Cryptids are [REDACTED]

they don't want you to know? Who's they I don't actually know? Discover this and more as we answer the agel question, what slimy, terrible creature maybe lurking right under your feet? So why do we love cryptids? Cryptids are animals that people believe exists based on anecdotal evidence, rumors, myths, folk tales, and conspiracy theories. There are cryptid sidings all over the world, in almost every culture. Why are they

so compelling? I think the idea of secretive animals who elude our attend to document them is a massively appealing one. It's the ultimate freedom to live in isolation, nimbly evading the watchful eyes of human society only being caught in the blurry photos of conveniently terrible photographers. Maybe it's wish

fulfillment fantasy. We live in a hyper surveilled world, either in tight knit communities who know everything about you, or vast metropolis is with the details of your existence on file. Cryptids are an escape from society monsters who are more revealing of our own psychological quirks. Well, at least that's the story the man would have you believe. What if

I told you there are some real life cryptids. Today we'll be looking at the facts behind the cryptids, what it would mean if they actually existed, and the real animals that are just as crazy as the cryptids themselves. Joining me today to discuss this is Tess Lynch from

Night Call podcast. Katie, How are you great? I'm so excited to have you because I know you guys love to talk about conspiracy theories, and it's just it's like all those late night conversations that you have with your friends when you know you're you're winding down from the day and then you're just your mind goes to incredibly creative places. It's really fun and I actually I was so excited that we're going to talk about cryptids because

we've talked about cryptids on the podcast before. But also we're all Steely Dan fans, and of course the squawk is memorialized by Steely Dan. Uh the squawk, that cryptid, the squawk that cries oh my God. So my my dad's a big Steely Dan fans. Dan fans, Dan fan, Dad Dad Dan fan. But I actually am not familiar with this the squawk, the Squawk. There is a book, UM that I feel like I talked about a lot and everyone's always like, okay, test, But it's called um

Fearsome Creatures of the North lumber Woods. I think it has like a kind of clunky title, pretty specific it is. Yeah, it's been out of print for a while, but UM, they have these like kind of crude doodles. It's very old book of UM all of these like different regional cryptids, and the Wendigo is probably like the most well known UM but than the squawk is it's like it's it's just a creature that's like a depressed cryptid and it

wanders around weeping. Yeah, and so there's a stee leading song called any Major Dude, We'll tell you, and it's like have you seen a squawks? Tears? That makes me sad? Um. So, first we're going to talk about another cryptod that I think is kind of sympathetic, you know, like there's I think that's what's so cool about a lot of these cryptids. I mean, some of them are supposedly evil, but a lot of them are just like they're kind of sympathetic in a way, like you kind of want to get

to know them, you know, like big Foot. Um. But first we're going to talk about Mothman. Oh, moth Man, yes, um. So, just for those of you who may not know, mothman is a cryptid originating from West Virginia. Uh. It started in nineteen sixty six when several grave diggers spotted a brown winged creature uh too big to be any kind of bird. Uh. And later a couple driving at night saw a huge creature with glowing red eyes, no neck,

and wings folded against its back. Uh. The Point Pleasant Register, one of the local papers, reported, quote a couple sees man sized bird creature something uh. And then ever since then there have been sightings throughout the years. Uh. Some people believe that the mothman uh pops up right before and oncoming tragedy or catastrophe. Um. And so it's it's such an interest. It's I really love this one. It's

so creative, it's very there's something kind of eerie. It's like, not because the Mothman doesn't necessarily hurt anyone, but it's just spooky. It's just warning you a bad omen. Yeah. Um, I had never heard about the Mothman until obviously the Mothman prophecies, and I was like, I'm not sure how much of this, probably zero is based on the actual legend, but um, yeah, I had no idea that it was

like a human sized necklace thing. Um. But I mean you kind of wonder if there's like you know, kind of like with near death experiences and things like that, there are tend to be like similar threads. So it makes I mean, if you just see like a kind of lumpy specter like before something terrible happens, it could be like an adrenaline response. But the red eyes are always a nice touch. Love acryptedd with the red glowing eyes. Red glowing eyes. Um. I actually get occasional sleep paralysis,

and it's not really the hallucinating type. It's more of the menacing presence where something is sitting something evil is sitting on my chest. Um. So I feel like it's dictated by the kind of culture I consume. So if I am, I listen to a lot of like murder podcasts and stuff. So when I listen to those and I get sleep proalysis' is like, Oh, it's a murderer

sitting on my chest. Like, but what's weird is I don't I think the part of my brain that's responsible for scaring me is also a sleep whatever specific disorder is going on. So like I'm like not afraid, but I'm completely convinced, like I'm going to get killed by a serial killer. But I'm like, I'm I'm disappointed, but

I'm not scared. Well, man, Jesus suck. So I feel like if I got sleep paralysis and I really absorbed the mothman prophecies, I might see a moth man and and be like, geez, come on, man, why do you think that is? Do you think it's just because you're so relaxed that you can't have that normal kind of like yeah, I think so, like with a with sleep paralysis, your brain is normally when it comes out of r

e M. Rabid eye movement. Sleep, there's sort of a process um of like the different parts of the brain kind of essentially turning back on um. But like if your sleep is disturbed and like say you're so the ponds in your brain will stop sending signals to your spinal cord um, so you that's why you're paralyzed. And but if other parts of your brain, like parts of the prefrontal cortex wake up or the occipital lobe, and that's for people who get the visual hallucinations that'll start

to give you'll start to process the real world. But then it connects with like your amygdala isn't fully operating at a hunder percent and it's not um communicating well with the prefrontal cortex. So I think in my case, for whatever reason, like the amygdala isn't is not communicating well. And then it's like so that fear response is just

not there. It's like it's like I have It's like when you see someone in your dream and you don't have the emotional connection to them and it's really bizarre. So it's like that it's like I'm I'm an emotionally distant from this feeling of doom and it's it's very weird. That's fascinating. Maybe that's a good thing. I mean, it's good for you. I know some people with sleeper elsis

