released. I've actually tried to ask David in the past about past projects and future projects. And his answer is, look, this is not personal, but I don't talk about stuff which I'm working on.
00:17:14
Speaker
to other people until such time it's ready to release, because I find it kind of gets in the way of the creative process. Something which I do understand, sometimes jumping the gun on describing a project to someone for certain creatives, kind of robs them of the impetus to then go off and do that particular thing. So David is very private about the work that he does.
00:17:38
Speaker
I get the impression that the Mongolian death worm thing just didn't really produce enough content to justify actually going into the post-production phase of producing a film out of the footage that was taken. That is the impression I get.
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, I saw one interview with David where he said that the impression he got, having done his filming, was that he thinks the Mongolian death womb is a thing that used to exist, but that it's probably extinct now, and he reckoned that the sightings of it seemed to dry up around the 1950s, so that was
The Mongolian Death Worm's Existence
00:18:14
Speaker
his impression. How long ago was that interview out of curiosity?
00:18:17
Speaker
I don't have the link now, but it would have been sort of late 2000s probably, 2009 or maybe even later. I do wonder what his view on it now is, given the kind of stuff he publishes on Webworm.
00:18:33
Speaker
I take it that he's now in the highly skeptical camp when it comes to a lot of the stuff that he used to have a deliance with. And so I do wonder whether now he would go, yeah, maybe I was actually a little bit foolish even then to think that it had existed. I don't know. Once again, it's very hard to talk to David about these things because things which are technically active projects or things that could be resuscitated are things that he's not particularly inclined to talk about for obvious creative reasons.
00:19:02
Speaker
But anyway, we're not here to talk about David Ferri, a lovely human being though. Here's where to talk about cryptids. Do you have a favorite? I suppose I should ask right at the start. Is there anything that you've ever captured your imagination?
00:19:18
Speaker
Well, I mean, I've always been either so slightly interested by the alien big cats in the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand, not because I think they're likely to exist, but for the sheer fact that they are kind of the local cryptid that gets talked about a lot, and also the extinct otter.
00:19:39
Speaker
that we had back home, which has not existed for a long time. And yet there are still stories about people seeing it in the bush. So there were a few favourites when it comes to local cryptids back home in Aotearoa. I've always had a little bit of a soft spot for the Yeti, but that's mostly because of their role in Dr Ho.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, I always actually quite liked Nessie. I think just because when I was a boy you'd get books about mysterious things and Nessie would always be involved and they'd have lovely pictures of these imaginary ideas of what a Nessie might look like and all the mysterious photographs and so on.
00:20:19
Speaker
And, of course, because I always used to watch Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, which as a child, the intro to that scared the shit out of me quite reliably. It did to me, but nothing beats Unsolved Mysteries for the creepiest intro. Yeah, I don't know. The other thing that also got me was the way every episode he was always introduced, and I had to write this down so I got it right.
00:20:45
Speaker
that introduced them every time that they had the very, very well-spoken British narrator. Who'd say Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, an inventor of the communication satellite, now on retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.
00:21:01
Speaker
But Nissi was in the very first episode of Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious world era. On retreat in Sri Lanka? Or writing out in Sri Lanka because of things he'd possibly done back in the UK, which... Yes, he had his controversies to do.
00:21:18
Speaker
He did indeed. But anyway, I mean, so you've got your classics, the big names, your Loch Ness Monster, your Bigfoots and your Yetis, and then there's always a variety.
Famous Cryptids Discussion
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, Sasquatches, various missing links, sort of mysterious hominid ones. You've got your, obviously, when Nessie is hardly unique in terms of supposed big lake monsters, there's lakes all over the world where people insist there's a giant monster.
00:21:48
Speaker
living inside it. You've got sort of dinosaur-like monsters that people think, you know, maybe there are still some living dinosaurs around. The one I was introduced to was Mokali Mbembe, the one that supposedly lives in Africa, basically because I saw, as a child, saw the 1985 movie Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend,
00:22:11
Speaker
I had very vague memories of that, very vague memories. I think it's one of those films that even as a child in the mid-80s, I thought the special effects do not look particularly good. Yes, they had a nice little... I forget the exact details of the plot, but there are a couple of adult Brontosauruses basically. I can't remember if the adults die or something, but they get left with the baby one.
