SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part eight

Stumbling around in the Realm of the Cryptids

Why this one now: the only possibly important thing for me to write about at this point (relating to Faery) is the argument that there might exist a parallel reality from which these entities could emerge. That requires some real reading/research, however, and even with spending most of a week on it (Jotts, Glitches, Reality Shifts et al), the task is overwhelming. So: not quite yet. Instead I'm going to post some thoughts about Faery and Cryptids off the top of my head.

I can't claim status as a cryptozoologist. But I'm not stone ignorant about that field either (above is the shelving unit for my book library on these matters and there are a few file cabinet drawers.) I can't claim to have earned a "professional opinion" on all I'm about to type, but I can promise you that I've given most of the "big" crypto topics an honest try. 

  
 I've had a lot of exceptional help. As many know, I've been privileged to be tasked with the preservation of Ivan Sanderson's famous three-ring notebooks wherein he collected much of his raw materials for his own launching into these things. (above are most of the cryptozoology ones.) Here and there you can, by surprise, turn up other bits and pieces of crypto-joy in the larger SITU files. This, plus having close friends involved (Jerry Clark, George Eberhart, Henry Bauer), .... well, it's been an honor and a lot of fun. I'm only mentioning these things because I want you to know that the following "crazy" remarks about several of the cryptids haven't just sprung forth out of shallow imagination. 

Let's just jump in the deep end ....

Sea Monsters, Lake Monsters.

Everyone's favorite cryptid (well almost), Nessie, and all her lake and sea serpent cousins? Bunk? Bio? or Faery? Let me start with the Oceans ...

Sea Serpents: I gave this one a good try on this blog between May and July of 2011. There were 14 posts covering Ivan Sanderson's Sea Serpent files notebooks, which looked at 114 different claims. The claims were mapped crudely at least, and the best cases, in my opinion, were highlighted in the texts. The analyses made at least one thing very close to certain for me: none of the claims of sea serpent carcasses hold up. (There's a skeptical fellow going by the e-name of Markus out there who is a relentless attacker of such claims, and though I lack affection for that mindset, I know enough of the biology to realize that such debunking in this topic is legit.) 

Having said that, there are also some terrific witness reports on swim-by observations of very odd sea creatures. 

Some reports are  surely the products of hysterical people, and even a fantasy-prone person here and there. Even if one is very liberal with such opinion, very few cases sound like that at all. Some of the cases DO sound like mis-identification of course. If everyone knew about Oarfish etc the data pile would be cleaner. But there are way too many "close encounters" with good witnessing to honestly claim universal debunking statements anywhere. Some serious numbers of the cases are "good anomalies."

 So, what are they? Biology or something stranger? I don't think that Biology is the correct answer. Biology should have carcasses. I've heard all the decades worth of anomalists dancing around this, but No. These things are a big deal --- not just in size but interest. We've had centuries of real interest in these things. NO carcasses. 

Maybe I could "forgive" that lack if we were still in the 19th century. Not now. In the 20th, the probable only real bio-monster (the Giant Squid) has been found, and found pretty much several times. Maybe a similarly gigantic octopus cousin could still hide out as a region-restricted bottom liver. So, OK if that character finally shows. But we are "radar-ing" the entire oceans now. We NEED to know submarines from underwater serpents, and apparently we are just fine with the knowledge that no such physical serpents freely roam the seas. But some serpents DO seem to occasionally roam. If not "physical", what? 

  There was one crypto-case which I spent a lot of original research upon: the alleged Pacific North West crypto-orm called by the local cultures "Wasgo", "Sisiutl", "WasX", and other names. This was a particularly rich possibility. The Wasgo not only had recent witness claims, but Native American PNW legends concerning it, many sorts of representative artifacts, and even ancient rock carvings. Something was obviously behind all of that. (The picture by the way is of my own artifact of the Wasgo: a ceremonial mask created by a famous mask-maker which I purchased while on a trip to Alaska --- at Skagway.) 

If I was going to find a real crypto-beast and a biological animal, this was a bigtime shot. I put everything together that I could. The beast seemed to be very like a zeuglodont,  a primitive whale with front legs but none at the rear --- an odd fact to be replicated in a myth and esoteric palaeontology identically. The research seemed to push the mystery out towards others, like Ogopogo. I liked the data. No matter how good it was, however, it really didn't distinguish between the paranormal possibility and the biological. I published this in the Journal for Scientific Exploration and am proud of the piece, but I really can't say that I solved the mystery. Here was the best case of a "sea monster" that I could ask for, and I was still juggling two hypotheses --- and no carcass and no high technology supportive evidence. What I DID have were local stories from the Native American cultures which pictured encounter incidents with the Wasgo very much like a fairy incident AND a list of common tribal crests which listed the Wasgo amongst the most popular choices of spirit icon entities. I am as sure as I can be in such a situation that the Wasgo exists, but not at all sure that it can be bio-textbook physical. 