it's extremely terrifying. I'm pretty lucky. Um. So I'm in terms of moth man, uh what I think if like I'm trying to think of a real like say this is real, right, like what to moth man moth human hybrid be like? Um. One thing I think that people that makes it really goofy is that it would be covered in these big flaky scales, just like because moms, you know how moths are dusty. Those are little microscopic

scales that play a role in coloration. And it's also thought they might be um uh sort of thermal regulations, so like insulating them and keeping or absorbing sunlight so they don't overheat or get too cold. Um. And so if it's like a proportionally sized uh you know, moth wing, and then there's just like all this like flaky scales, like every time the moth like flies away, like this dust kind of the need to exfoliate, right, some some get some perp. Plus what's the anti damia? Um, do

they have Do you know if moth man has antenna's antenna? Yeah, so, um, moths do have antenna and they actually, um, they're very sensitive in that they can detect pheromones. Um. So they are highly attuned to using their those little feathery antenna to pick up on the sense of females. And so it's kind of like, uh, that's another spooky thing. Maybe that's why if same mothman was real, that's why he could like detect an actually could like smell danger. You

can pick up the fear. So fascinating. I'm super into moss. I've I've been a big moth fan for a long time, with the exception of the ones that go into your cabinet. Oh, I hate that. The food. Yeah, I'm there. I'm at the same thing. The big the bigger the moth, the better. It's those tiny ones that are like almost flat, where it's like they go into your cabinets and eat your food and get on your clothes. I don't like those because those are those are pests. But every other moth

I grew up. I live for a while in Connecticut, and they had I think they're lunar moths. But the giant. Yeah, yeah, they're beautiful. I was walking in a nature reserve in San Diego and am I think it's called a It's called a sphinx moth. And they're these huge moths that actually get confused with hummingbirds sometimes because they um they're so big, uh, and they drink nectar like hummingbirds, and their their wing their wing beat can be mistaken for

like a hummingbirds hovering. Uh. And it like landed on me and refused to let go. Like I was having trouble prying it off, and I didn't want to hurt it, so I just like lit it sit on me, and then it like it just like stayed on me. And then eventually like I kind of got it off with like a leaf and put it in a little box. Uh, and then it just like it died the next day. So I think it was I think it was like on its deathbed and it was just it saw me.

Is it like this child with brightly colored clothes, and like it was like, yeah, I'll sit on this human. You listen closely. It might have been willing you. It's a state. Missed it I leave to you leave an assorted poop. So there's a couple of compelling theories about like what the real animal is behind the mothman siding. So theory one is the sandhill crane. Um. So arguments for it is that these are big birds. So uh, they're grayish brown, so that brown color matches the description.

They way up to fifteen pounds and they are a little over four ft in height, and they have a seven foot wingspan, so it's reasonably large for a bird. You're not like, if you're not used to these animals, that would seem too large to be a bird. They also have red foreheads and orange eyes. Um. Here's a picture of one looking particularly I'm convinced. Um. They also look kind of mad. Yeah, they do. They look angry. Um,

and that's just because their foreheads are fluffy. Um. Their migration path takes them from Canada to Florida, and they pass through Kentucky. Um. But they don't they don't go through West Virginia, but they're close enough that um. In nineteen sixty six, a wildlife biologist was saying, oh, this is probably a sand hill crane that was like veering

off course. So the residents weren't used to these birds, so they were attributing the mothman to this unfamiliar bird that was bigger than any bird that's like local to

the area. Um, here's the problem, and this is the problem that a lot of conspiracy theorists point to as is that sant hill cranes they got big next and moth man you don't got no. Um And uh, that picture I showed you, The reason that looks like the moth man is because that his head is actually turned so like when they're sleeping or resting, they pulled their necks back and they like kind of rested against their body.

So it could be that. But if the signing was like an agitated bird, I would imagine it wouldn't keep its neck like that. So so aren't cranes. I'm totally pulling this out of the here. I know nothing about cranes, but I would assume they wouldn't like a pro people. I mean, yeah, I'm not sure, like it's I don't think generally speaking, they would be aggressive. Um, Like, if this one's off course on it's migration, it's already stressed out.

Maybe it was like aggressively flapping at some people. But then if it's being aggressive, I would imagine it's neck wouldn't be at rest, but it's possible, like say, it's like kind of just chilling out and these guys see it and it's really spooky and they and then it kind of stretches its wings out and they perceive that

as being like, you know, aggressive UM. Or like in the case of the couple who there was like a couple who said that it followed them in their car, maybe it was super lost and it was like going to Florida. Where are you guys hitting Florida? UM. So theory number two is that it is an owl, which sounds dumb because it's like, of course, you know an owl is now. But here's some um reasons it could be. One is that it's local to the area. UM. And there's a species of owl uh called the barred owl

that is in the specific region that these sightings happened. UM. And their eyes actually, so different owls will have different eyeshine, so UM Barn owls, which were another candidate, they don't typically have red eyeshine. So eyeshine is when at night, like light reflects off the eye and you can actually see like the retina and the blood vessels and that's why, like in photos you have red eye. Um. It's like when cats and other nocturnal animals, like you see those

kind of glowing eyes. UM. For the barn owl, their eyes don't shine red. So people are like, oh, it can't be an now, but the barred owl this isn't It sounds similar, but it's barred like the A R. R. E. D like an owl that not like Shakespeare owl right exactly. Um. And their eyes do glow red at night because of the red eyeshine because they have these deep eyes with um blood a lot of blood vessels that will refract

that light back um. And the initial descriptions of the mothman were very owl like, with the wings that were folded on the back, the head that blended into the rest of the body as you know owls kind of they don't really have a neck. They do, but you can't see it. Don't feel bad, don't shame the owl. I'm not neck shaming them. It's fine if they don't have neck. Um. But you it doesn't seem like you would mistake an awl for a monster though. But have