00:22:34
Speaker
and they have to look after that. William Catt, the greatest American hero himself, Sean Young and Patrick McGowan was the bad guy. Of course, at the age of like nine years old or whoever I was, I had no idea who Patrick McGowan was. So that that meant nothing to me, but now.
00:22:55
Speaker
The favourite name one, I guess, has to be the Chupacabra, the Mexican goat cycle, which I think I first heard about because of the X-Files episode. See, I knew about it from being a avid reader of the 40 and times. There was a period of time in the 40 and times almost every month.
00:23:14
Speaker
There was a new theory to explain what the Mexican Goat Sucker actually was, from pervert to a sneaking interfield in the middle of the night and slicing open goats to drink their blood and their milk at the same time, to weird dog attacks, to cryptids. The Chupacupra ended up having a variety of different explanations. Because it's a relatively recent one, isn't it? People have been talking about Nessie
00:23:41
Speaker
in her current format since the early 1900s, but there have been rumours of lake monsters around there for centuries, but the Chupacabra kind of showed up in the 1990s, didn't it? And there are some theories which indicate that the initial stories about it were largely hoaxes or farmers making up excuses for dog mutilations of their
00:24:04
Speaker
about, say, their cattle or crops. Is that the right way to refer to a herd of goats? Not really cattle, per se, are they? So, yeah, so there was a theory going around that, look, the initial Tupacupra stories, because the term, even though people go, oh, it's an old, old name, because it's really not, it's a modern coinage, may well have been something where someone made up a story and then other people either continued that fiction.
00:24:34
Speaker
Or because they believed that it referred to an ancient creature, started finding evidence of it in other attacks of herds of- I'm not aware of Chuvacabra attacking geese, but I couldn't put it past them though. Heard of geese. Yes, I have.
00:24:55
Speaker
Chupacabra, so cabra is goat, which means chupa is to do with sucking or something, which when I realized that it was us, so that's why chuppa chups, lollipops are called chuppa chups, because it's expensive. So they're sucka suckas. Suck suckas. Did you know Salvador Dali designed the chuppa chups logo? I mean, I do now because I've been reading the notes for today's episode, but please, expound to our listeners. Salvador Dali.
00:25:21
Speaker
designed the Chubba Chubbs logo, not a melting clock, not a bizarre surrealist imagery at all to be seen. He did advertising work and marketing work as well. If we're doing Salvador Dali, our usual butchering of a Beatles song, Salvador Dali,
00:25:45
Speaker
He didn't chop off his ear. That was Van Gogh. Salvador Dali. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Yes. Anyway, that may have got a little out of hand, but I do love a good Salvador Dali fact. Just to peel the curtain away, because our curtains are stuck to the walls, because of various issues. Josh actually has in the notes here, this discretion may be getting out of hand.
00:26:13
Speaker
So as I started putting down those notes, I thought, well, I acknowledge that I've gone too far, but I want to put that in there. So I'll just, I'll just keep the, I'll just be honest with myself and you, and you, listener. But what else? We got the Jersey Devil and there's a few. Hey, I'm walking here. Yeah, that's, that's New Jersey. But anyway, yeah, it's a weird, weird sort of
00:26:39
Speaker
chimeric sort of creatures. I mean, and there's a long history of people sort of assembling weird, uh, your jackalopes and what's the, the European one, the vulpitinger or something where you sort of get a rabbit and then put some bird wings on it and some funny antlers on the top and say, Hey, look, this is this weird animal I caught. Um, or the, what was the, what was the Fiji mermaid? The one that was a monkey sowed to a fish.