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Nessie? ... and her cousins.

"Not a legend but a fact ... " I rather agree with that. 

 There are enough reports. It surprises me in fact that writers keep repeating over and over the same ones without realizing that others have continued to see things in the Loch, and some of the witnesses are, to me, certainly more impressive  than some of the standard photos. 

 
I'll break Loch Ness tradition by saying that I strongly prefer many of the witness reports (ex. the ones from the monks at the old monastery or some of what Alex Campbell reports or the witnesses that Ted Holiday audiotaped --- I had the privilege of listening to Holiday's old tape with several of them in the company of a good friend and Nessie enthusiast, Will Matthews) to other film classics even including Tim Dinsdale's black triangular hump-above-water filmstrip. In heresy, I am almost unmoved by the "film evidence" even including the flawed hi-tech sonar stuff. But the witnesses tell a very different tale. ... and I'm sold on them. 

 

 So, again in heresy, I find myself sitting in this boat with Ted Holiday and the priest who is trying to exorcise a local loch. As to exorcism for paranormal Orms, I don't know about that. But the paranormal part seems ringing true here ... even more so than in the oceans or the Vancouver Strait of the Wasgo-Sisiutl.

On the right is a page of one of the rarest books in the world. Sorry for the quality of viewing but we can't have everything from a book of only two known copies. (The book was "discovered" by some great detective work and industry by Theo Paijmanns.) 

One of its few chapters describes local (north Scotland) interactions of folks with their lake monster, The Mhorag. Here is an old group of stories about a Nessie cousin. These stories indicate a beast well known to people, but one which is clearly paranormal. Mhorag is a ragingly dynamic "Kelpie." Not a biological specimen. 

If we cross the world, we find these things all over --- and all over in impossibly small bodies of water. But we moderns continue the dance of trying to believe that these are textbook physical. Thankfully I am not an honorable member of the crypto-tribe. That allows me to step back a bit and say: Stop the absurd Dance of rationalization. The academics are never going to buy any of this anyway, so give it up. 

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Mermaids: everyone's favorite cryptid.

I'm going to be brief with this segment and then skip until the next post (as we're getting long today.) I gave this one an honest try also. 

This topic is not rich in data. Although there were 119 claimed incidents that I was able to dig out and log (the blog posts on the four main entries are from 2015, with two earlier ones from 2011 and 2013, and a scatter of comment inter alia), the quality of those reports was nowhere near that of the sea serpent or lake monster narratives. As usual, no legitimate carcass cases --- I am sort of relieved about that given "who" we're talking about here. More sadly, in my opinion VERY poor credibility in the narratives or very poor detail. I've forgotten the 19th century folklore collector who I'm about to quote, but he, operating along the western shores of Britain said: you can get a tale about mermaids almost anywhere, and none of them is like another. I am not sure that I'd go that far, but there are very few close encounters which are also attested to by credible reporters, and whose story has some reasonable second party to report and attest to anything about the case. 

I can say to you that if you want to make money, mermaids are probably the way to go --- the relevant posts have created more old consistent traffic here than any other topic. People like mermaids whether they ever existed or not. For me, maybe they exist, but if so are with absolute certainty paranormal --- the impossible evolutionary biology gets you that conclusion without going any further. (This is not the "land half joined to a water half", it's that the joining halves bear no physical sign of any historical relationship to one another.) 

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So, for the water entities: 

A. Giant Squid and maybe Giant Octopi? Yeh sure, put them in the bio-texts.

B. Ocean and Lake Orms? Nope. Over-sized "kelpies" it is.

C. Merpeople? I have no clue. For hypothetical consistency, I'd rather go with anthropomorphic Naiads for candidates for Faery denizens but I have essentially zero encounter claims for those. 

What about "Hairy wildmen"? What about Saurians or Too-Big Flyers ... and What All? 

I'll try a bit more next time. This is the 50th consecutive post on my exploration of this Faery topic. Although I'm still "in the Woods", I at least can claim to have earned my foggy opinions.

... and a sudden fog came down, and there ahead was a lantern light beckoning. Should we follow? ..........  off in the distance, the sounds of children giggling.

SLOW SWAN SONG, part three

Third piece of this last walk full of personal opinions ....

The piece on UFOs: I felt that I'd earned an opinion due to my work on the subject.