you ever seen an owl without feathers? No owls when they don't have feathers are shocking looking. Oh no oh no, this is going to ruin owls forever. Um, oh no ah, what happened to those owls? So those are they're fine there, um, but these are probably young owls that are growing their feathers. Um. And they're probably a little scared, so that's why they're stay ending so tall. But they this this uh viral

video went online because people thought they were aliens. They look like aliens, but also you could totally see they look kind of like moths. Yeah, they look humanoid right. Um. So it's like these these fledgling owls who don't have that many feathers. They look they're fluffy or than in one way there, like their their feathers are more downy, kind of like whispy. Um. But they're not fully filled out with the feathers. So you can see their legs

are really long. Um. That's another surprising thing about owls. They have mega legs, legs for days. Here's a picture of uh it's an artistic rendering of an owl without feathers. Um. Wow, that is so wild. Yeah, they look like aliens, right, yeah, like very old men. Right. And here's a really funny one of someone showing how how tall their legs are. It's just a person lifting the owl up and so you can see how how tall their Yeah, yeah, it's like do those legs go all the way up? And

that I was like, why yas indeed they do? Why put me on the right show you? Um, if you think about it, that makes sense because raptors often have big beefy legs because they have those huge talents and they need that muscle power for grasping prey um. And so uh, it's just I think surprising to people because owls are so fluffy their feathers cover all that leg It gives them like a totally different body shape, right exactly,

So how big is the bar at owl? It's not that big, but I feel like if you it's I mean, it's big in terms of a bird. Um owls are. I think it's like about it's like a couple of feet uh tall. I think if that makes sense um uh and it's uh, but I think it's There is a study that showed when people are like driving along the road at night, they have really poor or perception of the size of things. So if you're scared also, you'll perceive something as being bigger than it really is. UM.

And they have a pretty good wingspan. UM. So if you can imagine like say bart ol either a young bard owl who hadn't fully uh you know, fledged, or like a one with like some hair loss or not hair loss, has some owl pattern baldness, UM, just kind of like being agitated and and and they their hoots

are also very like deep and somewhat foreboding. So I could definitely see that as being you know, you see this leggy creature with wings and no neck and glowing red eyes and it's hooting maliciously at you, and you're like, yeah, that's a that's a that's a demon. Yeah, something bad did just happen. It's not even telling me it's already happened. That when an owl happens to you, that's bad enough. Now. I love that they can take it. We can, we can.

Rewls have a thick, a thick, feathery husk and under that a bunch of leg Is mothman just a mirror into the psychology of humanity? Maybe? David Gallo, of Psychology professor at the University of Chicago believes that mothman sidings may be part of a sort of group culturally dictated cognition. He explains that certain cultural ideas can influence how your brain interprets stimuli. So maybe after the first Mothman siding, every owl bird or blurry camera artifact became a mothman.

I think there's something pretty spooky about how we can almost create mass hallucinations just through the force of storytelling in a way that makes mothman reel, an operation of collective imagination. When we return, we'll talk about more cryptids, starting with an infamous blood sucker. So why do we fear the blood s After all, vampires exist in almost every culture and over many centuries of folklore. One theory

is that they're a manifestation of social upheaval. Vampire folklore seems to thrive in places where lower classes were persecuted. Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania, English professor and author of quote Our Vampires Ourselves says vampire fears arise during times of strife, such as in Eastern Europe when peasants were persecuted, or perhaps in nine when farmers found that their precious livestock had been massacred. So l Chupacabra literally translates to uh,

the goat sucker. I'm pretty sure, um So it's it's actually more recent than I had thought, Like I'm sure iterations of it existed before, but yeah, um, but it really hits sort of popular culture in um. So. It's a cryptod who is said to live on the American continent in Mexico of southwestern US uh and in Puerto

Rico and in Central and South America. So the first reported attack occurred in Puerto Rico where eight sheep were discovered with their blood sucked dry and puncture wounds in their chest and so the distress farmers, which for a farmer, when your livestock is killed, it's like if like one sheep is killed by a wild animal, like that sucks. But if like eight sheep are all killed and they just drained of their blood and then just left there

and left there, it's that's super upsetting. Um and so uh. The sightings of the chupa cabra typically describe a leathery gray beast with spines on its back and it kind of looks like a cross between like uh in descriptions like a kangaroo, a lizard, and a hairless dog. Um. Yeah, a lot of pictures of like chupa cabras online, uh tenda, there's actually ones that are of they're called Jolos. I think it's it's got a longer name. It's like Jolo's,

Jolo's we'll call them jolo jolos. Yeah. They're Mexican hairless dogs and they're born without hair, perfectly healthy when they don't have hair. Um, but they I think they're pretty cool looking dogs. They kind of look like a nubiss. I think they may even be called the nubass dogs, but they're they're really neat. But like, uh, we're not used to seeing a hairless dog, so sometimes people show a dog like them be like that's a cheap of cobra. It's no, it's just a normal dog. But he baled um,

he bald. But also the Mexican hairless dog. Like the first association I have is the scary stories to tell in the dark story where the couple goes to Mexico and they're like and everyone's like, look, you found a hairless dog. It's so cute. And then they come back to the u S and they're like, no, that's a rat. Babies. I was like that does not really that you don't resemble each other at all, but it's struggling like like all, so it's not it's like just anatomically a rat because