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh, the popular attraction and sideshows, which was also one of the attractions that was in the original Ripley's, believe it or not, exhibit. Yeah. And sometimes you get ones like the Mothman, the Mothman that they sort of somehow ended up getting sort of a supernatural aspect bolted onto it. I think there were these sightings of a creature that looked
00:27:32
Speaker
from the sounds of things a lot like a large owl but definitely wasn't a large owl according to the people who saw it and then there was that bridge disaster and for some reason people thought that the Mothman was a was a warning or something like that and then they made a movie about it with Richard Gere. Now are you aware that the book The Mothman prophecies by John Keel which is the kind of the story of the bridge disaster
00:27:57
Speaker
and the premonitions around it of the Mothman is also by and large the origin of the Men in Black. I did not know that. Because in the Mothman prophecies, Keel talks about how numerous witnesses or people who saw Mothman were visited by strange
00:28:17
Speaker
men wearing black or grey suits who had come to the house claim they were members of some nondescript government department and then ask people questions about the event was also acting really weirdly so there's one example he uses of two men in black arriving to interview a little old lady and she has some jello out on a plate
00:28:44
Speaker
And the ubiquity of jello in America and American culture cannot be overstated. So when one of the men in black points to the gelatinous substance going, what is that? The little old lady's interest is piqued, and she goes, do you want some? And then he starts manipulating and playing with it, as if he doesn't realize it's a foodstuff.
00:29:07
Speaker
And so you get not only the Men in Black story, but also the idea that the Men in Black are otherworldly, in part because John Keir was very into the kind of pan-dimensional or demonic notion of cryptids. They weren't real.
00:29:24
Speaker
physical entities, they were projections from other realities or worlds. And the Men in Black was some kind of similar intrusion into our world from another. Interesting book, quite hard to read because there isn't any central narrative to it. But nonetheless, very interesting. And I actually quite like the film. I think the Richard Gere film is quite a nice let's do the X-Files, but in a very, very different way.
00:29:54
Speaker
Hmm, maybe I'll check it out. You've seen it though. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because there is a bit of crossover sometimes between your cryptozoologists and your ufologists. They'll sort of be an otherworldly connection in some cases to some cryptids.
00:30:14
Speaker
but not universally. Now if we were to look more locally, I think you've touched on both of the kinds of cryptids that tend to get mentioned in New Zealand, those supposed big cats?
Big Cat Sightings in New Zealand
00:30:26
Speaker
that live somewhere down south that people insist they saw, you know, not a big cat, but a big cat, usually a panther of some sort, that people insist are roaming the wilds somewhere. And that's where we get back into cryptozoology may not be a pseudoscience, because you get
00:30:50
Speaker
alien big cat sightings in the south island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. And by alien you mean they shouldn't be there, not different in space.
00:31:00
Speaker
Well, they might be from outer space, but they definitely shouldn't be there. And there isn't much of a history of the ownership of big cats like panthers, lions, tigers, and the like back home. But when you start looking at alien big cat sightings in Australia and the UK, where they also occur, there's a much bigger history of privately owned menageries
00:31:25
Speaker
in situations where the government has shut these things down either due to animal cruelty or saying that you're not allowed to own a private sanctuary of large animals of this kind. The animals kind of just disappearing with the theory being that often the keepers just release them into the wild. And cryptozoologists who study these things are going, well look,
00:31:53
Speaker
We're not saying there are breeding populations of these creatures out there. What we're saying is that they may well have been private ownership of these animals, where the private ownership was terminated, but no one actually tracked what happened to the animals in question. And so we're investigating the possibility that these animals are out there with there being an interesting social story as to how they got there.
00:32:20
Speaker
And that does seem to be a legitimate area of inquiry, because whilst the alien big cat sightings in the South Island don't really make much sense given what we know about animal ownership in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in Australia and the UK, it is relatively plausible to think these are escaped animals from private zoos.
00:32:43
Speaker
I mean, certainly it is the case of Pablo Escobar's hippos, who, where was he, Bolivia? He was, yes. And I believe there's still a problem to this day. Oh, they're a big problem, apparently, because yes, it's supposedly the South American climate, when his hippos escaped into the wild after he went down.
00:33:02
Speaker
the South American climate turns out to be great for hippos. They love it there. And there was, I don't know if there was a single breeding pair or more, but there was enough that they were able to breed and hippos being known for being one of the most territorial and violent animals around. And it's very hard to kill. Very hard to kill. And so not only are they difficult to kill, but also apparently there's a little bit of sort of public sympathy because hippos, they're sort of round and bouncy and a little bit cute if you don't notice the gigantic teeth.
