Monster Hunting

that's what she's doing. Yeah, in fact, that's what we're doing. See, we wanted to do a special Halloween themed episode or two or four maybe four. Well, while Jonathan was out if you haven't heard them, we, Lauren and I decided we wanted to talk about monsters in the spirit of October because we're all sort of horror fans are in here, but how could we talk about monsters on this podcast. Well, it turns out there are a lot of ways we can.

So we invited on our friend Robert Lamb from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, are sort of resident monster expert, to come talk to us about the future of monster. He's very good friends with Dr Anton Jessup, who is uh is such good friends it's disturbing. Yeah, truly disturbing. He's a ductor. Anton Jessup, if you aren't familiar, is

a an expert in monster science. Yeah, and so Robert Lamb decided to come over and do some episodes, and I was very disappointed that I could not be part of them, although I must admit I was also having an amazing time at the simultaneously while those episodes are being recorded. Well, I'm sorry you couldn't be with us too,

but you can be with us on these upcoming monster podcasts. Uh. So, the one we wanted to talk about today was monster hunting, because this is another thing that can sort of relate to science and technology. Yeah, there is a quest that many people have committed themselves too deeply in a heartfelt way, to go out into the dark spaces of the world and find find the monsters that linger. Yes, for there

there be dragons. Well, there is sort of a sense that technology and its progress throughout the years has eliminated a lot of the strange creatures that we used to think existed, but some people hold out hope. Yeah, I mean I and I can totally understand that. So as a kid, when I was in elementary school, I checked out every single book in our elementary school library that had to do with folklore, ghosts, aliens, and monsters. Those were those were like my go toos, so much so

that I read them more than once. I tell you what, when I was a child, I had my brain ruined by these documentaries on TV about the Locknest Monster and UFOs and stuff. Because I saw them presented in a documentary format that was pretty much the same as the format of stuff about uh, you know, animals and and movie effects and all the other documentaries things like volcanoes or whatever. I just assumed, Oh, okay, just totally normal

to believe in uh Sasquatch and Mothman all that stuff. Yeah, that's just part of the world, and it's an especially cool part of the world, right, So why wouldn't I believe in it? Yeah? And I was. I was very much. I don't know that I fully believed in everything, but I knew I wanted to believe in them. And we'll talk more about the psychology of believing in monsters and hunting for monsters towards the end, but just keep in

mind that. As a kid, I was one of those people, and as I grew up, I was too, I think I I as I by the time I hit high school and I was already developing a much more skeptical view of the world. And I remember loving, uh mockumentaries that had to do with monster hunting. There was one called Phil and Arthur as a pair of British comedians who did a Luckness Monster special where they were investigating

the Lockness Monster and absolutely parodying everything about Lockness Monster investigations. Um. And I remember it came on the public broadcast station and we videotaped it. We had videotapes back in those days. Kids, and U so, yeah, I have at my parents house somewhere there's a videotape that may or may not still

be in playable condition. Um. That was one of my cherished possessions because even as a high school student, even at that point where I had kind of decided to put away the belief in these things, I still harbored this fascination for it. So it didn't believe was not a requirement. Well so beyond the realms of just wishing for these things to be true and liking the mystery

and strangeness of the creatures. There are people who are really interested in the question of whether some supposedly existing strange animal is actually out there. Yeah, and they dedicate time to study something. But there's studying something for which there is no evidence that actually exists. The evidence is very shaky, right, There's nothing like an actual specimen, for example, to study. So uh, it's it's a type of pseudoscience

called crypto zoology. And the reason we call it pseudoscience is because they don't have that hard evidence to actually look into. Well, I want to hold up for a second here and be fair and say I don't know if it's necessarily right to call it a pseudoscience. And now I'm not going out and saying that I believe the Locknest Monster and Bigfoot and all these creatures exist. I I very much don't. But I think you could use the scientific method to look into questions of whether

these creatures exist, or you could look for evidence. You could make hypotheses about what you'd expect to find if they did exist. You could test those and look for evidence and either find it or not. I think you could take a skeptical perspective to these questions absolutely, and I say you should take a skeptical viewpoint to those questions. However, you could end up saying the same thing about cold fusion. That doesn't make it science unless you find the actual

evidence to support it. It ends up being pseudo scientific. Now if you find the evidence to support it, and then you would have to say, all right, this is no longer pseudoscience. We can actually make observations, we can make predictions, we can test, we can replicate tests. Then that's truly the element of science. But if you're talking about let's say unicorns, that's if I sit there and I claim like I want to discover whether or not unicorns are real, well, all I can do is look

for evidence for it. If I don't find any evidence for it, that doesn't necessarily mean that unicorns aren't real, right, It means I can't find the evidence. If you look really hard and you can't find the evidence, they're probably not real. Probably, but you can't say with certainty. So this is this is why we put it into the realm of pseudoscience until there's actually direct evidence for these things, in which case we no longer call it cryptozoology. For