I've seen I've seen naked rats. Yeah, bald rats. They just look like bald rats. Yeah, they do not look like, Yeah, you're really roasting scary stories to tell unextraptable because that story also, I was like, that's it's not like scary so much as it just sucks. But they're just very dumb and this yeah exactly, they're really dumb and then they're just like, right, I guess like we don't have

a dog. We thought we had the story of like Yuppi disappointment, So I think that's that's also like a little bit of this stuff of like things in Mexico

are scary exactly. You never know what's going on, like that weird yellow filter they put on film when it's like like yeah, when you go to Mexico, like it's it's all yellow filter and yeah that like weird like like like wiggly distortion, yeah, yeah, like like when the ground is hot and it makes the air kind of distroyed around like otherwise, how would you know, how would you know that you were in Mexico and they made

it a complete different universe exactly. Um so. Um the I was wondering, how like there could be a real chuopicabra, so like a demonic goat sucking creature that manages to puck the blood out of sheep without them noticing. Um so, uh, maybe it could be like a leech or a vampire bat that's like a hybrid with a dog or something. So it's got the stealth and intelligence of a dog and then the blood sucking abilities of a leech or

a vampire bout. Now, leeches and vampire bouts both have anticoagulant in their saliva that makes it easier for them to suck up blood. But one thing I found, and I had actually believed this myth before researching this, that that their saliva contains an anesthetic. That's actually not true. Um so we there is no evidence of there being an anesthetic in their saliva. Um there's a morphine like

substance in their neural tissue. Um So, it's confusing because there's still a possibility that maybe there's somehow secreting this in their bike, but there's no evidence that it's actually in their saliva or in their um. They're sort of a mouth secretions that would make uh, would numb people too.

And I read some uh, some biologists heart like saying like it's a total myth that it doesn't hurt, because it can hurt when I when I wonder, I was always wondering about what it felt like to get a leech, because growing up, like you know, I would go swimming in shady the shady lake where it's like who knows

what's in there? Um, and some like some of my family members would be like, look out for leeches, and some of them had had leeches, but it was none of them could really remember because I just remembered being creeped out finding the leech, but they couldn't really remember like a sensation. And I always wondered if it was if there was something that made it not hurt, or like you know, able to be able to ignore the sensation, or if it was just the suction was so you know,

pinpointed basically that that can um. I think that's yeah. I think it's the latter. I think since their teeth are so tiny and needle like um and you probably get it while you're swimming, so you're in cool water perhaps and like you're you're maybe not noticing all of those body sensations as much. Um, so that would be that I suspect that would be the case. Like that. It's kind of like you wouldn't necessarily notice someone like

poking you with a syringe underwater and cold water. Um. But yeah, they but the the anticoagulant is very real and that that's a that makes it easier too. So it's not like they're actively like sucking like a vacuat. They're just kind of allowing the blood flow to come into your mouth, right. And vampire bats also have teeny tiny needle like tea, which you know, cow, it's probably

like the cows like whoa, what was that? But it doesn't necessarily disturb the cow because they're not like they're not like sucking on it there gently laughing at the at the web. Yeah there. And but here's the thing. This is why the chupacabra, even if we invent this like dog vampire bat leech hybrid, it's still wouldn't really work as an animal because most vampire animals, Uh, first

of all, they don't necessarily kill their host. Otherwise, if they're capable of that, why wouldn't they just eat the rest of the host. Um. Also, they tend to be small, like a vampire bat a little little tiny cutie. Uh and leech is a little tiny not not as cute, but quite tiny. Mosquitoes super tiny. These are all the animals a lot. I mean there are more than that, but most of the animals that tend to suck blood are small. Uh. And that's because something the size of

a dog couldn't subsist on blood alone. Um. Their body mouths would be too great. They would need things like ty tissues. Um. So the real animal behind the myth of the chupacabra is probably wait for it, mangie dogs and coyotes I know. Um So, Bio'll just think that the reports of chupacabras are likely stray dogs in Puerto Rico, where they do have a lot of stray dogs. And um, when the dogs are malnourished, uh, they tend to get mange. So because they're um they're less capable of fighting off

these uh so manges caused by parasitic mites. Um. So, when you have a healthy dog, there there's body their immune system, their body is able to kind of fight off these parasites, but if they're malne nourished, it's harder, and then they tend to get mange um. And that explains the appearance of the chupacabra pretty amplete, because that that gray leathery skin is probably mangie skin because there's

probably a lot of scams. It's hairless um. And it would also explain the spikes along the back because if they're ma this is really sad, but if they're malnourished, their vertebrae are probably sticking out, so those look like spines um, and their faces probably look more angular and reptilian um. And it would also explain why they potentially attack livestock, because if they're too weak to hunt down regular prey, they probably go where they typically are too

afraid to go. But they're so hungry they're like going after livestock um, and they may not even know what to do with it at that point. They probably get easily spooked if the rest of the livestock starts to um make a fuss, then they might run off without even eating it. So that coyotes and dogs are known to do that where they'll bite something, um attack it, maybe with the intention of eating it, but then if they get spooked, they'll run off before they make this calculation.

And I would imagine that a malnourished dogg or coyote is worse at making that calculation. They don't know what necessarily to do it. Once they've uh, you know, killed a sheep, like they're like okay, and then like there's a bunch of sheep around that are maybe jostling and angry, and then they get scared. Um, and then that whole blood draining thing is actually potentially not true. So um, it's not that it's that a lie like they're making

it up. It's that it's a misconception. So veterinarians reviewed these lives. They actually found that they did have blood in them. It wasn't that they had been drained dry blood. It's that what happens is that when a any living animal dies that has blood in it, it's a process called lividity where the blood pools at the bottom. So it's like if you cut it, like say you're doing like an autopsy on a dead sheep that's been dead

for a while, it won't bleed. So a farmer who's used to slaughtering an animal that's you know, either alive or like maybe freshly dead or something. They would be used to blood flow when you like cut through the animals. So if it doesn't that, they would very reasonably assumed that had been drained of blood. Um and So I

think that's probably the most likely explanation. But if there were eight of the sheep killed, would that be like a pack of could have been Yeah, it could be although you know it's so it's something where you know, it could be a dog just like going crazy biting things, or a coyote. Um and Uh, it could be a pack of them, although I would assume if it was