00:33:32
Speaker
So there's I think there's a little bit of popular pressure against culling them as well. But yeah, it sounds like they are actually becoming a genuine problem over there. But so as well as that, we also have every now and then you'll have people claiming to have sighted native animals that are thought to be extinct.
00:33:48
Speaker
Every now and then you'll get people insisting that they saw a mower, the largest, the flightless bird, probably the largest, must have been the largest bird ever. I can't imagine, I can't think of anything else. So, and I've now forgotten the actual name, but the Hearst Eagle, I think, was larger than the mower.
00:34:07
Speaker
because remember the house eagle predated on mower yeah it's wingspan yeah i don't know but i mean it could it could pick it could pick mower up no no the the the house eagle would actually pick up yeah i mean there were there were there were no sheep at the time it would pick mower up fly them to great heights and then drop them on the ground to kill them and then eat it's also a giant this is the biggest eagle the world has ever seen
00:34:35
Speaker
in terms of, because New Zealand had no native mammals with the exception of bats and dolphins. And that otter, I did mention that the otter did exist. But basically birds filled all of the evolutionary niches that you would often see in other places. And the heart's ego was basically New Zealand's lion.
00:34:57
Speaker
Butterbird. But anyway, some people claim to have seen Moa. If you've seen the film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, that has as a plot point. While the two main characters are going through the bush, they see a very distinctive, extinct native bird, the Huia.
00:35:12
Speaker
So you get things like that. But there haven't been really, there is not as far as I'm aware, a sort of any sort of oral tradition within Maori culture of these supernatural creatures that are thought to still exist today in the way that people talk about a Loch Ness Monster.
00:35:31
Speaker
or a McKellen-Bendy. Well, I mean, there's been discussion about the Tanifa. But of course, the Tanifa ends up being a... I'm looking up past Eagle here to get the actual... And the Wikipedia page, as per usual, which is actually really... Ah!
00:35:53
Speaker
Po-ake! There we go, Po-ake. Yeah, the Wikipedia page really should actually go with that first, but it's actually several lines down. So yeah, the Tanifa, which are...
00:36:04
Speaker
which gets us into an interesting thing about our Maori, the Maori worldview, and I should preface this with I am not Maori, it doesn't matter how many Maori friends or Maori partners I have, I cannot in any way talk about things with any degree of cultural fluency here.
00:36:26
Speaker
But the Tanifa are often taken by Pakia as being a Maori mythological creature, a kind of monster that exists in riverbends or bad parts of the land that people shouldn't go to.
00:36:42
Speaker
It's not entirely clear that people think Tanifa literally exists, so Josh is right, there's often no stories told, they're kind of a figurative creature or explanatory thing. But there is a way of talking about things into Aumari, where they're kind of both. They are a figurative way of explaining a phenomena within the landscape, but that doesn't mean they're not real.
00:37:07
Speaker
they're just not real in the same way that you or I are. Probably the more interesting thing within the Aotoro concept is the Patuparehe, the theory people of
00:37:23
Speaker
Because they would get the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis people. Yes, because the fae folk usually characterise as being light-skinned with blonde hair and blue eyes, which the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis proponents say, well, that sounds an awful lot like Europeans.
00:37:45
Speaker
And anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers would go, no, that sounds a lot like albinos. And albinos is quite striking in a people who are used to dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so there is a kind of history in a lot of different cultures of albinos being treated as being different from the norm. And it's understandable you might even create a kind of folkloric category for people who, and this is a terrible way to talk about albinos, because they are a horribly predated upon part of the human species in a lot of cultures. But there's a way of explaining away why you might characterize fae folk.
00:38:30
Speaker
as having these kind of European characteristics without actually having to talk about the Europeans having got here first. Just dancing around some racism and ableism there. But yes, I mean, when it comes down to it,
00:38:48
Speaker
A lot of these cryptids worldwide, some of them are hoaxes. I think we'll talk about one of the most famous hoaxes shortly. A lot of them do just seem to be mistaken animal sightings or stories about animals that may have existed but no longer did. So while, for instance, I think there were still some more extent when European settlers arrived, weren't there?
