It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

So we all complain about the changes in our basic cable channels, and wonder why such dreck can make it on the air, but seldom think hard about the process. But the excellent website TVTropes does a very nice job analyzing what happens to TV networks over time. To no one’s surprise, it comes down to one simple factor: ratings (and therefore money from advertisers), largely driven by the effort to woo those big-spending trend-setting 18-31 male viewers who already dictate the movie industry’s bottom line (although movies aim even lower to reach teenage boys, the biggest-spending and most loyal movie audience). As TVTropes points out (and those of us old enough to remember can attest to), it wasn’t always this bad on cable TV. When the laws changed and the opportunity to create hundreds of basic cable channels first emerged in the 1980s, the channels were initially set up to fill specific programming niches, from the Golf Channel to the Game Show Network and so on. In the early 1980s, all these new niche-driven cable channels were very distinct and more or less true to their niche description. But since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play: keep tweaking it and give the customer whatever sells the most. (This dynamic does not apply to non-commercial stations like PBS in the U.S., or the BBC in Britain, which can program what they feel is in the public interest).

As TVTropes documents, nearly all these niche-defined networks have undergone “network decay” since they were founded in the 1980s, as their programming shifts to find hit shows. Because they are nearly all chasing nearly the same demographic of 18-31 year old males, they end up programming a lot of the same kinds of things (or even the same shows). Their original mission and distinctive programming is lost in a sea of reality shows and junk that keeps you in your seat, whether it be explosions or dangerous occupations or whatever. Another factor has been the expansion of media conglomerates, so that these multiple cable channels are owned by just a few corporations, and the CEO of each channel must answer to corporate bosses who are only interested in their profitability, not any abstract “mission” to air certain types of programming. So much for the high-minded idealism that drove the deregulation of the airwaves in the 1970s and 1980s, with the intent of offering us dozens of distinct choices. Instead, they all “decay” to a lowest-common-denominator of “if it bleeds, it leads” bottom-line mentality, negating whatever real advantages that dozens of distinctive niche cable channels once offered. As TVTropes points out, the decisions are made by network execs worried only about their ratings and bottom lines, not any high-minded ideal like “quality television” that PBS brags so loudly about. They could (and did) notice that professional “wrestling” is popular with their 18-31 male demographic, and see no problem with programming the WWE next to a show about science.

TVTropes offers as a classic example the pioneering channel MTV, which single-handedly changed the music business in the early 1980s and made telegenic pop artists into big stars (e.g., Michael Jackson, Madonna) while ending the careers of less telegenic musicians (e.g., Christopher Cross). But soon MTV found it was more profitable to offer reality shows, cartoons, game shows, and many other kinds of programming until the original music videos that it pioneered have vanished altogether.  TVTropes analyzed the decay of the cable channels in various categories. Under “Total Abandonment” (of their original mission) they list not only MTV, A&E, G4, CMT, Biography, and The Learning Channel (TLC). In their words:

TLC, originally focusing around science and nature documentaries in the style of the Discovery Channel, drifted toward almost nothing but “home makeover”-style reality shows. In a somewhat confusing (in these days of internet porn) play at grabbing the all-important 18-30 male demographic, TLC acquired the rights to air the Miss America pageant. After sufficient decay, one would never guess that TLC used to be called The Learning Channel and was once co-owned by NASA.

One need only check here to see how far TLC has drifted away from “learning” and into the realm of bizarre sensationalism, or this hilarious send-up of their programming.

Under the category “Slipped”, we find The History Channel. As TVTrope comments:

[Their] programming now consists of roughneck-focused reality shows (Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men) and conspiracy theory “documentaries” about UFOs, the Bible Code, ghosts, Atlantis, Nostradamus, and the end of the world, earning the network the derisive nickname “The Hysterical Channel”. Heck, at least the “Hitler Channel,” as they used to be known (back when everything was about either World War II, Nazis or The American Civil War), was actual history.

Their analysis of Discovery Channel is even more hilarious:

The Discovery Channel still shows plenty of actual documentary material, despite having been decaying for almost as long as MTV has. In the late 80s the lineup was mostly serious documentaries, the most famous of which was Wings (no relation to the sitcom except for a focus on aircraft) but which also included classy repackaged BBC imports like Making of a Continent — and once a year there was Shark Week, which was just what you’d expect. By the mid-1990s, they showed an obscene amount of home improvement shows and cooking shows aimed at stay-at-home moms (enough to spawn the spin-off Discovery Home & Leisure Channel, now Planet Green) and Wings had proven so popular it had been farmed out to its own spin-off, Discovery Wings Channel (now Military Channel). Now, they’re being swamped with “guys building and/or blowing things up” shows in the vein of Mythbusters and Monster Garage. And about four different shows about credulous idiots with no critical thinking skills ghost hunters. In 2005, Discovery debuted Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in the back of a cab, leaving one unsure whether it even has a theme beyond “non-fiction”. It gets weird when you realize that they’re knocking some of their own shows off, especially Mythbusters into Smash Lab (with a focus on safety measures) and How It’s Made into Some Assembly Required. The latter has almost only done products featured in the former (though How It’s Made has been on for just about ten years, so it’s hard to find something they haven’t done). The Discovery Channel also used to contain a lot of nature, which is where the now-classic Shark Week (which they still air regularly) originated from. But it seems that explosions have taken the place of tigers ripping stuff to pieces. Most of the nature shows have since been relegated to Animal Planet.