a pack, they would successfully take one down. But they could have gotten spooked, Like they could have gotten spooked and run off, and then subsequent sightings of it, because I think the initial encounter, like they didn't necessarily see what happened. They just saw these dead sheep. So that could have been like a pack that like came in, tried to kill them and then got spooked and ran off. Um And or they were this is more morbid, but maybe they were just having fun and killing funny coyote

gays um, but yeah, I think it's UM. And then like maybe people like I was talking about these sort of cultural memes that happened where then you interpret things that you see as fitting in with um other people's um sort of rumors and stuff. So it's like you you hear about this like thing blood sucking creature, then you see like a mange coyote, and you're like, hey, maybe that's right, especially one that's like in the area

where another animal got killed. Because this chiopucabra, it's been in multiple areas, right Puerto Rico in Mexico, uh, the southwestern America and like Central and South America. So it's like these multiple sightings unlikely a new breed of animal that like, you know, that looks like a reptile with spines on its back. I think that's a really good hypothesis.

I mean, especially because here in l A, like you know, in the past couple of years, I think, especially during the when the drought was really really bad, you would see coyotes that were clearly like hardier than the coyotes you'd normally see, like coyotes where you would assume they'd hunt far away from people, but that they're being driven kind of closer to people just based on lack of cutter like resources, and some of them looked really rough,

you know. Well, so my parents house in San Diego kind of neighbors an area of chaparral. We would get a lot of coyotes. We even got a mountain lion

in our backyard once. And are my parents backyard is pretty friendly to these animals because it's like there's like a little wood fence, but there's the whole yard has a lot of trees and bushes and stuff, so it's like all you know, very similar to kind of their their native stuff on the other side of the fence, and so it's, uh, they would love to come in.

We had like kyoty puppies that came in. But like so a lot of times, like at night, you know, I'd hear coyotes and they sound like when they're in a pack, they have this weird they almost sound like demonic children laughing. Yeah, they have like it's almost sounds like a baby crying or something. It's like yeah, and it's super creepy. And I feel like there's something inherently

creepy about coyotes. I mean they're they're really cute too, like the little puppies are are adorable, but they're yeah, they're they're they're kind of menacing that their whole pack structure where they kind of try to like they'll they'll go in and sneakily kill your chickens or kill your livestock or even your pets, and that's creepy, and especially

the pack. I think the pack. My parents were out here and they were walking their dog in Griffith Park at night and like my dad saw a coyote and then heard behind him like a wrestling and he was being surrounded by the Yeah, and that was super But even though, yeah, I mean I love them, and like you know, it's clearly you can be creeped out by something but still love it exactly. Do you have sing

bevore a phobia that's a fear of vampires. And if you have a fear of these blood sucking demons, maybe you also have hemophobia, a fear of blood or blood injection injury phobia, which covers the fear of blood injections or seeing a physical injury. These are extremely common phobias, which kind of makes sense. Losing blood is generally not good for us, nor is getting injured or poked with something, so these very normal reactions can spiral into a full

blown phobia. Often people with these phobias also experience vaso vagal syncope, meaning fainting. But fainting at the site of blood doesn't necessarily mean you're a frady cat. In fact, vaso vagal syncope may have deep evolutionary roots. Are animal ancestors also experience fear brady cardia, which means the slowing of the heart in response to stress. Brady Cardia can lead to fainting, both in animals and humans. This may be an evolutionary defensive mechanism when the heart is in peril,

either due to injury or stress. A paper by Alboni at All called Origin and Evolution of vaso vagel syncope says quote the slowing of heart rate induced by the vase of vagle reflex may constitute a beneficial break of cardiac pump, thereby reducing myocardial oxygen consumption. Basically, it's giving your heart a chance to rest. Unfortunately, this means the rest of you might take a very sudden and unexpected rest as well, resulting in well fainting, so grab your

fainting couch. When we return, we'll talk about some very real, very creepy cryptids. So cryptids all over the world have similar features, which maybe speaks to some deep instinctive human fears. Take, for instance, the fear of giant worms. There's the Minho cow, a Brazilian legendary giant worm, a man sized Mongolian death worm, the movie Tremor starring Kevin Bacon, and many other giant worms, and folklore around the world. Maybe we have an instinctive

fear of these slithery creatures. They're snakelike, they can be parasites, and they're associated with death and decay in the deep, deep underground. Well, good thing. These giant Crawley's slimy worms are just legen and oh I'm sorry, did you forget

which podcast you're listening to? Of course they're real. So the giant Gippsland earthworm, native to of course Australia, is a three foot long worm, and depending on how long it's stretched or how much it's contracted, it can be about the thickness of a medium to large sized rope. They live in deep burrows in Gippsland, Victoria. They actually have really long lifespans. They live for several years and

they only reach sexual maturity at five years. Typically, they're never seen on land, as they spend their whole lives deep deep in their muddy burrows. While on land they can't move too fast. Inside their special wormholes, they can slip and slide around pretty rapidly. In fact, they make a deep guttural gurgling sound like water draining from a bathtub as they scoot through their holes, which can terrify

people because you can hear it from the surface. O the worst thing I've ever heard, um, which it makes sense that people would be scared of that. Yeah, not like sort of deep in the earth kind of thing and like just sort of sliding around in this mudd um.

There's this famous um Japanese comic by I think it's Gngi Edo Um that where it's like about people who find there's like these holes in a cliff face that are people shaped, and then people like crawling the holes and then they just like get sucked in and it's it's super creepy. And I just imagine that noise, like the these a giant start and the and watching it was also unpleasant. I actually really like worms, but not this worm. I don't like it. This worm is pretty big.