that particular or incidents. We call it zoology because it becomes uh an animal that we can actually or an organism we can actually study. Until it reaches that point, then it falls into cryptozoology, which because we can't actually point to evidence for it, we can't actually study an actual example of it. We're just talking about things that are based on folklore, on first firsthand or second hand accounts of encounters with this stuff, or maybe some unreliable

media of it of some sort. Then we can't really you know, without the direct observation of it, we can't really call it a science. M Okay, I think we're agreeing on the substance, just maybe disagreeing on how we're using words. Sure, Uh well, I think if you ask any any like skeptical organization about cryptozoology, they would classify

it as pseudoscience as opposed to science. But keeping in mind that if you were to find an animal that often gets lumped in under cryptids, these these hidden animals that we have not discovered an actual uh sample of, then they would say, all right, well then that that clearly falls into it, like we could exactly. Yeah, the Ceila canth is a great example. Ceila canth is a fish that we had long believed to have gone extinct, and then of course a fisherman caught one, and then

the and the and the wasn't the only one. Well if Phil and Arthur made that joke, because so there's a Ceila cat which people believe would been extinct, then a fisherman cult one, and now they are extinct. You know, that's not exactly, that's not true. There are more ceila can't out in the Okay, Jonathan, Before we talk about the technology and the future prospect for looking for monsters, we should talk about what are the monsters that are on the table. What what do people believe is out

there that we haven't actually verified yet. Well, cryptids come in all shapes and sizes. They some of them are are more quote unquote and monstrous than others. Mons stress does not necessarily mean spooky, scary, nasty, mean evil. It may mean that it's just something that's it's incredibly unusual large, uh, you know, something that is well outside the norm. But cryptids in general, that could be anything, uh, that is

believed to exist but there's no proof for it. That could be you know, pretty much any kind of living thing. I should say, because this doesn't really fall into the realm of the spiritual and ghosts and that kind of stuff. So um, pretty much anything that was rumored to exist could fall into that category. Okay, so how about like the Lockness Monster, one of my favorites when I was

a kid. In it then, because of course you saw that picture or the thing coming out of the water, the surgeon eld be well, and that was that was probably out of all the monsters that I read about when I was a kid, that was the one I held onto the longest. That was the one I was least willing to let go, right Like, Like, if you think of my my progression into skepticism, the Lochness monster, nessy she was. She was hard for me to say, all right, I don't really believe there's a monster in

Lochness anymore. It took me a very long time. So uh, in case somehow you have managed to go through your life without knowing about the Lochness Monster. Lochness is in Scotland. It's a lake in Scotland, or a loch. It is very large lake. It is very deep, it's extremely deepest formed by a glacier. Uh thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. Uh, it is connected by locks to um to Are you going to keep saying that's the way it's said. It's got the glottal stuff there. So

how did it end up with a dinosaur? And well, that's sort of the idea, right, that it's a pleasyasaur like dinosaur monster. Yeah, they're different. There were always Well, first you had to ascertain the fact that there's supposedly a monster here there first, right, and the very first sighting goes all the way back to St. Columba and Irish monk uh in the in sixth century Scotland, who's supposedly encountered a sea beast or at least a lake beast in the in the waters, and then calmed it

through Christianity. I'm not making any of this up. This is all in in folklore. And then uh it does you people knew yeah, essentially um and calmed it. It was some sort of sea serpent in uh in the story. But you don't really get any more stories about it until the nineteen thirties. Actually three there was a monster hunter named Marmaduke, which his name is It was Marmaduke. Uh. Yeah, that was his first name. Um So Marma Duke, Marma

Duke Weatherell. It's the best name ever, isn't it. I thought it was going to be like Marmaduke groteil Dip. I don't know. Weather Ell is pretty good though, Marmaduke weather Ll. All right. So Marma Duke weather Ll had been hired by a truly um uh historic and important journal, uh, the Daily Mail, to go to to go and and look into reports that there was supposedly a monster in

uh loch Ness. And so he went and discovered some tracks, didn't find any actual like, he didn't see the monster himself, but found some interesting tracks that were near the loch and proclaimed them to be the actual tracks of a monster living in Luchness. And then it turned out that in fact those tracks had been made by a dried out hippopotamus foot, which was at the time and at the time and in early twentieth century England, hippo and

elephant feet were used as umbrella stands. Yeah, yeah, enlightened times. Anyway, Uh, he was more or less humiliated, uh, And that is important for a little bit later in the story. So this is the time that we have the infamous surgeon's photograph of NeSSI, although uh Dr Robert Kenneth Wilson, who was the the person who supposedly took the image, was not actually a surgeon. He was a guynecologist, but it

was always referred to as the surgeon's photograph. He had produced this photo that's the iconic image of NeSSI, the one where you see a neck extending out from the lake with the head and it's you know, it looks like a plesiosaur, like our our our imagination of what a plesiosaur looked like. And so you see like a hump behind the neck and head. Fortunately, there's i think