Finally, the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel are the only two that still run mostly science documentaries with little junk, yet National Geographic still has “The Bounty Hunter,” “Is it Real?”, and “The Dog Whisperer.”  Science Channel has begun airing sci-fi programming, including “Firefly” and “Dark Matters: Twisted but True,” so they are running pop-pseudoscience garbage that now pollutes The History Channel.

Frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel. As long as these are commercial TV channels, they are driven by ratings and lowest-common-denominator programming aimed at 18-31 men. Only PBS and other non-commercial stations can escape this “network decay”—but then they compensate by annoying pledge drives that rerun old shows with sentimental value so that viewers will tune in and hopefully donate. Maybe the BBC, with its government support of top-quality science and drama programming (which the U.S. market then borrows or rips off) seems immune, although there are BBC channels that are lowbr0w as well. After all, Benny Hill reruns have done well on American TV for years….

A possible reconstruction of Gigantopithecus.

As Daniel Loxton and I finished our upcoming book on cryptozoology, I needed an image of the famous huge ape fossils from Asia known as Gigantopithecus for the chapter on the Yeti. I emailed my colleague Russ Ciochon at the University of Iowa, who has found many new specimens, and got a rather surprising reply on why he would not share his images with anyone: “Gigantopithecus is not part of cryptozoology. Yet that is the only way anyone hears about Gigantopithecus.” I was rather surprised at his brusque attitude toward a scientific colleague who is on his side, but I can see where he must be fed up with non-stop requests from cryptozoologists who are only interested in his work to support their completely unscientific notions.

The original Gigantopithecus blacki specimens were found in some Chinese cave deposits, first discovered in the 1920s. They include teeth and a complete lower jaw. Unfortunately, there are no other skeletal parts known from this mysterious gigantic ape, despite decades of searching by the large number of Chinese paleontologists who now work on the deposits. More recently, Ciochon has revisited this region, and found more specimens of Gigantopithecus. He did so by shifting his focus to cave deposits in North Vietnam, which are unspoiled by the fossil poachers who robbed the Chinese caves to supply “dragon bones” for apothecaries to grind up into Chinese “medicine”. Still, even after more than 75 years since the first tooth was found, we still have only three lower jaws and about 1300 isolated teeth of this mysterious primate. There is also a second species, Gigantopithecus giganteus, from India, which (despite its name) is about half the size of Gigantopithecus blacki. A third species, Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, comes from much older beds (6 to 9 million years old) in India, suggesting that the Gigantopithecus line goes back to at least 9 million years ago and the evolutionary radiation of early apes such as the dryopithecines (Ciochon, 1991).

Because we have only the lower jaws to go on, it’s hard to reliably estimate the size of the entire creature. Ciochon et al. (1990a) estimated that it was about 10 feet (3 m) tall and weighed about 1200 pounds. Simons and Ettel (1970) suggest it was proportioned like more like a gorilla, standing about 9 feet tall and weighing about 900 pounds. Either way, it was the largest primate that ever lived, immensely larger than a gorilla (the largest living primate), or even the biggest human giants.

Comparison of an old male jaw (bottom) and a female jaw, showing the extreme robustness and the large thick-enameled molars

What we do have of Gigantopithecus are the heavily built jaws with huge teeth, especially the molars, which have very thick enamel. Both the molars and the cheek teeth in front of them (the premolars) are very broad and low-crowned, often with their entire occlusal surface ground down flat, suggesting that these creatures ate a very tough, gritty diet. Ciochon et al. (1990b) used microscopic analysis of wear facets on the tooth enamel, and the presence of phytolith fossils from plants, showed that the Chinese apes ate mostly bamboo, as does the living giant panda.

Gigantopithecus had lived in Asia since at least the middle Miocene, about 9 million years ago, and were found mostly in eastern Asia during the Ice Ages. Careful dating of cave deposits in Vietnam which yield both Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus showed that early humans invaded China about 800,000 years ago, and that Gigantopithecus died out about half a million years later, around 300,000 years ago (Ciochon et al., 1996). Although this certainly disproves the idea that Homo erectus immediately killed off its distant cousin, there are also other possible factors, including competition with giant pandas which competed for bamboo, and also the fact that bamboo suffers from huge die-offs every 20-60 years, which may have stressed the ape population and made them more vulnerable to competition from pandas or people.