00:39:17
Speaker
But certainly not. Moa had been. I mean, so Moa were around when the Maori first arrived in Aotearoa, New Zealand. They go extinct around about 100 to 200 years after the arrival of the Maori due to the rise of agriculture in
00:39:38
Speaker
Aotearoa, New Zealand, moa basically, are a consequence of that, and also being hunted down. So by the time Europeans arrive, there are definitely none around. And indeed, there is a theory about because the word moa in most Polynesian languages just refers to chickens, which are the most common bird you'll find for eating purposes. And there's a theory going around that
00:40:06
Speaker
Moa had kind of disappeared from even Māori oral culture, although that's probably not true, because there are stories about Palaki, and they disappear well before the Moa do. But there's a theory going around that when Europeans went, these big bones over here, what do they refer to? They look like bird bones.
00:40:33
Speaker
What's a word that we have for birds we don't currently use? Oh, mower is a word that is in our language that refers to birds that we don't have. So that's probably a mower. It's a theory. But yeah, they may not have been extant, but as you say, there was enough physical evidence that we had proof that these creatures existed.
Moa Extinction Explained
00:40:55
Speaker
If the bones didn't exist, though,
00:40:57
Speaker
and you heard people telling stories about these birds that were much taller than a human being, you might think it's just some weird story when in fact it would be simply stories of something that no longer existed anymore. And that does seem to be the case
00:41:15
Speaker
Well, it's not necessarily the case here. It does seem to be the case in other places. So for instance, with Mokile Mbembe, the creature which, going by some descriptions, make it sound like a long-necked sort of brontosaurus-y sort of creature. Other descriptions talk about rather than having a long neck on the front of its body, certainly talk about having a long horn sticking up from the front of its body. And indeed, apparently some tribes local to the area
00:41:43
Speaker
were supposed to exist, having been shown a book with lots of African animals on it, identified a rhinoceros as, oh, yep, that's the one we're talking about. Rhinoceros is used to exist in that area, but had been extinct there for a long time.
00:42:01
Speaker
Similarly with the Mongolian death worm there are stories of people talking to locals who claim to have seen them and showing them pictures of various snakes and having them point at a sand boa and say oh yeah you know that's what we are talking about when we use the words
00:42:19
Speaker
that they use to describe this creature that we talk about as a Mongolian Death Worm because it makes for a better title for a movie, although not a better movie from what I understand. I haven't actually seen Mongolian Death Worms, the monster movie, but it doesn't sound great.
00:42:35
Speaker
And similarly with Nessie, some people have thought that the various sightings which, you know, tend to be not always have things in common sometimes it's shapes under the water sometimes it's creatures walking around sometimes it's weird ripples and so on but I think there could be a variety of
00:42:52
Speaker
people seeing otters, people seeing large eels, or large fish as well. Because there is a river that connects Loch Ness to the sea. I'm not sure it's possible for sea underground. It's also very, very deep underground. Yes, so maybe not. But
00:43:12
Speaker
Which brings us back again to your alien cats, because while, as you say, in other countries there is a lot more plausibility of being an escaped creature, a lot of the time the explanation that people offer for these supposed big cats
00:43:32
Speaker
seen in New Zealand, they're not a big cat, they are simply a big cat, a big house cat, which when seen at a distance with no, across a field where there isn't enough detail to give you proper perspective, your eye basically plays tricks on you and you end up perceiving it as being larger than it actually is. And that's been a explanation in some cases of how a person could mistake an otter for the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, it's a creature with a long body and sort of a long
00:44:00
Speaker
longish neck and a long tail and what have you and other things like eels and there are some relatively large fish I think that can be found around there. If you just saw a bit of one gliding under the water you never know.
00:44:15
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, there are plenty of explanations, but there are, I would say, even more cryptids that people believe in. And cryptids, in this case, go back a long way. So when people talk about the histories written by Herodotus, where we get stories like Centaurs and the Light, people are going,
00:44:34
Speaker
I mean, Herodotus, he's not the most reliable of historians, but he often was drawing on reports by people coming in from overseas. He just wasn't very good at kind of fact-checking the claims they made. And people are going, yeah, a lot of the cases of Herodotus describing an unusual species like a centaur is probably Herodotus getting a very garbled description of something very strange someone saw.
