Squid's Cabinet of Curiosities

I love the Discovery Channel.

I love Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.

I love shows about mysteries, sea monsters, ghosts, lost civilizations, and the like.

I know I'm not the only one who loves a good mystery that challenges the fabric of our very existence. Unfortunately, the biggest mystery of all seems to be, where to find a place on Internet for mystery-seekers to hang out. So, I've made such a place.

And since there are a few other such pages, I figured I'd make mine unique - with pictures.

So here's a list of the coolest mysteries of this world and the next... at least according to me.

Sea Monsters

Let's face it: there are sea monsters. I stole my nickname from such a monster: an eighty-foot giant squid, with eyes the size of dinner plates, fighting with whales and plucking unwary sailors off sinking ships, is about as close to a monster from legend as ever existed. And in fact, recently scientists in New Zealand netted a 26-foot female Architeuthis some 1400 feet under the Pacific. Just a baby, really. But beyond the occasional giant squid to wash up on the shore, science hasn't really got anything substantial to explain the countless sightings of strange things in the ocean.

In 1974, a Japanese fishing boat trawled up... something. It was big, ugly, and smelled really bad, and no, it wasn't Mehdi Ali. They took some pictures, and in what must have been the toughest decision of his life, the captain ordered it thrown back, to keep from spoiling the rest of the fish they'd caught. (Apparently zoological mysteries don't bring much money at the fish market.) The photos show a rotten thing, unidentifiable, but probably a vertebrate, with what looks like a long neck. To me, it looks almost Plesiosaurian. But as I just found out yesterday (and NOBODY bothered to tell me this - get off yer butts people!) in 1977, a tissue sample taken from the creature was identified as shark. I'll look again at the pictures of the thing, it may or may not be a decomposing shark. Basking sharks are the usual suspect for sea monster carcasses, it seems; when they rot, the ribcage collapses and the jaw falls away, leaving a long neck and small head. Even so, this thing was 33 feet long, making it one of the larger basking sharks around.

In 1894, on the shores of St. Augustine, Florida, washed up... something. It was a featureless blob of animal tissue, possibly whale blubber, possibly... something else. A small sample was taken from the blob and preserved; recently, modern zoologists studied that sample under a polarized microscope, and compared it to the muscle tissue of octopus and squid. It more resembled octopus muscle tissue than squid. If the blob were, in fact, an octopus, it would have stretched some 75 feet across its tentacles.

I know of many other weird stories of aquatic things that can't exist: from the legendary Loch Ness Monster itself (I'm convinced Nessie was the second gunman in Dallas in 1963; how could Oliver Stone have missed that big gray shape sitting on the Grassy Knoll?) to an old farmer's tale of a giant turtle living in a pond. I collect these semi-plausible stories. If you have them, I want them.

Land Monsters

Impossible animals are a bit harder to hide on dry land, but it can happen: it wasn't that long ago the gorilla was considered a fairy tale, the same with Komodo dragons and striped cheetahs. Every year, scientists discover many "new" species - some of which have been "known" for some time, often seen but never documented. Here's the classiest of these.

A living dinosaur. You know the story: a lake deep in the heart of Africa, the local tribesmen telling tales of a dinosaur-like beast living in that lake. The evidence is quite scarce, mostly third-hand eyewitness accounts, and the possibility of a small dinosaur family surviving 65 million years in central Africa is farfetched at best. Still, knowing our culture's fascination with dinosaurs, you'd think there'd be expeditions to that lake more often. Roy Mackal and company went there about 15 years ago and never reached the lake; I don't even think anyone's tried to go there since then.

Giant snakes. These have been seen, reported, and even photographed. But yet science seems to kinda gloss over the existence of snakes longer than 35 feet.

Weird scattered tales:

Humanoids

This is a category that gives me the willies. It's cryptozoology (study of mysterious animals), but it's also really spooky, to deal with things that are sort of human but not quite. Here's where we file things like winged men, vampires, Bigfoot, and... other things.

Dover, Massachusetts (not Delaware - my oops), 1982. A guy is walking home at night, and in the twilight, he sees what he thinks is one of his friends, who is quite short. He shouts hello, but the "friend" runs away. He chases, and finally the thing stops beside a tree and he gets a look at the silhouette of the thing: it ain't human. Later that same night, two teenagers driving their car happen across the thing, it's crawling along a low wall at the side of the road, and they first thought it was a cat until the headlights shone on it, revealing a pink thing with a large ovallike head and a thin monkeylike body. There were some four people who saw a creature like this on the night in question, and then the "Dover Demon" was never seen again.

Mothman, Lizardman, and others. They stand upright, but aren't human, and aren't accoutable for by any rational scientific means. Yet they've been seen. Mothman, it's said, has wings, and if you look in his eyes, your own eyes will burn for days afterward. Lizardman has left bizarre footprints, and one local has recorded his "call", but beyond that, nothing that makes sense.

Bigfoot, Yeti, etc. Bigfoot's been filmed at least once, hinting that there may actually be some sort of great ape in the western part of North America. But films can be faked, and other evidence is quite scarce. Yeti, however, is far more substantial. In addition to the hundreds of photographed footprints in the Himalayas, and the fact that the Yeti plays a critical role in the religion of the local Sherpas, there are several mummified Yeti body parts in the possession of Sherpa priests as holy objects; mummified scalps, a skeletal humanoid-but-too-large hand. An explorer once found hairs in a Yeti footprint; he sent them off for identification. The analysis: "humanoid but not human."