nothing in the photograph to give its scale. Well, the the full photo makes it look like it's pretty tiny, but the image that you always see is a cropped image where it's yeah, the croped image has it where you can't see any of the shore. You just see water. And in that case, you have no no sense of scale. Right, this thing could be enormous or it could be tiny. You don't know. Uh. In the full picture it looks

like it's a little smaller. You still don't have it's still not close to the shore, so you can't be entirely certain exactly how big it is, but it looks like it would be smaller than what you would imagine it up please please us, or to look like at

any rate. Uh. This photograph made huge news. I mean it was incredibly successful and uh for many many decades it was held out to be a true, authentic photograph of a monster in the lake, until yeah, a man named Christian Spurling claimed that in fact, the image and the photograph was of a why submarine that had been outfitted with a sea serpent neck and head and placed

in the lake. The photograph itself was not taken by Dr Robert Kenneth Wilson, but rather a certain Marmaduke Weatherell, who had been uh been stung his pride stung by the treatment he had received from proclaiming the footprints to be authentic, and then revealed that it was all a hoax and his reputation had suffered as a consequence, and he said, we'll give them a monster and so um he took the photograph then gave it to Dr Wilson as the person to actually proclaim he was the one

who took the photograph, because obviously weather all came forward, everyone would claim that was a hoax in the first place, right because he had already been involved in this. You know, I want to go ahead and point out one thing that's going to be relevant to our eventual point in this episode, which is that I think the only reason of photograph like this remained a prominent piece of evidence

for so long is how bad the photograph is. Yeah, like that you could look at this and plausibly interpreted as a monster is a fact that is based on it being black and white, being often, at least as I experienced it always cropped, and so not having any scale, and being blurry, grainy, low resolution that old time you photography. You don't have any any detail on the monster at all. You can't make out any features on the monster. Um, yeah,

it's all those things really aid quite a bit. Now, granted there have been a lot of other photographs of of Lochness and the monster. You just every single time I say it, You're just gonna shake your head, aren't you. Um, You're you're If you keep saying it like that, I'm eventually gonna believe in the monster at the lake. Working

me towards that the lake near Inverness, Scotland. UM. There's been a lot of photographs since then, but many of them are none of them are conclusive, right, none of them are are uh convincing enough for you to say this is conclusive evidence that there is a monster living in that lake. And Nessie, you know, isn't the only purported lake monsters. Now, there's so many. Basically every lake that people go to has a monster. Everybody of water

that's been around long enough has a monster in it. So, uh, there's yeah champ in Lake Champlain, there's og Pogo, and then there's all the other pogos that are supposedly lake monsters. Uh, there are there's Big Blue. If you watch X files, Uh did you remember that episode? Within saw that one? It was it was set in Georgia. Actually Big Blue was a supposed lake monster living in North Georgia. Um,

North Georgia Lake. And then it is revealed, well, there's a false reveal spoiler alert for anyone who's making their way through X files for the first time, there's a it's a false reveal that it's actually a giant alligator that was living in the lake. Never mind the fact that no giant alligator could ever live in a North Georgia lake. Those leaks are freezing cold. It would never

an alligator would never survive. But at the very very end of the episode, of course, Big Blue pops up out of the lake, unseen by anyone other than the viewer. So it's a little wink and a nod of oh, there really is a monster. Well, they gotta keep mystery alive. Yeah, well, even though they never go back to that lake ever again.

But at then you're right, um, Yeah, there's lots of different lakes and rivers that supposedly have monsters in them, and this this is all over the world, obviously, not just We're focusing a lot on North America in this episode because that's where we live, but there are all over the world stories of lake and river monsters. Okay, before we get to the tech, I think we should talk about one other big monster, which also comes in

many varieties. Like the lake monsters. You've got the large hairy humanoid, yes, big foot slash, sasquatch slash, the skunk gape slash, the swamp ape slash, the Yet how many other names are there for there's yahwe you gotta say, yeah, that's the Australian one. Okay, yeah, so yeah, they're these

are essentially the the large harry ape like creatures. Generally they tend to be described as a missing link between the great apes and man um and there are a lot of different varieties, but they all are basically harry arboreal critters that I've seen it often referred to as the missing link between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, which means people don't even understand the common view on human descent that we didn't evolve from Neanderthals, right, and even if

we did, it seems like Bigfoot would have been a step back based upon he's a prete hairy guy. Well, I mean, it's almost suspicious the fact that this widely varying concept of monster really seems to coincide with what a human would look like in an ape suit. Yeah, it's almost almost almost suspicious, almost suspicious. Yeah, you would if you were, if you were a cynical type, you might say that this was all based off of flim flam. Yeah.