It's a hefty, it's a it's a big boy thick worm. It's a thick so we we like to call them big old noodle boys. Yeah. Um. But so I want to talk about another very real cryptod um, but perhaps in a way you might not expect. So bigfoot or sasquatch is what maybe the most famous crypto in the world. Uh, It's found in North America. But North America is not

the only place with a big foot. So there's the Baramano of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan that locals describe as a humanoid apelike creature who abducts women to mate with. There's the bucket Tima monkey man, who is said to inhabit Singapore, which is a three to six foot tall small difference, but uh, depending on reports. Uh, it's an immortal bipedal hominid um. And actually by all just think sightings of this are the crab eating macaque. But when

I've seen like these maccaques, they're like clearly small monkeys. Yeah. Yeah, Um. There's the Mary coxy, which is a large ape like creature in South American jungles. Who Uh, these are more advanced versions of Bigfoot where they actually can use both and arrows, which I feel like it's not fair. No, I know, right, It's like Bigfoot to me has always been sort of a nice, like passive guy. But you can't get Bigfoot like an A K forty seven. No. No,

you can't arm Bigfoot. Don't arm big keep arms away from Bigfoot. We need legislation. Yeah. Um there's the Mogo lawn monster, which is a bipedal humanoid over seven ft tall who lives in Arizona who smells like dead fish or the musk of a snapping turtle with wild red eyes. Um. So, it's really interesting to me that so many cultures have a big foot. Um and I'm kind of just speculating on why. Uh. Some of my theories are that it's like we have a kind of Uncanny Valley fear of

apes because they're almost humans. They look so close to humans, but they're just not and so it's like we I think that, um So, the uncanny Valley is the description of that graph of your like comfort level when you look at like robots or humanoid c g I thing um, and as it gets more and more real, like your comfort level is like fine, maybe even goes up a little.

But then like as it gets super close to being realistic but not quite the your comfort and anxiety like like your comfort goes way down and dips into the un kelly valley, and then it goes back up as we get to like basically real human face. It seems like it's almost a defense against getting tricked. You know. It's interesting. Yeah, it's super interesting. I love I mean, I remember like when I first heard about the Uncanny Valley and I was like, this is like a place

I like to be. This is the crea I love looking at uh like weird animatronics. I really enjoy the Uncanny Valley too. It's fine, it's fun place to be because it also it's like it doesn't really makes sense why it feels so spooky. It's like going on a roller coaster, but it's happening inside your amygdala. Yeah. But also, like when you were talking about our complicated relationship to apes, I think it also has to do with how guilty we feel. I mean, I I took my kids to

the zoo. Um like last year, I think it was part of a field trip and we spent a long time like with the apes, and they were taking care of their children, and we were watching them from behind glass, and like when we saw the chimps, they were like coming up to the glass and interacting, and you just get this sense of how wrong this is, like how

closely like you feel like it could be swapped the patients. Um. And So sometimes I wonder about with Bigfoot, if it's like we're kind of projecting the of we want there to be like a secret society of big Feet, because it's almost like then maybe we haven't completely raised the entire planet, like maybe they're secret pockets of just untamed wilderness.

And I think that's super appealing. I think, yeah, that that makes a lot of sense to me, because I think with a lot of other animals, especially like less human looking animals, we can kind of like go like, okay, but they're just animals. But with apes, it's almost like looking into a mirror exactly. It's it's super that that idea of like, oh yeah, maybe maybe animals can feel things, right yeah uh um. I also think that we tint to anthropomorphized thing like on the other other end of

the scale where it's like so so um. When you see like faces in the clouds or like in tiles with like random patterns and stuff, it's called para idolia, and that's kind of a um your brain really wants to see that human face schema, and it's we develop it really early on, so like little babies start to develop the face scheme and they actually respond to like, say, you make like a face where you put the eyes in the mouth in the right place and you hold it up to a baby and they're like they can

wreck a nize that and then if you like, you know, you know, make it, make it kind of like more bizarre, like the proportions off. They don't. They don't like that didn't Uh no, thank you. I will not like to see the new Sonic movie. Um. But I almost wonder if like we experienced this like paidolia when we're looking at say like a bear in the distance, and sometimes bears can walk on their hind legs, um like they're capable of it. They don't, that's not their normal mode

of locomotion. But if you see a bear on its hind legs, like from a distance, I could see like you know, you kind of project like a human face onto it totally. It's like that's in human position. So like maybe that's uh because a lot of the I think a lot of these samples sent into labs and stuff of like this is bigfoot for and stuff tends to be like bears or dear too. Um here that's interesting. I think it's because like people will see like a

chunk of fur somewhere. It's like maybe the spook foot, but it's just dear um. But good news, there is a real world bigfoot, a scientifically verifiable bigfoot. It's called gigant Epithecus blackie um, which is extinct. Sorry um, So, Gigantopithecus is a species of prehistoric ape that lived from nine million years ago to maybe about a hundred thousand years ago. We're not sure. There's very limited fossil evidence. Um. All of the fossils we've found have been in South

China and Vietnam. But we have just enough fossils to know what about what they looked like. So they were nine ft tall and up to one thousand, three hundred pounds. What. Yeah, So we have their mandibles and jaws and based on the size of their their mandibles, which means we know what their skull sizes. We know how big they had to be to support such a big skull, and like also their closest living relatives orangutans, And we just use that anatomy to kind of build this animal up. And

it's enormous. That's like the weight of a horse. Yeah, it's for comparison, guerrilla's only way up to about four and thirty pounds. Um. So yeah, it's like the size of a bear. U. Yeah. Um. And uh, we know how big they were. We know that they were hominids, uh, and we know that some of their closest relatives are the oriantans, which they're actually uh they're like eight times the size of oraantans um. But we uh don't know

how they walked so uh. Most paleontologists and biologists assumed that they must have walked on all fours because with such a massive body, that's hard to imagine being able to support that weight. But the argument for them being bipedal is that the shape of the jawbone, which is like this U shape, would allow for the wind pipe to go traverse through the jaw so like and if you look at the anatomy of like say a gorilla

that is uh walks on all fours. Their skull is like forward, and then their spine kind of forms the slope, so there trachea and their wind pipe actually goes like not through the jaw, but like kind of behind it. Um. But for us, like if you feel you're you're tricky, it's like right, it's it's right through that um, that little U shape of your jaw bone, and that allows our heads to sit erect on our spines. UM. So there's that argument that like, well, maybe because their jaws

are kind of U shaped. Um. Of course we have very little falsil evidence. So um. I my personal feeling, as much as I want them to be bipedal, I feel like they probably at most would kind of walk slumped over with like kind of maybe one uh foot on the ground, maybe like three legs, maybe four legs sometimes maybe sometimes bipedal, Like maybe that that jaw design in their skull design allowed them to stand up for longer periods of time. It's just such a massive animal.