Or did they die out? As Brian Regal points out (Regal, 2011), back in the 1950s and 1960s some anthropologists like Carleton Coon made the inference that the Yeti was a relict population of Gigantopithecus. At that time, many anthropologists embraced the “multi-regional hypothesis,” which argued that Homo sapiens had evolved separately over a million years ago from different stocks of primates in different regions. Asians were descendants of Peking Man, Neanderthals descendants of some early European Homo fossils, Africans were descendants of African Homo erectus, and so on. Although there are still a few holdouts who still support a version of the multiregional model (like Milford Wolpoff at University of Michigan), genetic evidence that amassed since the 1980s has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is false. Instead, the human genome shows that modern Homo sapiens are all descended from African ancestors that spread across the Old World about 60,000 years ago, displacing any older populations of Homo (such as “Peking man” or “Java man”) that might still have been living there. And the fossils plus the dating showed that this “out of Africa” model occurred more than once, since Homo erectus appears to have originated in Africa and then spread around the Old World (China, Java, and many other places) about 1.85 million years ago. However, even more recent work in genetics (Wells, 2002) shows that some populations (like Neanderthals) interbred with Homo sapiens, so when the invaders from Africa arrived, they did interbreed with the locals and incorporated the regional genome into theirs. Nonetheless, the archaic idea of multi-regionalism and independent, isolated parallel evolution of humans from local Homo erectus populations as advocated by Coon in the 1950s (with its racist overtones) has long been discredited by anthropologists. So Gigantopithecus is no longer viewed as connected to the Yeti, or in any way relevant to this debate.

Not surprisingly, cryptozoologists like Heuvelmans in 1952 and later many others also made suggestions that the Yeti (and later, Bigfoot) were surviving descendants of Gigantopithecus. If you read the cryptozoological literature, it is full of bizarre unsupported speculations about how these immense apes spread all over Asia and North America from different primate stocks, and Bigfoot and Yeti are their relicts. None of this amateur speculation bears any relation to what anthropologists know about the real history of hominid fossils and human evolution. This demonstrates once again that amateurs are out of their depth and use outdated concepts of human evolution when they propose their wild ideas. Nevertheless, there are many strong lines of argument against the idea that either the Yeti or Bigfoot is a surviving Gigantopithecus:

For one thing, Gigantopithecus was a giant relative of the orangutan, not a close relative of humans. Although we don’t have much evidence of its skeleton, it is reasonable to assume that its feet would be arranged like that of an orangutan or other great ape, not like that of a human with its reduced big toe and inability to grasp with its foot. Thus, its footprints should resemble ape footprints, not the human-like footprints allegedly produced by the Yeti or Bigfoot. And it should show the same stooped knuckle-walking gait of the orangutan, gorilla, and all other great apes, not the human-like bipedal walking posture allegedly shown by the Yeti and Bigfoot. (Indeed, one of the biggest problems with the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is that the walking posture is almost completely human, not ape-like in the least). Any time you read about cryptozoologists trying to connect Gigantopithecusto Yeti or Bigfoot, it shows they know almost nothing about fossil and living primates.

Second, although Gigantopithecus fossils are rare, something that large would still be expected to be fossilized at least a few times if they had survived anywhere in the world after 300,000 years ago. For example, one Bigfoot website claims that ”No research group has ever made an attempt to look for Giganto bones in North America, so no one should be surprised that Giganto remains have never been identified in North America. Ironically, the most vocal skeptics and scientists who rhetorically ask why no bones have been located and identified on this continent are the last people who would ever make an effort to look for them.” This claim is patently false, and shows how completely ignorant this writer is about paleontology and the fossil record. Paleontologists do not go out specifically to look for a particular fossil, but they collect any and all deposits that yield decent fossils. For deposits of the last 300,000 years (middle and late Pleistocene), we have an extraordinarily good fossil record in both China (where hundreds of Chinese paleontologists have been working for many decades) and especially North America, where we have excellent fossil records (especially of larger mammals, and especially from cave deposits) in every state in the United States and most Canadian provinces (Kurten and Anderson, 1980). Hundreds of paleontologists have collected these fossils for over a century and documented them in excruciating detail. Many extremely rare species are known, including an American cheetah and a camel that is built like a mountain goat, among others. Yet not once has anything resembling Gigantopithecus ever been found—not even the smallest tooth fragment (which could be easily recognized by its thick enamel and distinct low-crowned cusps). Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking of cryptozoologists, paleontologists would be overjoyed to find such a fossil and announce it with great fanfare if they had one, because such a discovery could make your reputation. They have no reason to hide such a fossil in hopes that it won’t give comfort to cryptozoologists. In fact, most paleontologists don’t even know or care about cryptozoology at all, so they are not worried about whether cryptozoologists might be affected. Instead, this statement shows that cryptozoologists such as this writer have no clue about fossils, and are using their ignorance to support their fantasies about fossils.

Finally, the best reason of all to dismiss the idea that Gigantopithecus survives today: all the evidence (and lack of evidence) that shows that neither the Yeti or Bigfoot is likely to exist, but the product of bad observations and bad science and lots of wishful thinking. Our upcoming book will discuss this evidence in detail.