But okay, so tons of people have claimed to actually see these, to photograph them, to capture some kind of some kind of empirical evidence, and before I before I go into kind of the the dawn of the big foot age here in North America, I have to ask you are you are you familiar with the term skunk ape? Were you personally familiar with that term? I'd read about it before. That's a Florida thing, Yeah, mostly Florida, North Carolina. Also, yeah, it was one of those things where I had heard

about it as a kid. Now I was born in the seventies. Nineteen seventy four was when there was a rash of skunk cape sightings in Florida. And for the longest time when I was a kid, I mean I read about skunk capes right there. That was because I kept on checking out all the folklore books in my right. So when I talk about skunk capes these days, people are look at me like, what the heck are you

talking about. I've never heard of such a thing. And it wasn't until I watched um Rob Zombies House of a Thousand Corpses where there is a television news item going on in the background of one of the scenes where they're talking about skun cape, where I thought, oh, thank goodness, I didn't just imagine that from my childhood there's validation. Well, to go to where the bigfoot craze started here in North America, you gotta look back at the infamous film that was made in nineteen sixty seven.

That's the one everybody's seen with the loping thing looking back over its shoulders. Yeah, it's it's twists. It's torso to look back because looking back over its shoulders being really generous. It turns its whole upper body around in order to look back and is loping through woods in northern California at a pretty rapid pace. And um, there are some people who proclaimed that the movement's made in that film are those that a human could never make.

There are others who say, we don't know what speed the film was shooting at, and that's very important because based on the film speed, uh, it may be that it's just like a human would move. But if the film was shot at a different speed, then it makes it look like it's something that a human would not be able to uh to ape pun intended, even without

seeing it, that argument sounds specious. Tool like that. Well, nineteen sixty seven was when this film was made, and it was made by Bob Jimlin and Roger Patterson Um, and they shot it in Bluff Creek in northern California. And the interesting thing is that there are a lot of stories about this how this this film came to be made UM, including stories that reveal at least some level of hoax. So there was a guy named Ray Wallace who passed away in two thousand two, who was

something of a prankster. He enjoyed a good prank now and then. And his son, Michael Wallace says that his father had a wood cover create a pair of sixteen inch long feet out of wood that you would strap on to your to your own feet, so like giant sandals essentially, and you could go tramping around wherever, making enormous tracks in the process. And his his dad, Ray Wallace, owned a construction company that built logging roads in northern California.

So you had all these big roads with a lot large equipment going back and forth across them where there was ample opportunity to make some interesting tracks in the mud, which is what he would do. He would occasionally make big old tracks near them the equipment. You know, if equipment shuts down for the day, he would put these things on trump around a bit and then the next morning the workers would come out and say, holy crap, look at these these enormous footprints next to the bulldozer.

What what's going on here? And it started this kind of legend of a creature with enormous feat that lived in the northern California woods, and Ray Wallace apparently just ate it up he thought was fantastic. Meanwhile, uh, he supposedly knew all about the actual uh filming of the the Bigfoot Creature by Patterson and Kimlin, and even knew who was quote unquote inside the suit, but did not

give it away. Now, Gimblin seems, at least for his part, to have been completely uh believing that this was in fact a legitimate film. He was not. He was not, as far as I know, present when the filming was happening. That was Patterson who was there. Um. And the story was that Patterson had developed cancer and was looking for you know, trying to raise money so he could get treatment.

The story is that this whole thing was orchestrated for his benefit essentially, and that a North Carolina costumer made this costume, this Bigfoot costume mail order, uh, made this for Patterson. Yeah, and that they even got a request about how to make it look taller, and the costumer had said, look, used shoulder pads like football shoulder pads to to increase the height, and use sticks in the arms to increase the the arm length so that it looks like it's got longer arms than what a human

would have. Um Now, there are people who who dispute that this story is in fact legitimate, and that you know, the people who are claiming this are doing so just to you know, pull a prank of their own saying that they're responsible for it. But most reputable sources that I could find have pretty much said, like, there there's no reason to believe this was a person in a suit. In fact, like stan Stan Winston, right, he's the special effects guy. Yeah, he he said, yeah, that was not

even a very good suit. He said that would be maybe a few hundred dollars. Then when he was interviewed, he said that would be a few hundred dollars Today when it was made, it was probably less than a thousand dollars, which was a lot of money back in those days. But still it was something that was totally in the realm of possibility. But That's not the only giant Bigfoot story. There was one here in Georgia not too long ago. Oh I remember this BA claiming that