I can't imagine it being able to just stroll around like do what, well, what did it eat? Do we know what we actually have? A pretty good idea of what it ate based on fossil records of um, sort of the like um plant leavings in the teeth and like the scraping marks. So UM. It's thought that they ate bamboo seeds and fruit. So you know, hippies, um, which I think is great because they're so huge that

they probably had no natural predators. But they were just like these these hippies hanging out, vegans hanging out eating bamboo seeds and fruit. Now, they could have eaten more of an omnivorous diet and we wouldn't know because we don't have the fossil records of right, um, but we do know they at least date bamboo. UM. I love

these guys. How I never heard of this. I think it's I think it's just um because there's not there's not a full skeleton of them, so it's like it maybe it's like, oh, a fragment of a job bone, Why is that interesting? Um? But when you really build it up from that, it's like, this is an amazing animal. The reason it probably went extinct is wait for it,

climate change whoops. Um. So the climate change was turning its forests into savannah and since it was so large, it couldn't really adapt to the more meager food offerings, so smaller primates were able to go Okay, like our normal fruits and stuff are gone, but hey we can still do this other stuff. Um. But like with such a big animal, it's sort of like how um pandas um if you take away their bamboo, they can't survive as a species. Um. And which is interesting because like

the Gigantipithecus also ate bamboo. Um. And uh it's to me kind of um it's very prescient. I mean, like last week we talked about the Amazon rainforest and climate change and like, you know, sure we're not the size of the gig Antipithecus, but our society really is. We are a huge, huge society with so many people, and we have such a high need for food and land and we're the vampires now that I don't know if we could adapt to a planet that gets downgraded to

uh not not necessarily being as human friendly. Um. So you know, but uh, you know, maybe in like a few million years, like the next smaller iteration of humans will look at our uh skulls and be like, I wonder if they walked on like two feet or feet, you know, like they were all vegans clearly like they should have been. They were very against something called straws. Straws. Yeah. Um, but that's that's an incredible story to me. It's like, hey, guys,

big Foot was real. I mean, they're dead, but it was real. But once upon a time. I wonder like how that kind of came into play and like influencing Bigfoot the legend, I think it helps propagated. I don't think it starts it, but I think when people hear about this, they're like, Okay, an animal like this is so it's not impossible. It's not impossible, which I mean

there's a certain logic to that. I just personally think that, well, when we do find species that we think have been extinct but actually aren't, it's usually in places that are really hard to explore. So there was a tree kangaroo found I think in Indonesia in an area that was extremely remote, very difficult to explore, and that that was a case of a pretty large animal that we thought had gone. It's not like huge tree kangaroos, about the

size of a medium to large sized dog. Um, but like it's uh, you know, it's a fairly meaty animals. Unlike like when a really small animal we think goes extinct and then it's like, oh, but we found this insect over here, like that kind of makes more sense. But with a tree kinger, it's like, oh, that's really exciting. Um it's a specific species of tree care at all, we knew like other tree cares are still around, but um,

but it's still really exciting. But in that case, it's like they're either really deep in the sea like Sela camps. Where are these deep sea fish that are kind of this like evolutionary throwback, um, that are like millions of years old in like they look it they there. Yeah, I'm sorry to say, but they don't look great. They need a little lift, right, But you know they're deep, deep in the sea. So that's why we didn't realize

they're still around. So like the idea that like some extinct gigantic Epithecus is just chilling out in the Appalachia, I don't know. I want to I want to believe, I really, I'd be so pumped if it right, I would be so psyched. But the sheer size is like exciting. Maybe we could scrape off some of that DNA from the jaw clone. It gratically. Um. So before we go, you said there was a news item and oh, yes, okay.

So my friend Dan Hernandez, who has guessed it on night call before with all of his crypto knowledge, his dad was like a cryptologist. I was like, damn. I thought my dad was cool, but this this is a very cool dad. Um. But he just sent us this link to I think I'm gonna actually find out what the website is called. It's like it's a crypto zoology,

crypto mondo, very in festive crypto mondo. But it was this article about a cryptod called the Awful Uh and it was described as looking like a griffin kind of with a long serpent's tail, wings that were I think ten ft each um and it would grab prey and its talents. So people reported that someone had seen it and they thought it was holding like a baby's crying baby in a talent. But then later they were like, maybe it was just a ship a doll. Yeah, maybe

one of the baby alive love. But I think it was first discovered in n and H. P. Lovecraft was in Vermont, I think, visiting friends and he heard people talking about this thing, and he said that from the way that they talked about it and their responses to it, he kind of believed it was real. And I think it was. One guy saw this thing, had a heart attack on the spot, had to be carried home and I in fashion and they're like and then he was carried home and like, where was the setting woods Woods

of Vermont? I see interesting? Um. But then this this article that was on Crypto Mondo cited a newspaper article from two thousand six where a reader had written in I guess and said, I I saw this. Everyone will think I'm crazy, so I want to be anonymous. But I've seen one and I think they're real. Like I'm usually a pretty skeptical person, but I believe this thing is real. And it's called the awful. Um. I mean, there were real animals that existed that were like this,