The tales don't stop here. Giant humanoids, short humanoids, "grey people", flying men, werewolves, vampires, latter-day Neanderthals, etc. seem to exist all over the globe. The one thing that, for me, makes the least sense about Mothman and his like, is that there always seem to be exactly one of them. Are they freak humans? Quirks of nature? Extraterrestrials? One day science might explain them, but in the meantime, be really cautious about giving a ride to that nine-foot hairy hitchhiker at midnight.

And this latest: something called Goatsucker. Goatsucker is either a joke or a nightmare, I'm not sure which; it's supposed to look like one of those "gray" extraterrestrials (the big-eyed, big-head, skinny kind) except with red eyes and spines all over its body, and the ability to jump rather high. It's earned the name Chupacabras from the locals in Puerto Rico, where this thing was first sighted - the word basically translates as goat sucker. Goats, and other animals, are found drained of blood. Recently, there have been reports of animal drainings in Florida; many have speculated that a Goatsucker or group of them have made their way to the continent. Meanwhile, there are wild theories floating around that Goatsucker is a government experiment, some kind of genetic mutation of a captured extraterrestrial - which is truly a sickening thought, if our government would go so far as to turn an intelligent lifeform (the Grays) into a vampire-like animal. Not entirely irrational, given the weird crap our government does.

Ancient Mysteries

I think Atlantis did exist in some form, an advanced civilization lost in the mists of time. Furthermore, I think Sarah McLachlan was born there, and lay in some kind of hyperbaric chamber for ten thousand years, to be awakened in 1987 to go record her first album. But beyond this, Atlantis is the source of horrendous controversy. I really don't see how there's room on the floor of the Atlantic for an extra continental plate, as it would have to have been to be the size Plato described. But Atlantis doesn't hold the monopoly on ancient weirdness... or maybe it does.

Easter Island you know about. But there are other places where the mysteries are literally scattered around the countryside. From the strange earth-drawings of the British Isles to the giant desert glyphs at Nazca and elsewhere, to the bizarre giant stone spheres found (I can't for the life of me remember where), to vague rumors I've heard from Ireland of some sixty cubes with Egyptian-looking writings (if you know more EMAIL ME!), our ancestors seemed to enjoy building funky-looking things just to confuse the hell out of us.

There are those who think we were visited in ancient times by extraterrestrials who were worshipped as gods by ancient peoples. Perhaps. There are a number of bizarre artifacts which hint at the presence of something weird... ancient Incan beads which have been microdrilled with almost modern precision, strange civilizations that sprang up and disappeared overnight, odd tales of "green children," ornaments that appear to be figures in spacesuits, and many other weird objects from ancient times that couldn't have been made with the tools they had available in those times. In Iraq, archaeologists found an object which, when filled with grape juice, functions as a tiny electric battery - and put out almost half a volt of electricity when connected. Off the coast of Greece, divers found a chunk of corroded bronze which was found to contain a 2000-year-old mechanical computer, a gear-driven astrological calculator. (I'll bet it was more advanced than Windows 95...) The ancient world is full of mysteries like these.

UFOs

UFOs and extraterrestrials get beat to death on Internet already, between the Roswell film homepage and the countless alien abduction newsgroups, there's not much I can say that hasn't already been said... except that if aliens do exist, they probably think we're morons for the way we treat the subject of extraterrestrials. If aliens exist, our first contact with them should be one of the most important events in human history, instead of the front page of Weekly World News right next to "OJ Simpson Had My Baby."

Miscellaneous

A few weird objects which have been found over the years:

The Crystal Skull has a weird history behind it. It was found amongst ancient ruins in Mexico, a remarkably accurate and precise human skull, complete with articulating jaw. At the time it was found, making one like it with modern technology would have been very expensive; at the time it was supposedly made (in ancient times) there was no way to have made such an object. Other glass skulls have been found, but none with the same precision or realism. Story goes, people have seen strange shapes moving inside the skull. Story goes, one owner of the skull put it on a shelf overnight, all night heard weird catlike screams, and the next day found the room trashed.

Oak Island. We're talking about a big hole, in the middle of an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, a big hole that doesn't seem to have anything in it. Well, nothing, that is, except wooden platforms spaced every 10 feet, weird flooding mechanisms, concrete, and other weird things. The hole is said to contain anything from pirate treasure to the crown jewels of some European country. In any case, locals have acquired a form of gold fever, and have sunk lots of money into massive digging operations, trying to figure out what's down there. I've heard of one particularly weird incident, where they broke through to a new chamber at the bottom, sunk a camera and lights down there, turned it on, and the guy watching via closed-circuit TV in the nearby equipment shack saw a severed human hand floating in front of the camera, and several wooden chests in the background. I know every couple years they come on the news and say some company "is getting ready to dig a really big hole next to it and solve the mystery once and for all" but nothing ever comes of it. The rumor mill has been oddly silent the last few years; I wonder if they finally hit bottom and found nothing. I have to wonder what in that hole could be so important they'd go to such trouble to hide it, and how the original diggers planned to retrieve it, if it's taken so many millions of dollars to try and find it.

I've gathered all the cool stuff so you don't have to. Cryptozoological and other such "strange phenomena" information on the Net is hard to track down; this is my public service to you.

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