It’s important to recognize that sea serpent witnesses do not usually report seeing animals shaped like serpents. Instead, they report a series of discrete coils or humps or dark rounded objects (“like a string of buoys” is a typical description¹) and infer that these are connected beneath the water’s surface. The problem, of course, is that such sightings are by their nature ambiguous: a humungous serpentine animal might resemble a string of buoys, but it’s also possible for a group of smaller individual objects (say, an actual string of buoys) to resemble a string of buoys. For this reason, smaller, known animals such as seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises, and waterfowl have always been obvious sources for false positive sea serpent sightings. For generations, this has been the most common explanation offered by those skeptical of sea serpents: could witnesses in a given case have misidentified a group of smaller animals that were swimming together in a follow-the-leader arrangement?

From the perspective of many cryptozoologists, these “group of X swimming in a line” explanations seem forced. Nonetheless, naturalists routinely observe such following in a line behavior in many species, and it’s well-known in the cryptozoological literature as well. (I give a number of examples in the book.) But all that is largely beside the point: the illusion does not depend on the animals traveling in a line, but merely traveling in any clustered group.

This is perhaps one of the least appreciated principles relevant to the sea serpent literature: thanks to perspectival effects, any cluster of distant objects at sea will appear as a line when viewed from near sea level—as from a small boat or shoreline.

It’s an effect you can observe yourself on your kitchen table. Just plunk down some small objects in a random-looking cluster at the other end of the table, and then bend down to view the scene from an edge-on perspective. I just did this with some blobs of modeling clay. Viewed from above, my squishy blue seals comprise a more or less random cluster; viewed edge-on, presto—a squishy blue sea serpent. (See image below.)

We know that many animals move in groups on or near the water’s surface, from otters to ducks to dolphins. Given perspective, many of these groups of animals will appear sea serpent-like; therefore, it’s predictable as clockwork that some witnesses will believe they have seen sea serpents when in fact they have not. Consider, for example, the misperception of a flock of birds by key Loch Ness monster witness Alex Campbell:

I discovered that what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants, and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings as they often do. The other cormorants, which were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the Monster, as it has been described by various witnesses.²

Perspective transforms playdough "seals" (top) into playdough "sea serpent" (bottom) at Daniel Loxton's kitchen table.

To me, it seems like it should be hard to authoritatively answer questions about a cryptid that is only hypothesized to exist (and then only by the fringe of the fringe), and of which there are no specimens; indeed no proof that it exists at all. But The Erickson Project found it quite easy. Here are their FAQs and the answers they offer:

Q: Why have there not been sasquatch bodies or bones discovered?

A: For the same reason no one discovers the body or bones of most predators that have died of natural causes. When ill or nearing death they hole up in very secluded areas, and die there. Their carcass is eaten by other predators and the remaining bones are consumed by porcupines and other rodents.

This is not true. There is no example, that I know of, of an extant animal whose remains have not been discovered in the wild. Corpses of all large land animals in North America are found frequently. Carcasses of all North American bears, mountain lions, and wild canids are found all the time, and who met their ends without humans present. Their ancestors are also known by extensive examples in the fossil record. The true expectation is that if the animal did exist, its remains would have been found many times by humans.

Q: How many sasquatch exist in North America?

A: Extremely difficult to quantify, sightings indicate sporadic populations in nearly all heavily wooded areas of Canada and the U.S. The sasquatch is known to occupy a range larger than that of the black bear. Our estimate is a minimum of 4000, and likely many more.

I do not buy that this estimate was arrived at by actually counting sasquatch, or by any other method that might give us a good count. Instead, I believe it is the result of backwards reasoning. There are science-based estimates of how many individuals you’d need for a viable breeding population. Dr. Jeff Meldrum, the closest we have to a science-based sasquatch researcher, estimates 500-750 individuals; and according to famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, other researchers and groups put the number somewhere in four figures. 4000 is a pretty good median of these estimates. The Erickson Project is not answering the question that was asked — how many sasquatch are there — they are answering how many they think there would have to be if it did exist. This is like me saying I would have to weigh 1 ounce in order to fly holding two eagle feathers. It doesn’t make it so.

Q: Do they have their own language?

A: Yes, we believe they do. Our own experiences and those of others suggest they have language.

Certainly not unprecedented in nature. A number of species use forms of communication. Whales vocalize, insects use scents, other animals use precocious displays of colors or feathers. We know this because it’s been observed, documented, studied, reproduced, to such a degree that it is widely considered a fact of zoology.

Sasquatch language, on the other hand, has only the “belief” of believers. What few recordings exist are poorly documented anecdotes. They are inconsistent with one another, and better represent the variances expected among unrelated recordings than they do the complexities of language.

Q: Why has no sasquatch been trapped or shot?

A: The sasquatch is an extremely cunning and elusive creature.

