Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  162 “The Great Sea Serpent,” Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 17, no. 2 (1849): 234.

  163 Michael Shermer, “Miracle on Probability Street,” August 2004, http://www.michaelshermer.com/2004/08/miracle-on-probability-street/ (accessed August 3, 2011).

  164 Captain Elkanah Finney, description of a sighting in 1815, recorded in 1817, quoted in Oudemans, Great Sea-Serpent, 128.

  165 Edward Newman, “Notes on the Zoology of Spitsbergen,” Zoologist 24 (1864): 202–203.

  166 Province [Vancouver], March 9, 1943, 1, quoted in LeBlond and Bousfield, Cadborosaurus, 70.

  167 Ley, Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology, 213.

  168 Oudemans, Great Sea-Serpent, 53.

  169 Loren Coleman, “Otter Nonsense,” June 5, 2007, CryptoMundo, http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/otter-nonsense/ (accessed September 24, 2011).

  170 Photograph by Tony Markle, reprinted in Loren Coleman, “Real Otter Sense,” June 16, 2011, CryptoMundo, http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/real-otter-sense/ (accessed September 24, 2011).

  171 Alex Campbell to Ness Fishery Board, October 28, 1933, quoted in Rupert Gould, The Loch Ness Monster (1934; Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976), 110–112.

  172 McTaggart-Cowan went on to serve as head of the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, and then the dean of graduate studies. See “Ian McTaggart-Cowan, Part 2,” Heritage Conservation Trust Foundation, http://www.hctf.ca/AboutUs/mctaggart2.html (accessed September 26, 2011).

  173 Quoted in Ray Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” Maclean’s, June 15, 1950, 43.

  174 Oudemans, Great Sea-Serpent, 345.

  175 Gosse, Romance of Natural History, 338–340.

  176 Indeed, these cases are so similar that a few have suggested the possibility of plagiarism. Gould wrote, “The accounts given by Smith and Herriman are so singularly alike that one might be pardoned for thinking that one was copied from the other” (Case for the Sea-Serpent, 138–139). However, he felt that this “very remarkable string of coincidences” was unlikely to be anything more sinister than coincidence. Heuvelmans was more suspicious, saying that the story Captain Smith told of his adventure aboard the Pekin “seems most unlikely to have happened to him at all” (In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 201–202).

  177 Quoted in Oudemans, Great Sea-Serpent, 342.

  178 Quoted in “Notes,” Nature, October 13, 1881, 565, http://books.google.ca/books?id=TMMKAAAAYAAJ (accessed September 24, 2011).

  179 Pontoppidan, Natural History of Norway, 201.

  180 Oudemans, Great Sea-Serpent, 396.

  181 Archie H. Wills, “All in a Lifetime” (ca. 1985), 61–62 (hand-bound, typed manuscript), Central Branch, Greater Victoria Public Library, Victoria, B.C.

  182 Ibid., 62.

  183 The Victoria Daily Times managed not to resort to layoffs, but only because the staff accepted two waves of across the board wage cuts. See ibid., 61.

  184 “A Cure for the Sea Serpent,” Critic, July–December 1885, 153.

  185 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 24.

  186 See, for example, Bruce S. Ingram, “The Loch Ness Monster Paralleled in Canada, ‘Cadborosaurus,’” Illustrated London News, January 6, 1934, 8; “Animals: Cup & Saucer,” Time, October 16, 1933; and Bert Stoll, “Sea Serpent Appears Off Vancouver Island,” New York Times, February 11, 1934.

  187 Archie Wills, in Victoria Daily Times, June 8, 1959, 12, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds, University of Victoria Archives, Victoria, B.C.

  188 Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 43.

  189 “Yachtsmen Tell of Huge Serpent Seen off Victoria,” Victoria Daily Times, October 5, 1933, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  190 “Not Humpback Says Langley,” Victoria Daily Times, October 18, 1933.

  191 Quoted in Ingram, “Loch Ness Monster Paralleled in Canada.”

  192 Ibid.

  193 R. G. Rhodes, “The Diplodocus” [letter to the editor], Victoria Daily Times, October 16, 1933.

  194 Quoted in “Says Serpent Not Conger Eel,” Victoria Daily Times, October 17, 1933.

  195 Quoted in “Caddy,” Victoria Daily Times, October 20, 1933.

  196 “The 8th Wonder of the World! Starts today for three days. Adventure that Leaps Far Beyond the Bounds of Imagination! Unique! Thrilling! Startling!” proclaimed the advertisement in the Victoria Daily Times, May 20, 1933, 9.

  197 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 42.

  198 Wills, “All in a Lifetime,” 62–63.

  199 G. Clifford Carl, Guide to Marine Life of British Columbia (Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 1963), 134.

  200 Wills, “All in a Lifetime,” 62.

  201 Quoted in Gardner, “Caddy, King of the Coast,” 24.

  202 Jim McKeachie, “$200 Offered for Caddy Photo,” Victoria Daily Times, March 31, 1951, and “Doctor Carl Enters First ‘Photograph’ of Caddy in Times’ $200 Competition,” Victoria Daily Times, April 16, 1951, clippings, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  203 Michael A. Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh P. Shanahan, “How Many Extant Pinniped Species Remain to Be Described?” Historical Biology 20, no. 4 (2008): 225–235.