the parosaurs. Um. The that's so that's like pterodactyl Um, that's like the cat cats actalists. That's the giant one that's like the size of a giraft that was thought to be able to fly. Um so um. But I wonder if like these sightings, I don't know, this is just throwing it out there. And of course I'm not sure exactly where these sightings are if this makes sense, but if it's like some kind of hawk that has

caught a snake, because like and that would prey. Yeah, so predatory birds do prey on snakes and sometimes they actually wrestle and the sky um. And so it's like, I wonder if someone could see that and be like, that's a that's a big flying animal, and that would mess with you for a long time because it's it is like a strange thing to see, like the actual

act flock wrestling with a snake. And if you're not expecting that, if you don't know about like hawks preying on snakes, and you see that, it's got like and then you have this kind of cultural on understanding of like a griffin or like a monster. It's like that image will be interpreted by your brain as being like

a griffin. Mom, Yeah, that's actually a really good call because I I initially thought a turkey vulture because I know that they kind of kick around up there and they're huge, like especially I think maybe just the way that they fly it looks it's very like dramatic working and they look big, but yeah, that they doesn't explain the tail well, but they could be it could be a turkey vulture holding like a dead lizard that yeah, and especially if it were like a lot but I

guess like a lizard in Vermont, Like what kind of lizards happen. I mean, they do have snakes, right, snakes? Yeah, And and honestly, I think maybe like the giant Eastern salamander. Those are huge and like strange looking. Do you think a turkey vulture could pick one of those up? I think. I mean I've seen some really big turkey vultures I looked on because I that was like my first thought

was that it must be a turkey vulture. And then but I mean, just like you said, when you see an animal that it kind of like startles you in your mind, it's just automatically make it bigger than it is. So in my mind, I was like turkey vultures. And I mean, this has happened to me. So like when I was I was out walking my dog once and I saw this thing with glowing, bright yellow eyes and it was standing like a humanoid and it was like this furry thing that looked it was like I was

just like my brain was like monster. Uh. And it didn't help that my dog was like growling at it because I was like, oh my god, it is a mom this is not It's like, oh my god, monsters are real. There was that moment where it was like, holy crap, like demons and monsters are real, because here's one like standing in front of me on its hind legs and then it like uh and it was like kind of making a weird noise like and it was

like really freaking me out. And then it like it was it was it looked huge to me and it got on its all fours. This is skunk. No, you're kidding. Yeah, it was just a skunk that was like on its hind legs for some reason, probably doably, you know, trying to scope me out because it's like who is this? Who is this person in her very angry, little tiny dart. And the reason it looks so big, First of all, skunks can appear quite big because they're very fluffy and

they can kind of puff up. Yeah, they puff up. And it was on an incline, so in my brain I shortened the distance between us because it was so scary. So it looked like I thought it was human sized, and then I realized, no, it's a skunk, and it's normal skunk size. But it really like if I hadn't gotten that verification that it was a skunk when it like flopped down on its fours and I saw that little white stripe. I mean, it's like been like, yeah, I saw I saw a big foot. Yeah, total sasquata.

And then like especially at night, and everything's creepy and every like when your clothes piled in the corner of your room at night look like some kind of evil demon like with giant teeth and it's like a shirt that's folded weird. Ye. Yeah, not that that's ever happened

to me, of course, I'm not messy have um. Yeah, it's I think I think you kind of like hit the nail on the head when you talk about how we're so surveiled and like we're there's nowhere to hide, you know, and and also like so much knowledge is available to us and we have some little privacy that I think there is something of wanting to believe in animals that are so elusive and you know, kind of leading the existence that we used to have more access

to I mean, one thing I think that should reassure people is there are so many species of animals that we have not discovered that exists deep under the water and and I mean even in in forests and in rainforests, especially because of the huge amount of biodiversity um. And I think it's that mega fauna, which are like something like a big foot, it's like a or like a big cat that's like a cougar or something, or the mammoths. Those are harder to really. Like you, we we've sort

of run out of megafauna to discover. And I think that those big, magnificent animals that oft too often go extinct, you know, that's that's sad. And I think we want we want there to be secret, like these big secret animals like locknut monster in the big Foot, and I want that too. I just skeptical. Now we just have to clone them. We do have to clone them. Let's clone a gigant Epithecus and then we got a big foot and he's going to be super chill. Yeah what

if he's like what if he's like super annoying. He's always like bogarding all the he does sound like a frat guy, like maybe people are just seeing like really confused stone fract. Guys, that's a big foot. Yes, yeah, that's that's very insino man. Right, yeah, exactly. Well, so you've got anything to plug you want to tell people a little bit about the podcast and where. Yeah, so we're our podcast Nightcall. It's me and my friends Molly Lambert and Emily Oshida. We do the podcast once a week.

We took a little bit of a hiatus because we were moving networks over to I Heeart Media and we're so excited to be doing it here. So, um, yeah, look out for a night Call. We talk about all things related to late night thoughts, so conspiracies, weird animals, outer space, psychic stuff, advice. Um. Also, if you want to call with a question or late night thought, you can give us a call at to four oh four six night because we take calls. Uh leave a voicemail

and me answer them on the air. I might just call you guys please do I love it. It's gonna be at three o'clock in the morning. I'm like, do you think do you think bees are planning something? Oh? That's exactly our champ. Yeah. Uh. Can people find you on social media. Yes, so we are a Nightcall Podcast on Facebook and Instagram and Nightcall Pod on Twitter. Awesome. And you can find us on the internet Creature Feature Pod dot Com, Creature Feature Pod on Instagram, Creature Feet

Pod on Twitter. F e A T not f e T that's very different. You can find me. I'm at Katie Golden on Twitter, and I'm also at pro bird Writes where I am definitely the human and it's not the bird controlling me. That's don't tell. And thanks to the Space Classics for their awesome song Exo Lumina