I think they claimed they had a big yeah. Yeah, this was back in two thousand and eight. The Georgia Boys, as they are some types called Matt Whitten and Rick Dyer who had collaborated on a hoax with another guy named Carmine Biscardi who had uh he had been like a promoter in Vegas for a while, and the three of them together really pushed a story to national prominence. And now it turned out it was really big foot. No, no,

sadly it was. It was an actual Bigfoot costume. In fact, there were people who found the catalog item Bigfoot costume. It was a very good bigfoot costume. You know. It wasn't like, you know, a super cheap party city guerrilla suit or anything, but it was still a bigfoot costume and it was one that could be identified as such. Uh, And yeah it was. It was revealed as a hoax. Um there. You know, they didn't make a huge amount

of money. I believe mark Matt Whitten was had formerly been a sheriff deputy and no longer has that career as a result of this story. Um, Rake Dyer was like a used car salesman, and so this was like a rough story all around. I think Dyer actually went on to make another claim not too long ago that was a similar bigfoot claim, but kind I've got a frozen cheap acabra. Yeah, yeah, we he did not do that as far as I know. But um, at any rate, the Bigfoot evidence is really more of a story of

a lack of evidence. Then again, any sort of definitive proof. Well, I noticed that's a common thread and a lot of these crypted searches is the story of the evidence turns out to be a story of weird or debunked evidence. Yeah, it's either fabricated or mistaken identity, that kind of stuff. But that doesn't mean people have stopped believing. In fact,

this is huge. You go out just Google searching, look on the internet for people talking about their Bigfoot sightings and and whether or not they believe in these lake monsters. It's all over the place. Well it's it doesn't seem to be going away at all. Now they took journeys

words to heart. They didn't stop believing. Um, and so now I guess we should transition to talking about the role that technology plays in in people search for these monsters, and whether advances in technology can or ever will affect the way people believe in them, Like can can it just be having better technology will finally dispel all of these beliefs about big foot in the lake monsters. I think it will make it harder to justify a belief in these things, But I don't think it's ever going

to eliminate the belief in these things. Yeah, I feel like in some ways it could go both ways. So I think one of the first things we should talk about, since it came up in both of these examples, is camera technology. So here's the thing. Camera technology has advanced dramatically. I really mean dramatically, right, I mean it really has advanced. So you can get a consumer model, just a regular off the shelf point and click camera that's gonna have

zoom features, image stabilization, low LFE photography. If you're talking about a professional model camera, you know, the kind that you're spending a few thousand dollars for, you get even more incredib double pictures, control options, all these sort of things, um stuff that you know back in the day would have been unheard of. And today you have the option of incredible fidelity and resolution with your photos. Uh. And that's not just still photography. You know, your your video

cameras have gotten really high resolution. I mean you could get a two K or four K camera and use that in your monster hunting techniques. And thus, if you capture anything, you're not gonna have one of those murky photos, right right, Well, I mean the photos and videos of bigfoot, locknest, monster UFOs all that they're always I mean, it seems

to me, always grainy, low rez blurred. It seems to me that not just as this professional stuff comes out, but as high quality photographic equipment is more widely disseminated among the population, you don't have to be a professional photographer to take high quality images. And you don't even have to plan ahead and take a camera with you. You probably have a very high quality camera in your phone. Yeah, there's a really good chance that you or someone with

you does. It's so funny because you know, you think about back in the day, like think about when America's funniest home videos first came out, and you would ask yourself why the heck, would anyone be videotaping this particular moment that we're watching? How can this not be staged? Right? Because back then video cameras were not everywhere. You didn't have one on your phone just sitting in your pocket.

So the fact that someone's actually video taping something usually meant that there was something there to be videotaped, and you wouldn't have done it just for no reason. Wow, how lucky that these guys had a video camera in the woods with them when they saw Bigfoot. Right now, these days, it would be very unusual to not have at least a few people with access to it. You're taking a big group out there, somebody's gotta you know,

somebody's gonna be able to shoot this intin ADP. I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly. They'll be able to use the iPhone and put it in slow motion if they want, right, so you can see it in incredible detail with you know, two frames a second. And in the next generation, I wonder if it's going to go even further, like why didn't they get this in gigapixel? Uh no, see, I think at this point, when you've got this level of of fidelity already, the question you'd have to ask, is why is this

so poor quality? Right? If it's if you're thinking everyone has access to something that's got at least like a six or eight megapixel camera in it, Yeah, not everyone, but I mean it's just common enough that it's going to be really frequent that if bigfoots walking around, he's frequently going to encounter people who have high quality video.

Particularly if you're talking about people who are actively looking for these creatures, right, We're not just talking about the people who would happen upon it, although that's a big issue there too. Uh, We're talking about the folks who have made a career out of looking for these kind of creatures. They're obviously going to be relying upon technology that is going to have this level of detail, because why wouldn't they It would It would be suspicious if

they did not. If you're telling me like, oh, no, I'm I only work into Gara type and I'd be thinking maybe maybe monster hunting isn't so legitimate. But if you're talking, I'm going to use this high speed, high resolution camera that works in low light levels so that I can have the best chance of getting a really good image of this thing that I believe exists, but we've never been able to capture it before. That makes

more sense. Um, And so yeah, the fact that everyone has cameras, that that kind of suggests to me that since we don't see a huge number or at least a significant number of pictures and videos of these kind of creatures, it obviously you can't prove a negative, but it it certainly goes a long way to say, well, if there's not all this evidence, where are these critters? Yeah. Another thing I would like to point out is the