The piece on PSI: I felt that I had a well-founded opinion based on powerful experiences within my family plus knowing the giants of the field and respecting their honesty and competency.

Today=entities --- "crypto-entities" if you will. The famous cryptozoological ones and the ones split off into the category of Faery: I'm less sure that I've earned my opinions here but I AM sure that I've spent a lot of time with several areas of this. Still, I'm no expert.

My credentials, such as they are, include a couple of good ones [two refereed papers; one on the SET animal of Egypt, and the other on the Wasgo/Sisiutl of the Pacific Northwest], and some take-them-or-leave-them things like working in the Ivan Sanderson collection and a fairly formidable pile of resources. Out of those things came the blog entries on sea monsters, "Little People", black fairy dogs, merbeings, dragons, ABSMs et al that you have read. But no personal experiences nor any from my family, though I have had a small number first or second hand from friends.

Still, I feel more humility in these opinions than on the earlier two. But, on we go Out Proctor .....

Faery or The Middle Kingdom: I used to not think about this as anything but romantic fun, and the famous cryptozoological critters as hidden biology. As the blog "progressed", the evidence for me turned nearly completely around. It did NOT point to the NON-existence of these things, though.

"Little People", Fairy Folkloric Entities, and "The Good People": Diarmuid MacManus was the man. His book The Middle Kingdom contains encounter reports so close to him [in terms of knowing the witnesses] and so detailed [so as to make necessary "strangeness" obvious], that for me as a decades-long UFOlogist, they rivaled some of the best UFO reports. The aura of authenticity was dense around them. Suddenly, my reading of Evans-Wentz' The Fairy-faith in Celtic Countries, which I'd read to try to understand what Vallee was on about, made more compelling sense. Whereas I didn't come to Jacques' conclusions that the Faery Phenomenon was real AND explained UFOs, I saw the probable truth in the first part and the probable falsity in the second [i.e. I agree on the raw data, but feel that the two realities have ENTIRELY different feels about them  --- Jacques is a "lumper" on this, and I am a "splitter".] Then came Janet Bord with Fairies and The Secret Country, followed by Wirt Sykes' British Goblins.

I began to collect the cases and produced a 500 or so case catalog whimsically called LEPRECAT. The reality of these things was getting almost impossible to deny. But what sort of reality was this? I've spent much time since buying old texts to find out more of what the people 150-200 years ago thought, and there are [of course] two schools: "modern debunkers" who were snickering as they make patronizing comments about the ignorant "lower class" and naive older generations, and a type of amateur folklore-collector who was open-mindedly trying to preserve the cultural traditions at least from being forgotten. These latter persons don't always have the same personal opinions, but they find the same things: an interpretation by the people that these entities are undoubtedly real, often interact with them as simple encounters between different "persons", and are paranormal or call it quasi-spiritual in Nature. ... and, in my opinion, that is exactly how those encounter stories seem, and continue to seem right up throughout the 20th century.

"Dr. Beachcombing" seems to see this the same way. He is a British academic who seems to have traveled a similarly intellectually-shifting path to my own, and who now has resurrected the old records of the British Fairy Investigation Society of the 1920s-1950s, and is collecting a MASS of information for his blog and a book of review chapters by different experts. He believes, as I do, that there is not only something very real here but it is possibly important.

As readers know, one of the things that MacManus inspired me to look into was the claim that in some places there have been [even modern] sightings/encounters with what may be called the Black Fairy Dog. I've scoured the internet and old books on this, and the investigations are surprisingly strong. This phenomenon, particularly in a few concentrated areas in Britain plus the MacManus cases, seems as real as any "crypto-entity" in the literature. AND when the evidence is taken whole, this crypto-entity appears to be some sort of highly-defined but non-material apparition. [examples: instant vanishment and you can put your hand through its image.] What in the world does that portend? The one thing that it DOESN'T point to is biology.

Does the Black Fairy Dog hint to us about the rest of LEPRECAT? Maybe. Maybe not. Could all the encounters from Faery be apparitions? That might go for some of the reports but not others. There are plenty of reports which include "physicality", although one should keep in the juggling-processes of our minds that a paranormal entity could physically affect the world [via psychokinesis.]

I've looked for merbeings recently and as you know didn't find much, but perhaps enough to give them some credence --- but, if so, they must be non-biological and part of Faery. We've searched for dragons and found almost nothing --- a shame in my opinion but that's where the data goes. A modern weird thing, Mothman, was looked into quite deeply here, and with the exception of John Keel and Gray Barker getting involved and fouling the waters, there seems [pre-their involvement] enough good investigating and reporting from the local journalist to give it some credit --- but again, as a paranormal entity.