If the lack of evidence equals evidence that it is cunning and elusive, then Sauron is similarly cunning, elusive, and extant. Unfortunately, the scientific method does not permit us to go from “We haven’t found a sasquatch” to “Therefore they exist, and have the property of elusiveness.”

…Their senses are beyond human, especially their incredible night vision.

How was this established without a specimen to examine? This cannot be logically asserted, unless they are simply designing an imaginary creature based on their own creativity. This trait is not an observation, it is merely what seems consistent with the believers’ impression of sasquatch.

…In human populated areas they operate almost strictly nocturnally.

They do? Not a single more creature has been documented to exist at night than has been documented during the day. I do not know these researchers’ opinion on the Patterson-Gimlin film, widely considered by many Bigfoot enthusiasts to be the best evidence, but it was shot during the day. This is a poorly supported supposition.

…We know of two sasquatch that were mistakenly shot by hunters decades ago. In both cases, upon discovery, the men ran off, afraid to tell anyone until many years later.

These researchers should know better than to accept such stories as if they constitute evidence. I can only repeat the old axiom “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Q: How tall are they?

A: Our experience and those of other reports indicate a mature male ranges from seven to over nine feet tall. Females average from six to seven and a half feet tall, however it is the muscle bulk of the sasquatch that is so impressive.

I am left to wonder what method was used to sex and measure these specimens that were neither captured nor photographed. How many specimens were needed to establish these averages? These numbers may well represent good averages of anecdotal reports, but anecdotes are not data, and responsible researchers should not present them as such.

Q: Why have they never officially been studied by scientists?

A: Scientists in general are not risk-takers. Because a sasquatch is so much like a human they can be hoaxed. Scientists are afraid to make a mistake. As a result it has been safer for most of them to steer clear of the phenomenon.

It is hardly possible to be more wrong about scientists than this. Every professional researcher I know would want nothing more than to find something new and exciting. “Steering clear” of new discoveries is a good way for a scientist to lose his job; not to keep it. Scientists are not employed in the hope that they will discover nothing. A better reason that so few scientists have dedicated time to sasquatch research is that there is no good evidence that the creature exists; thus it would be a waste of resources that could be better applied to fields more likely to produce results.

There is a lot of poor evidence that sasquatch exists; but lots of poor evidence does not aggregate into good evidence. Instead, mounds of bad evidence aggregate into a pretty strong indicator that the null hypothesis is true. As I often say: You can stack cowpies as high as you want; they won’t turn into a bar of gold.

So I say, strike 6 out of 6. I’m not hostile to sasquatch research, but I am hostile toward the use of bad science to beguile the innocent into accepting your point of view. I invite the members of The Erickson Project to take another pass at answering these questions, and this time, tell us what we actually know; or if they prefer to tell us what they believe or what their hunch is, within the context of no supporting evidence, to make that clear.

Erich Pontoppidan

Steve Novella’s discussion of gullibility about fictional tree octopi reminded me of the curious case of the “Tree Geese” investigated by the Right Revered Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen in Norway from 1747 to 1754.

Skeptical history (dimly) remembers Pontoppidan as a pivotal early proponent of the “Great Sea Serpent” of the North Atlantic. Although he was perhaps the person most responsible for moving sea serpents out of the realm of mythology and into what we would now call cryptozoology,¹ Pontoppidan is largely eclipsed by more recent sea monster authors (Oudemans in particular). When he is remembered at all, Pontoppidan carries a reputation for credulity. His two-volume Natural History of Norway, translated from Danish to English in 1755, promoted not only the “great Sea snake, of several hundred feet long” but also the Kraken. He even argued for the existence of mermaids!

We’ll come back to sea monsters at another time. Today I’d like to look at Pontoppidan himself. It’s perhaps understandable if some suppose that a creationist mermaid-believer might be a lightweight. Luckily (for skeptical researchers love nothing more than seeing our assumptions turned on their heads) Pontoppidan turns out to have been much more complicated than his place in cryptozoological history suggests.

Science Advocacy

Mermaids or no mermaids, the Bishop of Bergen was a scientist — and indeed, a case could be made to count him as an early scientific skeptic. A member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, Pontoppidan articulated pro-science positions that many skeptics would recognize today:

I am therefore inclined to think, that neither I nor my brethren transgress the bounds of our ministerial office, by investigating and exhibiting natural truths concerning the works of God, which, like his word, are Jehova’s. I am rather of opinion, that a supercilious neglect of such truths, in this critical age, as one the causes of that contempt, with which the freethinkers, as they arrogantly stile themselves, look on the ministerial function.²

He had a specific recommendation to fix this neglect of truth.