00:45:02
Speaker
like a person riding bareback on a horse, which sounds quite, quite lewd, but bareback riding on horses sometimes actually just means a person not using a saddle and then going, how do we kind of reconcile the strange behavior here?
00:45:19
Speaker
and so you get the centaur or some people have claimed that giraffes are the source of centaur stories because at a distance it looks like the body of a horse with a really weird person standing on top of it. It actually does get us into the interesting discussion about centaurs in fiction because people like to point out that centaurs are always described as being tall in fiction as if you've got you know they've got the four legs of a horse
00:45:50
Speaker
And then I've got a kind of a human on top. But as people point out, I mean, the thing about a horse is that the hind legs are the equivalent of a human's legs. And the forelegs are basically the arms. So really, centaurs should just be a horse with a human's head.
00:46:12
Speaker
the same height as a human so either if you want to maintain that centaurs have this kind of you know this human torso thing then we should downgrade the horse bit to kind of like a pony size when you get these delightful tiny centaurs cantering around the place or if you're going to go for horse size you just go for a horse and you replace the head with a human head
00:46:36
Speaker
which is also delightful and weird and certainly not the way that fancy depictions have of these of these buff muscular men and life-strong women that for some reason also have an additional set of legs along with their arms you know who else has six limbs dragons so what i'm saying proposing why do they have six limbs
00:46:58
Speaker
Well dragons have four legs plus wings and wings are arms. Good point, well made. So what I'm saying now is that centaurs and dragons are literally the same thing. Actually, well actually, sometimes dragons have their arms on their wing. Well those are wyverns. Oh you've got an ounce for everything.
00:47:24
Speaker
this is the point time if if we had if this was a video episode you should be you know just slowly raising up a monster man you're from dnd at this point and then putting it those are wyverns i think you'll find
00:47:41
Speaker
Yes, now anyway, I think we're drawing to a close because we're aiming towards a regular length episode anyway, and I am at least 60% sweat by body weight now. So I thought we should finish off because we haven't really talked about conspiracy theories a lot so far. But one of the best conspiracy theories when it comes to cryptids is of course the story of the surgeon's photo.
Loch Ness Monster Photo Hoax
00:48:05
Speaker
This surgeon's photo? If you've ever seen
00:48:08
Speaker
anything about the Loch Ness Monster you probably know which photo I'm meaning. It's the one, the black and white photo showing the silhouette of what appears to be a long-necked creature in a bit of its back sticking up out of the waters of Loch Ness, probably the most famous Nessie photo that there is.
00:48:27
Speaker
which we now know was a hoax and the result of a conspiracy between some of the most Britishly named Britons in all of Britain. Oh, can I, can I, can I give, can I give the name? Let me introduce you to our cartel of British conspirators. Our first one is Mama Duke Withal or Withal. I'm actually not quite sure how the pronunciation of Withal. So Christian Spelling,
00:48:56
Speaker
Christian Sperling, Ian Withal, and Maurice, or Morris Chambers. I'm heard, I hear he likes it both ways. So yes, interesting, not one of these people is a surgeon.
00:49:12
Speaker
Um, but apparently when the photo was first published, it was credited as coming from a Mr. Robert Kenneth Wilson, who was a local doctor. I'm not sure if that was, uh, I'm not sure if that was a mix up or if they were, if it was them trying to throw people off the scent or something. But so the, the surgeon's photo was a hoax. It's kind of a revenge hoax. It's an interesting one because, uh, Mama Duke Wetherill, Wetherill the Elder, was an actor, a filmmaker, a big game hunter.
00:49:42
Speaker
and also an employee. There's a song there. I'm an actor, a cheetah, a big game hunter. Nobody calls him Maurice. There's a Maurice as well. It's about all four of them.
00:49:59
Speaker
Mr Weatherill, the Elder, worked for the Daily Mail and brought them supposed evidence of the Loch Ness Monster when he found these mysterious footprints around the shores of Loch Ness.