recent widespread dissemination of easy photo manipulation techniques. So if you wanted to doctor a photo or make it look like an alien or a monster or two picabra. Back in the day, this used to be a much more arcane and obscure art. People had their own, you know, photo manipulation techniques. A lot of times they'd involve these different kinds of art tools like ink and and paints

and erasers and things like that. Now you've got ten million people who have abe photoshop, Yeah, and some significant amount of those people have enough skill to manipulate pretty much any photo to look like something really weird is

going on in it. And one of the funny things about this is I think this actually should be reason for an increase in skepticism, even though you're gonna have probably even more were weird photos, you know, photo of a of a megalodon jumping over the Golden Gate Bridge, because you can see stuff like that on the Internet all the time. I think the net result is that

people are more skeptical when they're looking at a photo. Now, I think video is still probably the the go to for, you know, people who are waiting to hoax others, because video is the perception is that video is much harder to fake than photographs. I guess it probably is harder. It definitely takes. It definitely takes a set of skills that is beyond the average person. Right at least it's more work. Yeah, it's a lot more work, and uh and to make it convincing, it requires skills that most

people just aren't familiar with. Of course, then again, for reasons of just data storage and and stuff like that, video is often lower resolution than still photographs, So maybe you could more easily fudge something on a video because the photo, the still photo you'd be expecting, should be high res solution and you can take a kind of

grainy image these days and get away with it. Well maybe, but I mean there are more and more high quality video cameras being included with things like smartphones easies too, like to the point where seeing, uh, seeing a camera that's capable of capturing images like video in two K is not that far off. So if you take a video with my phone, I mean, there's probably gonna be

a mothman. And yeah, that's that's fair. My phone the camera quality has degraded over time, and in fact, it would get to a point now where if I took a photo of a child's birthday party, you'd be pretty sure it would be a bunch of sasquatches getting a gathering around a bonfire or something. So yeah, it's uh, but but I think, you know, there are also people who are good at doing digital effects and and doing them in a way that's subtle enough where it's not

easy to just pick out. And we're seeing that with things like like viral marketing campaigns, to where it's you know, the whole purpose of it wasn't to fool people that's necessarily, or at least not indefinitely into believing that this creature exists, but was rather a promotional thing for something else. We've seen that happen a few times. So yeah, well, while photos and videos can be faked, it does require a lot of work. And I think we're starting to see

a little more skepticism in the general public. I mean, they're always going to be people who react very quickly to something that's presented as real. Like if you present something as real on Facebook, there's gonna be a lot of reaction until someone finally says, hey, wait, let's slow down and apply some critical thinking here. But um, I don't I give the fact that we don't see tons of this stuff is more of again evidence against their them existing. Yeah, I mean face value is more highly

valued than we might expect. So how about sonar. That's another one, because Yeah, you said a minute ago that you can't prove a negative. I guess that's true in a certain way if if you make uh, you know, exceptions for well, maybe the monster is invisible and stuff like that. But barring that kind of thing, you sort of can prove a negative if you can exhaustively look for something in the only place you would expect to find it, and it's something that you should see if

you look. So. In other words, you're saying that if you were to take a confined area like a lake, yeah, and you were to apply sonar a very a very thorough sonar survey of this lake, and you were not to find any evidence of monsters in that lake, then you could pretty firmly say this monster doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, that's about as close to proof as you

could want. Yeah, unless you have people immediately claim that the lake has got underground caves connected to it that the monster lives in, which, by the way, is again one of the things you hear about luckness and didn't many times somebody sonar scanned it and they said there's

nothing there there. Well, there are multiple sonar scans that have happened of the lake, and some of them came back with stuff that was inconclusive, like they saw large shapes under the water and said, well, this might be debris, it might be an organism, it might be a school

of fish. The point was it was always inconclusive, and in fact, telling the difference between a school of fish and a large creature it can be a little tricky depending upon the resolution of the technology you're using so as technology improved over time, we saw multiple scans of the lake happen over and over again. Um, some of which were used as proof that there was a monster there, some of which was said, no, there's no monster there.

The most recent one was done in two thousand three and it was sponsored by the BBC, and I think the BBC would definitely prefer there to have been a monster. But the conclusion they came up with was that there was no monster in Locked nest They did a high resolution scan of the lake and didn't find anything mysterious or inexplicable. And they they said they essentially scoured the lake from one end to the other and did the effect of a full net across the entire lake. I'm

sure the local tourism board was not happy with them. Now, well, then, the Nesti tourism has taken a bit of a hit over the last few couple of decades. Maybe uh hit a hit, kind of a high note sometime in the eighties and nineties and then has been declining ever since. They still, you know, have people come out there and I mean the lake is still lovely, but it's not necessarily a monster haven. Um, what about the way technology enables sort of a bird's eye view of the Earth,

So satellite imagery, yeah, and you know, like aerial photography. Sure. Um, again, we've got examples where people have said, look, there's nothing here to to support a claim of a crypted living in this area. Then we have others that, you know, people have said anything that was remotely out of the ordinary was evidence that the crypted lived there. So for one thing, a lot of satellites don't have the resolution to get down to a level where you'd be able

to look at individual creatures. Yeah. I did wonder if this might apply to like the people who believe, for example, that I think there's a belief that there's a dinosaur living in the Congo. It's like a really large organism. Yeah, maybe you'd expect to see that. At least one of those was very obvious hoax. The images were terrible, but I can't remember. It was something rex was what they called it. But that was just one of those examples. There have been multiple legends of that sort of thing.