I heartily join with the celebrated Linnaeus in wishing, that even those gentlemen in the universities, who are not particularly destined to physic, or the like, but to the study and promulgation of the word of God, in some ministerial office, were directed to apply such a part of their academic years to physics, as may equal, if not exceed the time spent in metaphysics….³

As a bishop, he of course emphasized the argument that scientific research supports natural theology. At the same time, Pontoppidan made modern-sounding arguments for the earthly utility of science. Scientific literacy would help clergy to “to make useful discoveries or improvements, from the products of nature, to the lasting benefit of their country,” as well as to communicate the majesty of creation. His advocacy of scientific medicine may sound familiar to modern skeptics.

The utility, I should say the absolute necessity of this science to medicine, needs no tedious proof, the alliance between natural philosophy and medicine being universally known, and the whole materia medica being properly res physica.⁴

He was a guy with a lot of questions. Almost a century before Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Pontoppidan understood that there were serious problems with flood geology. A fossil collector, Pontoppidan knew that fossils recorded real organisms, somehow embedded in the rocks “as if they had been impressed into a paste, or dough….” But by what mechanism, exactly, could the Flood liquify and reset the rocks of the earth? Once set, what forces (perhaps “a universal earthquake, or the like”) could cause the “general confusion” of strata visibly raised, sunk, disjointed or even overturned?  And, while the Deluge might form simple hills and valleys, what of dense mountains which “seem to have been elevated from beneath, in a convex form, by a violent force of subterraneous wind, water, and fire, heaving them up and scattering them about in so many protuberances”?⁵

Pontoppidan the Skeptic

Over a century later, skeptical scientist Henry Lee’s 1883 debunking book Sea Serpents Unmasked (correctly) criticized Pontoppidan for giving too much weight to eyewitness testimony about sea serpents — the very criticism skeptics (correctly) make of cryptozoology today. Yet, ”if those who ridicule him had lived in his day and amongst his people,” Lee felt, “they would probably have done the same; for even Linnaeus was led to believe in the Kraken….”⁶

Overall, Lee argued, Pontoppidan’s critical approach was worthy of praise.

The Norwegian Bishop was a conscientious and painstaking investigator, and the tone of his writings is neither that of an intentional deceiver nor of an incautious dupe. He diligently endeavoured to separate the truth from the cloud of error and fiction by which it was obscured….⁷

Pontoppidan thought of himself in just such skeptical terms. He invited criticism and factual corrections, saying,

…the discovery of truth, is in this and every other respect, my chief end, and I live in an age, which not content with mere hypotheses, unsupported by proofs, requires that every fact or position, which is advanced as real, be at least demonstrated possible, and consonant with the nature of things in question.⁸

Even more interesting, Pontoppidan made skeptical inquiry into popular claims an explicit goal for his Natural History of Norway.

I am very far from desiring to relate, or establish marvellous things, merely to excite the admiration of the reader. On the contrary, I have endeavoured to rectify the erroneous idea which many, even among the learned, have, for want of better information, formed of several, in themselves very wonderful natural phenomena, here in Norway; such as bottomless sea-abyss growing in the Moskoe-strom, penetrating quite thro’ the globe, of ducks growing on trees; of a water on Sundmoer, which in a short time turns wood into stone, and many other such things, which, some who have had no opportunity of enquiring further, or others who were not disposed to it, have received as undoubted facts.⁹

Zoologist Konrad Gesner's depiction of a "Tree Goose" in the mid-1500s

Enter the Tree Geese

This brings us to Pontoppidan’s skeptical investigation of a very odd piece of European folklore: the idea that some waterfowl literally grow out of trees or wood. It may sound ridiculous, but this legend persisted for centuries. It was well-established by 1187.¹¹ In 1883 (a century after Pontoppidan) the legend remained current.¹²

Natural History of Norway quotes this description of the legend:

It is said that a particular sort of Geese is found in Nordland…which leave their seed on old trees, and stumps and blocks lying in the sea, and that from that seed there grows a shell fast to the tree, from which shell, as from an egg, by the heat of the sun, young Geese are hatched, and afterwards grow up, which gave rise to the fable, that Geese grow upon trees.¹³

(Because these geese were said to hatch from trees, incidentally, they had implications for religious dietary practice. In 1215, Pope Innocent III prohibited the enduring practice of eating tree or “barnacle” geese during Lent.¹⁴)

Though this folkloric belief was commonly “taken on the credit of one to another,” Pontoppidan wrote, “That any kind of fowls should grow upon trees, and be properly and truly called Tree Geese, is a thing which I have narrowly examined into, and find without the least foundation.”

His investigation revealed that the two parts of the legend were unconnected. On the one hand, the geese identified in the tale “generate in the common way,”  from eggs; on the other hand, the “barnacles” or “shells” identified in the legend (tree galls or bulbous growths) had nothing whatever to do with geese.

Pontoppidan dissected many of these galls, and discovered that they contained larval insects. Silky filaments within the galls had a feathery look, which presumably gave rise to the legend. Case closed — though like many skeptical investigations, this well-publicized scientific explanation failed to dispel the popular false belief.

Thoughts

What are we to make of all this? I draw several lessons. One is a renewed reminder to myself: always read original sources.