00:50:15
Speaker
And so he came to the Daily Mail with his exclusive proof of the Loch Ness Monster. Unfortunately, when the casts of these footprints that he'd made were analyzed, they were found to be quite clearly the footprints of a hippopotamus. And it was found that some wacky prankster who had a hippopotamus umbrella stand, because that was one of those lovely things that people did back then.
00:50:39
Speaker
making furniture out of animal parts. Somebody had a hippopotamus foot umbrella stand and for a bit of a laugh had walked around the shores of Loch Ness making these large footprints. So the Daily Mail ended up rubbishing him and making him look like an idiot when it turned out he had been hoaxed. So he thought he had hoaxed them right back.
00:51:02
Speaker
and come up with what ended up being one of the most famous photos of supposedly the Loch Ness Monster ever. So we now know that it was a toy submarine with a head and neck made out of wood putty stuck to the top of it that they floated out into the loch and photographed.
00:51:23
Speaker
I think, so, Mr... Mama Duke Wetherill sort of was the brains of the operation. I think his son, Ian Wetherill, brought the... I think he supplied the putty and Christian Spirling supplied the submarine or something. I don't actually know what Mr Chambers did, but he was there, so... It is here, he was an insurance agent. He was an insurance agent, yeah. I'm sure he was doing some kind of claims adjusting at the time. Probably here, had insured the toy submarine or something.
00:51:50
Speaker
So they took this photograph, it was published in the mail in 1934 and a large deal was made of it. Most of the time the photograph is shown cropped in quite close. If you see the full photograph where you can actually see the shore of Loch Ness, it does look a little less spectacular with that amount of perspective. The creature does look quite a bit smaller but nevertheless it stayed there. People
00:52:20
Speaker
Well, I mean, first of all, back then, although photo manipulation was possible, it wasn't simple. I mean, Stalin was really keen on it. Yeah, he was really keen on it. And fake photographs, I mean, how old were those fairy photographs? The cotton-coated deal. I mean, that's slightly earlier. Yeah, but I mean, that was sort of...
00:52:45
Speaker
paper models made to look real. But basically, photographic evidence was held in much higher regard than it is these days, of course, where anyone, if they choose not to believe in a photograph, can just cry Photoshop. But back then, it was, you know, that was a photograph was as close to cast iron proof as you could get. But yeah, people, obviously, they were always skeptics. Apparently,
00:53:09
Speaker
In the 70s, there was a bit of a bit of noise around the fact that they thought it was a hoax photograph. And then in 1993, some people, some experts took a good look at the photo and really did start to cast doubt on it. They thought that the ripples around the edge of the monster, which in the cropped up version, kind of looked like they could be at making large waves when you actually had a proper look at the photograph. They had the characteristics more of small ripples.
00:53:39
Speaker
And when you look at the full zoomed out, the full photograph, in fact photographs, I think there were two, but there was only one that was ever used because the other one, I'm not quite sure, wasn't as good a picture or something, but one of them seemed to show, there was a little sort of dot at one point in the photograph which
00:54:00
Speaker
they could analyze and see wasn't a speck or an artifact or something. It was something that was actually in the photo, and it almost looked like it was something that had been towing this model and could possibly be seen to be causing some of the ripples. So this study basically said, you know, we think this photo is a bit of a hoax. And then not long after that, in 1994, Christian Spirling, the son-in-law, admitted publicly that indeed it was a hoax.
00:54:25
Speaker
And then in 1999, the book Nessie the Surgeon's Photograph Exposed by David S. Martin and Alice Dear Boy. Did you see what they did there? The photograph exposed? Exposed, yeah, it's just double meaning, exposure. Yeah, so then they published a fairly detailed book, presumably having interviewed Mr. Spirling and what have you, that went through the history and the details and exactly why it was a fake. But
00:54:54
Speaker
So there you go. I think a lot of people, I mean, that was the photo, obviously. Good old Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious world. That was always front and center on some of the credits. No, I believe some of the work they did back in 1993 was actually trying to recreate the photos. So people went to using the larger photo, found the kind of vantage point with a camera of that time.