But yeah, there's not been any evidence of that kind of thing. Some people would just say, well, you know, satellite images are made over time, right, it's not like it's a constant surveillance of the entire earth. You get images that are made as the satellite passes over the areas, and then what you end up with the maps is a composite of all of these different images that are kind of stitched together. So it could just be that

you're taking pictures everywhere where the dinosaur isn't. Well, that's a decent point. Yeah, it's also very convenient, but you know that's possible. And then one of the things I think would be interesting is if monster hunters start using

things like drones um with cameras on them. Well, because you think, like, if your argument is that the monster lives in some area that is difficult for people to access, using something like a drone in order to get to areas that you normally would have a lot of difficulty getting to makes a lot of sense. You take away the risk factor of a human being putting themselves in a situation that could end an injury or death. Um, you know you can get a high view of everything.

Drones probably freak out a lot of critters, but you know you'd still be able to get a high level view of whatever area you're looking at You know, it does seem to be a view very often among the monster enthusiasts, and I don't mean the fictional monster enthusiasts like us, but the people who really believe in these cryptids that I don't know, they're just not usually where people are, you know, It's just you're not likely to run across them. For some reason that's there. I don't know,

there's just something about them. Maybe maybe having people there with cameras drive them away. I think that. I think. I think people who exist drive away the things that don't exist. I think that's where the problem relies. But that's that's my own personal opinion. Yeah. Well, one answer to that kind of belief might be the kind of automated visual cataloging of the world that's now going on

because of things like Google Earth and Google Maps. Are you about to tell me that they found bigfoot on street view? You're just zooming down Oxford Street and there, Hey, look it's big foot. Uh that. There have been all kinds of claims, And I think that it's interesting that

this is going both ways. On one hand, it's like, well, I mean, we're taking all of these automated photos of places where nobody's there to look, so you know, if Bigfoot's hanging around, we should see him pop up sometime and then people come out and say, yeah, there he is. So I don't know that anyway. There was one story, uh, The UK Independent reported on November one that there was

a YouTube video. Seriously, This was an article drawing attention to a YouTube video high journalism right here right that

had been posted a few days before. A user called Wow for real has three ees for real that sounds pronounced real posted a video showing Google street view for this deserted section of highway in British Columbia that's in western Canada, and the highway was running through a forest and on one side of the road in one particular frame of street view, there appears to be a vaguely humanoid shape loping through the brush. Obviously, there he is, and what else could it be? John John Lithgal's right

next to him. They're re enacting Harry and the Henderson's. To me, it looks like a shadow some kind, or maybe it's a particular angle on a tree stump. Could have also been like a bear, you know, like there are bears in Getada. By the way, to me, it's it's of the quality that it's more likely a shadow than a bear to me. And yeah, so so the level of quality goes let me get this straight. For big Foot believers, level of quality goes bear shadow big Foot.

That's just my my opinion. Lots of people are looking at like, yeah, obviously there he is anyway right the YouTube video now, at the time, I had like thirty thousand views, uh, from when I read this article from the Independent. The Mirror also quote reported it. Now it has two hundred and twenty thousand views. There was another one actually where Nessie showed up on Apple Maps. Okay, was she in lockness Oh yeah, okay, well that was

a big that was a big if. Earlier this year, Apple Maps apparently showed an aerial photo of lock Nest that had this large, dark, almost catfish like shape appearing in the water, uh, producing wake on either side. The waves were coming out, so moving through the water is obviously not just stationary and moving along the surface. It looked like too bad, it was just a boat. Well it looks What it looks like is that it looks like a boat where the boat has been removed and

there's like this boat wake. But I've seen it compared to other photos of large boats and lock nest producing wake, and the wakes exactly the same. So it might just be an angle where you can't see the boat very well. So so too bad. It was just a boat, and too bad somebody was using Apple Maps. I mean, there's your problem, right, there is a problem. I don't know how many millions of people use that, But here we have a series of vaudevillian musings on lock Ness in

the Apple Maps. Uh so you hear. The Longness Monster recently appeared on apple Maps. It took people a while to catch on because it was labeled as the Jersey Devil. But when apple Maps caught a glimpse of the Longness Monster, many excited monster hunters rushed to the scene. Unfortunately, the ones who used Apple Maps navigation ended up on the runway at the Glasgow Airport. That's another good one. Now here's why the Longness Monster was in fact identified by

Apple Maps in Lake Champlain. Or try asking Syria about where you can find the Longness Monster. You'll be surprised, and so will I. Because I don't have an iPhone, I don't know what would happen. I could try with Google. I've got I've got a Google phone right here if you want to find out what happens if I ask Google, what I think where I can find loss has not appeared on Google Earth as far as I am. But so anyway, that that looked like it was just a boat.

