Tatzelwurms and SITU??

I've promised that when possible I'll try to respond to questions of interest, so this will be another of those times. In the comments a couple of weeks back, I was asked if Sanderson had anything to say about the European cryptobeast, the Tatzelwurm. Somewhat surprisingly, the answer so far has been "no". When you look at Ivan's files, it is overwhelmingly obvious that he was an ABSM man. He is "crazy" interested in the concept, and his files on it double any other subject. He's interested in water monsters, UFOs, and lots else, but no Tatzelwurm so far. Still, we may as yet uncover material on it, and the SITU magazine covered the Tatzelwurm twice in the Warth era. More on that later.

I am not going to give a professorish dissertation on the Tatzelwurm concept because it is a topic relatively new to me, and my naivete is profound. Plus there are several nice overviews on the alleged beast easily available on the internet ; one named Frontiers of Zoology has a fairly lengthy and intelligent coverage of our monster, lasting about 50 pages. I downloaded it myself --- well, if I'm going to make my own file on this thing, why not make a thick one??

As I said, I'm going to leave it to you folks to read the web in depth on this, but I'll give a vague descriptive context. This subject seems to merge back into the mediaeval past [at a minimum] in the central European Alps, especially in Switzerland and Austria [yeh, I know they weren't around yet politically]. Early descriptions seem to vary quite a bit depending on what commentator you're reading today; some folks want to glue more things together than others do. The conservative commentators tend to focus on relatively small lizardy or Gila Monster type creatures, which are dangerous due to poisonous behaviors.

A middleground of commentators seem to like a larger possibility for the monster, and go with an extended snaky affair with front legs and no hind ones. This sort of Tatzelwurm takes on an image reminiscent of some of the PNW coast sea/lake monsters, but having an Alpine habitat instead.

The "All-The-Way-Fool" school of Tatzelwurmologists [you should read back into the blog to find out what "All-The-Way-Fool" signifies in hypothesizing], combines much larger geography [possibility extending right around the planet] and much wider encounter tales. This sort of School-of-Thought is usually my favorite in cryptozoological matters, as most of these things end up impressing me as having observational reality, but not the "physical presence" in my mundane world that a biologist would like.

The ATWF school in this instance begins to speak of "dragons", the "Last European Dragons", and casts a folkloric aura about the beast. That, as blog readers know, is not at all put-offing to me, if the data seem to indicate actual encounters, but the rest of our commonsense fails to come up with a biology textbook sort of solution. Save the Data; Throw away your "commonsense" if that's what it takes to do so. "All-The-Way-Fool". Plus, I rather like Dragons. But, they're biologically out-of-the-question, so off we go to the paranormal little folks' land.

The blog-keeper of the blog that I just mentioned claims that the picture below is of a tombstone commemorating the death of a farmer killed by an attack of two poisonous Tatzelwurms. I can't see the carving clearly enough, but I trust that if we were right up next to it that we could.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I have found no commentary by Ivan on this subject. Even in his two books where one would seem encouraged to find such [ "Things" & "More Things"], there is nothing, despite comment on many other monsters.

But during Bob Warth's years of publishing PURSUIT, the Tatzelwurm was covered twice --- once in a 1986 article by Ulrich Magin [who is apparently as much an expert on this subject as anyone; and who has a recent Fortean Times article on Tatzelwurm, as well as a full book on it and other beasts {in German only, I think}], and once in an undated [but five years later] article by Luis Schonherr.

Schonherr was a great "fan" of the Tatzelwurm since his youth and had "secretly" collected a huge pile of reports alongside his more well-known UFO interests. He claimed 160 case histories. There are two unfortunate things in this part of the story: 1). Schonherr's article was part one of two, but the Journal stopped with this issue and part two never appeared. 2). Luis has now passed on and we have lost an expert as well as a fine UFOlogist.

Unless one of you is a channeler, we can do nothing about Luis passing up through the NDE light-tunnel to the next phase of his spiritual existence, but there is a small hope on the other thing. And, you guessed it, it concerns what's in those d@#$#& unsorted boxes that I described in the previous post. MAYBE Luis already had sent Bob Warth his "Part Two" of the Tatzelwurm articles and we'll uncover it in the long haul of turning over papers in hopes of the worthwhile. IF I stumble upon the mysterious unpublished part two, I will promise you a detailed report. Until then, you'll have to be content with internet sources, Ulrich Magin's doubtlessly good book, and your back copies of PURSUIT.

p.s.: both PURSUIT articles were pretty in depth: seven pages for Magin, and five for Schonherr.