00:55:22
Speaker
you'd be able to work out exactly where it was. And then they would just take various scale models going, actually, how big does this thing actually need to be? And that was part of the deciding proof of going, actually, if this is meant to be a big creature, this photo does not show up because the model itself they used is actually quite tiny. Yeah, no, not very big at all.
00:55:45
Speaker
But there you go. So whatever you think of it, it's definitely a conspiracy. So we're allowed to be talking about it. And frankly, that's all I have to say about The Loch Ness Monster. Except there is a link to Sherlock Holmes. Is there? Well, no. So there's the film The Seventh Percent Solution, which is a film about
00:56:09
Speaker
a non-canonical story of Holmes investigating a crime. The reference, of course, is to the cocaine solution. Solution of cocaine, yes. And part of the plot of the 7% solution is the faking of Nessie on Loch Ness.
00:56:25
Speaker
And so they built a kind of fake nessie along the lines of the Sturgeon's photo. They put it out on the lake, they filmed it. And then many years later, that prop was found at the bottom of the lake. And people thought they'd found the prop associated with the Surgeon's photo.
00:56:50
Speaker
But of course it turned out actually they had found the prop associated with the film. But that also in part then led to a new re-investigation because we go, oh yeah, we've actually seen in the moving pictures how you would fake the Loch Ness Monster. And it looked pretty convincing in that film. We should probably go back and have another look at that photo again.
00:57:15
Speaker
Sherlock Holmes inadvertently solved the case, which is kind of ironic given that Arthur Conan Doyle died believing that the Kotlin theories were very, very real and that he could speak to his dead mother. He wrote a book after death, you know.
00:57:34
Speaker
was these one of those ones dictated to a psychic? Yes, and it ended up being a fairly interesting legal case because the Doyle estate, when this book came out, well, if this book is written by Arthur Conan Doyle, then it belongs to us and the author, sorry, the spirit medium who took
00:57:55
Speaker
down dear Uncle Arthur's words or Daddy Arthur's words, really can't claim anything other than being a secretary. So we should deserve all the royalties from this book. And so there was a legal case about who the author of the book was and the court sided with the Doyle estate going, well, look,
00:58:16
Speaker
If the person who channeled Arthur Conan Doyle really does claim all she was doing was typing out what he told her, then she's not an author and can't make any... So yeah, an interesting legal proof of life after death, or at least authorship after death.
00:58:39
Speaker
So, I think that's us done for this week. But it's not, of course, because after we stop this, first I'm going to turn the fan back on again and cool myself down, so at least to the point where I could... Josh, are you going to strip Naked for the bonus episode? Only you will know.
00:58:57
Speaker
But anyway, we're going to record a bonus episode. There's no doubt about that. We're going to talk about a bunch of mysterious things. We'll talk about the protests that's been going on down south. What else will we talk about, do you think? Well, we're going to talk about good old Havana sound because there's more information about that Havana set hand drum. We'll have a little bit of an update as to Prince Andrew's legal travails over good old Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie of underage girls.
00:59:27
Speaker
We've got a journal of lost, timeless secrets, which can be easily bought from Etsy.
00:59:35
Speaker
And of course the good old debate as to whether the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is going to stay on Spotify given that we should follow Neil Young's lead. We've got some stats and some commentary on that as well. So if you'd like to hear about all of that and you're not currently a patron then just be one. We already told you at the start how it's the perfect mix of encouraging and also infuriating.
01:00:00
Speaker
um you could do that by going to patreon.com and signing yourself up. Being a patron of the podcast's guide to the conspiracy is basically the ability to edge both Josh and myself. You always have to bring it down don't you honestly.
01:00:13
Speaker
If you don't want to in any way even tacitly support the torrent of filth that regularly spews from Dr. Dentist's mouth, you don't feel like you have to. The fact that you've listened all the way to the end of this episode is quite enough for us, thank you. And I believe that's everything we have to say. So before I collapse into some sort of coma, I'm just going to bring things to a close in the usual method of saying goodbye. I'm going to say elementary, my dear Edison. Elementary.
01:00:44
Speaker
Sherlock Holmes never said that, but curious enough, Captain Kirk from Star Trek did. And remember, Soylent Green is meepos.