So it's weird. It seems like, on one hand, if we're getting a better and better view of more and more parts of the world, it should be sort of like opening the door into a dark room and eliminating the shadows. I mean, shouldn't it like that, You're you're letting the light in, You're looking in more and more places, You're eliminating the places where these monsters could hide. But

it just doesn't seem to be working. I mean, these examples we just showed, it seems like it's only opening up more and more avenues for people to find evidence of these monsters. And that sort of brings us to the question of why we hunt monsters. I mean, I don't believe in any of these monsters, but I do love this stuff. It's lots of fun. Going back to the X Files, I think it all hinges on that

famous poster above Moulder's desk. I want to believe because it gives you this feeling like there's something magical or unknown out there and and the possibility of that is very enticing. Um And I totally get that. I mean, as a kid, like I said, I was fascinated by the same reason I was fascinated by dinosaurs. The idea of these enormous creatures that had far more power than say, the evil parents who would make me go to bed

at a reasonable hour did. And so there were there were these creatures that once were more powerful than my parents. I wanted to believe, and in fact that one, you know, we have evidence for it's actually those were real creatures, but to think that such a thing could still exist was very enticing. Um And I think there's a lot of that that's still around, this idea that it is kind of a more magical place with these creatures in existence.

I would counter that, however, by saying that we're using this amazing technology, these these scientific approaches processes to learn more about our earth and the place is phenomenal, Like we're learning so much incredible stuff. We're encountering uh species that we had never seen before that are are amazing,

legitimately amazing creatures. They are not the mystical monsters of lore, and maybe some people look on them as being less interesting for that reason, but to me, they are just as fascinating as the creatures that inhabit folk tales from you know, hundreds of years ago. But I think that we're always going to have this kind of curiosity and this desire for things that have yet to be discovered to be out there, because we do like to discover things.

We're curious people. Well, of course there's a lot that is out there to discover, and a lot of it's really weird. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like the real world is weird. If I think it's about as weird as Bigfoot. Finding organisms that can survive in uh, in incredibly toxic environments for humans, like you know, at the bottom of the ocean, near a crack in the earth where you're kidding, these incredibly hot jets of water coming out, and there are creatures that can live in the chemicals of that.

That's phenomenal. Like that is something that if you told me as a kid, I would have thought that's a science its fiction story that couldn't be possible. That couldn't possibly be true about the tartar grades that can survive all kinds of radiation and live in empty space. Sure,

I mean again, really amazing stuff. And you know, some of the cryptids that are on the big long list are things like, uh, types of dogs or cats, type types of canines or feelines that haven't been um found so that you know they're they've they've been talked about in in stories or whatever, but there's never been any direct evidence for them. It may turn out that there's some parts of the world where we come across some of some creatures of a significant size that we haven't

encountered before, at least haven't classified before. Uh, that's the possibility. It's it's you know, of course, it gets less likely the more of the Earth we we explore, we find more and more of those, and the number of of undiscovered creatures decreases over time. You know, I think the undiscovered dog variant that we're going to find is Marmaduke.

You think is it mar Marmaduke weather All, because I'm pretty sure he passed away, But oh, you mean the the enormous Well, if he looks exactly like the cartoon, he will be lovable. Uh. Yeah, so this was a fun thing to to kind of talk about just this the science and technology behind monster hunting and the psychology behind monster hunting. I'm glad that we were able to look into this and and to tie it into our other October slash Halloween type episodes. And this is not

the end, folks. We're gonna have another Halloween episode. Uh in the you know, to to round out the experience, We're gonna be looking at a famous fictional monster and asking whether or not such a fictional monster could ever become a real creature, but one might wander through a Frankenstein creation of science. Yeah, not to not to totally give away what the monster is, Okay, I'll tell you

it's critters. Um no, No, We're gonna be talking about Frankenstein in a new in an upcoming episode, so keep your ears out for that one. And guys, if you have any suggestions for episodes for forward thinking, uh, you know, we're gonna get away from the monster topic because now that Halloween is gonna pass by, we're going to look at other issues. But there's ever anything you're interested in

hearing more about, right us. Let us know we've got plans for another really fun, wacky episode in the very near future that I think you guys are gonna dig. But anything like if from fusion power to nanotechnology, anything that interests you about the future, let us know. Send us an email that addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. On Twitter and Google Plus, we

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