Another — and this is a theme I’ll be returning to throughout this year — is a reminder that the world does not break down to spiral-eyed crazies on one side, and right-thinking skeptics baptized in critical thinking on the other. People are more complicated than that.

Pontoppidan promoted ideas we now know to be naive, but he was not a cartoon cut-out. He also conducted investigations, solved mysteries, and advocated for science literacy — in language that I as a modern skeptic find astonishingly familiar.

And yet… the guy did believe in mermaids.¹⁵

A frame from the video in question.

I am in receipt of a new alleged Bigfoot video, the YouTube version of which is hereinafter appended. A fellow emailed it to me with the request that I help him “get it into the right hands”, because, you know, routing Bigfoot videos to the appropriate cryptozoologist is what I’m all about.

These are actually kind of fun to get. At a first glance, there’s nothing in there that’s inconsistent with a guy in a suit. If a guy had a suit like this and his homey filmed him in it, this is exactly what you’d expect the video to look like. By Occam’s Razor, this is a guy in a suit; because the other possibility requires the introduction of the assumption that an unknown species of great ape roams about. But I hate to stop there; that’s too easy.

First let’s see where and when the video was made: Just north of Greenhorn, Oregon in October of 2009. That appears consistent with the foliage seen in the video, about the right season judging by the leaves, and I probably wouldn’t expect to see any snow on the ground. John E Walker is what’s on the YouTube page, but that’s not the name he emailed me with; and though the Scotch Whiskey reference calls attention to itself, there are people with that name. He says is that it was shot on a JVC Everio GZ-HD7 3CCD camcorder, which is a real model of camera. The picture looks pretty good, so probably a 3CCD, but that’s about all I can guess. I didn’t find anything in the mechanical details of the video to prove or disprove its authenticity.

So that doesn’t leave us much to go on. Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.

Which is how I came to frequent the popular cryptozoology blog site Cryptomundo. Presided over by the prolific Loren Colemen, Cryptomundo is updated constantly, and always a source of fantastic claims and speculations.

Screen capture from Cryptomundo.com

I get on quite well with Loren, who is one of the more skeptical and responsible pro-cryptozoology writers. (He has, for example, critiqued the “Jacko” story from sasquatch pre-history, writing, “in reality Jacko may have more to do with local rumors brought to the level of a news story that eventually evolved into a modern fable.”)

Before long, I found myself contributing regular comments on Cryptomundo posts. I knew something about the subject matter, and joined Ben Radford and one or two other “resident” skeptics at the blog site. I even contributed a guest post at one point. I love these mysteries, so it was pleasant to talk about them with others who found them interesting.

(As you might expect, the skeptics at Cryptomundo did take some abuse. That’s a shame. I argue that name-calling and straw men are always ugly and counter-productive, whether coming from cryptozoologists, from skeptics, or from anyone else — see comments on the posts “Is Scoftic a Useful Term?” and “Speaking of Name Calling and Skeptics.” I’m not quite sure how I ended up becoming a cheerleader for civility, but there it is.)

Then, one day, I posted a comment only for it vanish almost immediately. It turned out my comment had broken a house rule: by raising a comparison between cryptozoology and other paranormal claims, I had posted “off topic.”

I found this discouraging, although there are good reasons for this rule. Serious cryptozoological enthusiasts believe cryptids are living species of animals, and wish the scientific world would make an effort to locate these “hidden” creatures. What mainline cryptozoologists do not want is to be lumped together (and further marginalized) with other “paranormal” topics like ghosts or aliens. They are especially touchy about this because a loud fringe within the cryptozoological community insists that cryptids must be understood in paranormal terms. (Like, “We can’t find Bigfoot because it’s a psychic shapeshifter from another dimension.”)

An Argument That Should Never Be Made Again

My deleted post was a mild rebuttal to an argument heard often in cryptozoological circles — an argument that should be immediately and permanently laid to rest. It’s wrong, and I think that’s easy to demonstrate to the satisfaction of almost anyone.

If I may paraphrase, this common pro-cryptozoology argument goes something like this:

There are thousands of sightings of Bigfoot! They can’t all be wrong. Sure, some may be hoaxes, and some are probably mistakes — but all of them? Come on. I think the skeptics are the ones making the extraordinary claim, there!

This “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument is central to cryptozoology — and to most paranormal claims. That universal popularity is a huge red flag, and exposes a critical flaw.

Whether you’re a skeptic, a cynic, a mystic, a believer or what have you, I think you should join me in agreeing right here:

Yes, it is possible for entire categories of paranormal claims to be completely, 100% bogus. Yes, it is possible for hundreds or thousands of supporting testimonials to comprise nothing but mistakes and hoaxes.