It is folkloric entity encounters [and the Black Dog] where this category of anomaly is strong. There is an ongoing [unless I just haven't heard] screw-up in the crypto-community which could/should be nailing down [or not] a foundationstone case: the encounters had by Moyra Doorly and her friend on the Isle of Arran. That experience --- a set of fascinating claims --- needs to be properly investigated, most notably the lack of a detailed interview of the anonymous friend, and a site visit. I hope that this has happened and I just don't know about it. If her case is true, it not only is coherent with just about everything in the old literature, but widely expands our consciousness.

As I "came over" to the position that the old concept of Faery has a great deal of evidence for it and as a realm of paranormal/spiritual or psychic entities, my assumptions about "normal cryptozoology" changed. Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Mokele M'bembe, et al had difficult-but-just-possible-biological hypotheses for them, but the further one looked into most of them the more difficult it became to sustain.

Ivan Sanderson hated that way of thinking. He wanted flesh, blood, bones, teeth, and a specimen --- alive if possible. He was a zoologist and zoo-keeper, so of course he did. He disliked the paranormal, as it, for him, made the investigation of anomalies problematical. He wanted something "you could get your hands on." He wanted proof for the establishment. His files are full of this. SITU takes its turn towards the paranormal only after he dies and John Keel briefly ascends and then Bob Warth takes over. One strong contributor then is Berthold Schwarz, who is all PSI and paranormality. But Ivan was not. And most folks in cryptozoology are not. And I wasn't either.

For me that era's past. Below are some "light-weight" opinions critter-by-critter:

A). Yeti: some "real" but paranormal folkloric-type entity encounters are true. No artifacts seem to be. No "hair" seems to ever check out. "The Shipton Print" is a great enigma --- why is it THE Shipton print? Where are all the other cases of prints such as this? We've certainly been crawling about looking for them? My only hope for a biological entity at this point is a relict Neanderthal population as suggested by Myra Shackley.

B). Bigfoot: I used to like the Patterson film --- no more. And nothing has replaced it. Grover Krantz' reconstruction of gigantopithecus is impressive, but unless one considers some relict population of it in Asia long ago as a source of cultural memories, I no longer see the relevance. The only thing that I have left is the set of prints which have dermoglyphs on the them--- seems pretty sophisticated and tough to fake. But even then, does that preclude paranormality? A lot of Bigfoot encounters take me to Native American ways of viewing them as spirit entities. And a recent acquaintance told me of his own encounter where the entity just vanished. He told me this detail as he struggled to maintain his belief that the thing was "only" an unknown [intelligent] ape.

C). Lake Monsters: Maybe I should be ashamed to admit it, but I'm at least halfway removed from Robert Rines and Henry Bauer by now and moving towards F.W.Holiday. The study of Nessie's cousins [a la Mhorag] is pushing me there. Really old 19th century reports describe something of a much more folkloric entity than biological. And that has been the grass-roots opinion, possibly since St. Columba and before.

D). Mokele m'bembe: I really liked the idea, and the geography [over millennia] and the isolation gave this a reasonable chance. Maybe it still has one. But there has been a lot of surveying there by now and all we have are the tiring normal claims of results far beyond their substance. Dr. Challenger, where are you?

E). Sea Monsters: some of these reports seem to have merit, but none of the meat and bones ones. When I did my research on the Wasgo/Sisiutl, there were a lot of bits converging impressively around a biological answer --- most favored hypothesis: a relict population of primitive [zeuglodont] whales. Maybe that's still an option.

Maybe if Ivan was still alive, he'd still have a shot at a few of these crypto-beasts as potential zoo animals but maybe there are none.

My opinion, again however unworthy, is that a few crypto-possibilities might exist under one or more of the following situations:

A). Relict populations of "extinct" creatures: Zeuglodonts or similar, Neanderthals or [very] similar, and not much else. The SET desert canid or hyenid of Egypt might well have been a real violent animal, even driven to extinction in ancient times, just as we did to the mammoths and mastodons in North America.

B). Out-of-place animals --- frankly this would have to be a VERY spectacular thing to even rise to the level of much interest to me in this age of wealth and bizarre human "ownership behavior."

C). A really big squid ... or octopus ... or snake. The oceans and jungles are still "big" enough for that.

I've given these crypto-beasts a reasonable shot over many years. Even though I didn't [apparently] "find" them biologically, it was worth the trip. I think that I found their Middle Kingdom "shadows" instead, and that seems to me to be a better find.

Peace friends.