To see that this is true, just scan this short sample list of paranormal claims. Stop as soon as you see something you’re persuaded doesn’t exist:

• Bigfoot
• fairies
• ghosts
• alien abduction
• telepathy
• mermaids
• visitations from angels
• “therapeutic touch” energy healings
• astral projection
• demonic possession
• the Loch Ness Monster
• reincarnation
• phrenology
• predicting future events using tea leaves
• Mesmerism
• dowsing
• miraculous weeping statues
• Satanic ritual abuse cults
• saintly apparitions

…and so on. We could add hundreds of similar things on this list. If any one of them is false it debunks the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” argument, revealing it as a non sequitur. Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke. (Note that my purpose today isn’t to assert that this sample list of paranormal claims are untrue — only to point out a flaw in one argument they share in common.)

It’s a fact that many people have claimed personal encounters with Bigfoot, ghosts, mermaids, and psychics. But, that fact is ultimately trivial: it does not, by itself, allow us to draw any conclusions about whether these things are real or not. (As the old saying goes, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”)

Comparisons Are Poisonous

Cryptomundo has good, practical reason to avoid paranormal digressions. Believe me, those are a genuine pain for anyone who wishes to do serious research on cryptozoological topics. As a purely administrative matter, I think they should continue to maintain some version of their “stay on topic” rule.

But, I submit that this habit of compartmentalization is wrong in principle. It’s artificial, and it’s deeply misleading. Pretending that one’s favorite claim exists in isolation is to reduce it to a kind of soap bubble or hothouse flower. Are cryptid cases so delicate that they cannot survive encounters with the wider literature on hoaxes, paranormal claims, and the ways in which thinking goes wrong?

In the case of Bigfoot, it is obviously relevant that people routinely report encounters with paranormal and supernatural creatures like aliens and angels. It is obviously relevant that people claim literal or de facto conspiracies to explain away absence of evidence for many different kinds of paranormal claims. (“Scientists are too dogmatic to consider psi/sasquatches/homeopathy/creationism because this would threaten their funding/world view.”) Trace evidence like ectoplasm is relevant to trace evidence like Bigfoot tracks. The existence of habitual, multi-year crop-circle hoaxers, professional fake psychics, and other scammers and practical jokers is relevant to arguments about cryptid hoaxes.

Confronting relevant comparisons is poisonous for many paranormal claims — and for some claims, lethal. But, I suggest that this exercise is necessary for any proponents who hope to move a paranormal topic away from the fringes….

It pisses me off because it’s the perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with television science reporting. They’re not interested in reporting good science or in educating their viewers; they’re only interested in tabloid stories. And they affix a “science” label to them. Send some horseback kooks into the woods with a megaphone and an infrared camera to look for Bigfoot, show it on the Science Channel, and that’s what passes for science programming in the United States. The obvious result? We have a population who believes that communication with ghosts represents the leading edge of brain research, that multilevel marketing schemes are a way to get rich, and that a mail order gadget (suppressed by the oil companies) will make your car run for free.

I grew up obsessed with cryptozoology. I knew all the Bigfoot stories, I fully believed Nessie was a relic plesiosaur, I was convinced that Neanderthals survive in Russia. Having seen, as a young boy, the skeleton of the Megatherium that died falling into the Grand Canyon Caverns millennia ago, I was thrilled to learn that a “scientist” had discovered that they may still exist in the Amazon, based on local superstitions. I had no doubt. It seemed perfectly plausible and scientific.

That’s because I, at ten years old, had an understanding of the scientific method comparable to that of the cream of today’s cryptozoologists. My reading had taught me that you start with a conclusion (“Bigfoot exists”), support it with a logical fallacy (“Either it’s true or it’s a hoax of impossible proportions”), and you’re automatically right because nobody’s disproven it. This was absolutely convincing to a ten year old boy, and that’s good enough for the TV networks. What an easy sell! If your “science” broadcasting is effective, it must be good.

Cryptozoologists are the perfect marriage for this type of reporting. They sell a seductive message – monsters are real – and they’re not hampered by the need to restrict their comments to what’s supported by facts. They’re free to say the establishment suppresses them. They’re free to draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence. They’re free to turn correlation into causation, and to present the results of confirmation bias as evidence for their monster du jour.

Cryptozoologists are not hampered by the boundaries learned in formal education. You can drop out of school and flip burgers for a living, yet the attachment of “-ologist” to the name of your hobby turns you into exactly the kind of expert the networks want to promote. Someone whose conclusion is easy to understand, exciting, and game changing. Someone who’s absolutely convincing because they’re free to employ every logical fallacy in the book to support their position, to the detriment of a public largely unprepared to recognize poor arguments and bad information.

Cryptozoology is not just a joke that can be laughed off. It’s an active threat to human intellect. But the real culprits are not the ordinary cryptozoologists themselves; they’re just well-meaning guys who grew up reading the same books I did, but who never took the opportunity to learn the scientific method. The real culprits are much bigger and more numerous. They are the networks who promote bad information; the viewers hungry for exciting information indistinguishable from fact; and everyone who works to support that dangerously co-dependent relationship.

No conscientious person should knowingly condone any part of that process.