  204 John Kirk, “BCSCC Member Sights Cadborosaurus-like Animal in Fraser River,” BCSCC Quarterly, September 2010, 6. Kirk has also reported several sustained daylight sightings of 60-foot, serpentine Ogopogo—“I have had 11 sightings” (John Kirk, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 21, 2012)—and to have shot several sequences of video in association with those sightings. In one dramatic report, Kirk claimed to have seen two Ogopogos traveling together “like a series of arches. I could see the other shore through the gap between the underside of the humps and the water’s surface. By being able to see under the arched humps I knew I was definitely not seeing a boat wake or an unusual wave effect, but rather the enormous forms of two huge aquatic animals which were members of the Ogopogo brood” (In the Domain of the Lake Monsters [Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998], 18–20; see also 44–26, 52–53, 69–74, 80).

  205 As of this writing, other skeptical investigators and I have seen only those segments of the video that appeared in previews for Alaskan Monster Hunt. At first glance, the “creatures” in the film appear more like a boat wake than a family of Caddys, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve had a chance to review the entire video in detail.

  206 Owen, “Sea Serpent,” 8.

  207 Edward L. Bousfield and Paul H. LeBlond, “Preliminary Studies on the Biology of a Large Marine Cryptid in Coastal Waters of British Columbia,” American Zoologist 32 (1992): 2A, and “An Account of Cadborosaurus willsi, New Genus, New Species, a Large Aquatic Reptile from the Pacific Coast of North America,” Amphipacifica, suppl. 1 (1995): 3–25. Bousfield was a retired research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, and LeBlond was a professor of oceanography at the University of British Columbia.

  208 Darren Naish, “Cadborosaurus and the Naden Harbour Carcass: Extant Mesozoic Marine Reptiles, or Just Bad Bad Science?” September 2, 2006, Tetrapod Zoology, http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/09/cadborosaurus-and-naden-harbour_02.html (accessed September 26, 2011).

  209 LeBlond and Bousfield, Cadborosaurus, 79.

  210 “I don’t agree with their conclusions,” wrote Darren Naish, “but I do respect the guts and determination involved in publishing these ideas” (“A Baby Sea-Serpent No More: Reinterpreting Hagelund’s Juvenile Cadborosaurus,” September 26, 2011, Tetrapod Zoology, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2011/09/26/baby-seaserpent-no-more/ [accessed September 28, 2011]).

  211 LeBlond and Bousfield, Cadborosaurus, 55.

  212 “Baby Sea Serpent Found in Stomach of Whale,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1937, 3.

  213 Jim Cosgrove, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, July 11, 2002. At the time, Cosgrove, a marine biologist, was the acting manager of natural history at the museum.

  214 Or is there? I have long regarded the case of the Naden Harbour carcass as permanentl
y unsolvable, so I was very surprised when Darren Naish contacted me during the last stages of preparing this manuscript to let me know that he and his colleagues believe that they have solved the mystery (Darren Naish, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, September 28, 2011). I look forward to reading their argument in print!

  215 This bit of fakelore tells of “a beautiful Indian maiden, Cadboro,” whose lover was transformed into a monster. See, for example, T. W. Paterson, “Sea Serpents Might Exist,” Daily Colonist, May 23, 1965, 10. However, Cadboro Bay was actually named for a ship that belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company around 1842: the brigantine Cadboro, said to have been the first European vessel to anchor in the bay. The British Columbia Geographical Names Office adds, “Note that her log book and journal (copies of which are in the Provincial Archives) confirm the spelling ‘Cadboro’” (BCGNIS Query Results, http://archive.ilmb.gov.bc.ca/bcgn-bin/bcg10?name=38867 [accessed September 28, 2011]).

  216 Associated Press, “Amy, Cadborosaurus,” San Francisco Examiner, November 3, 1933, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  217 Bob Davis, “Bob Davis Reveals: Authentic Sea Serpent Due to Arrive Any Moment off Canada,” New York Sun, October 31, 1940, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  218 Archie Wills to Paul LeBlond and John R. Sibert, August 16, 1970. My thanks to Paul LeBlond for sharing his correspondence with Archie Wills—essential original sources that are not otherwise part of the public record.

  219 William Carpenter, “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, Independently of Volition,” Notices of the Meetings of the Royal Institution, March 12, 1852, 147–153.

  220 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep (New York: Penguin / Tarcher, 2003), 26.

  221 Jack Nord, letter to the editor, Victoria Daily Times, October 11, 1933, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  222 Robin Baird, “Elephant Seals Around Southern Vancouver Island,” Victoria Naturalist 47, no. 2 (1990): 6–7.

  223 Ray Wormald, “Caddy Has Three Heads,” [Victoria Daily Times], April 6, 1951, clipping, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  224 Stephen Cosgrove, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 17, 2012.

  225 Myths and Monsters, broadcast on CBC, October 29, 1950, script or transcript, Archie H. Wills Fonds.

  226 Cameron McCormick, “A Baby Cadborosaur No More. Part 4: What Is ‘Cadborosaurus’?” September 21, 2011, The Lord Geekington, http://www.thelordgeekington.com/2011/09/baby-cadborosaur-no-more-part-4-what-is.html (accessed September 28, 2011).

  227 T. H. Huxley, “The Sea Serpent,” Times, January 11, 1893, 12.

  228 Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe, The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates (San Antonio, Tex.: Anomalist Books, 2006).

  229 Many authors confidently credit this sighting to Hans Egede; others either are vague about whether he personally witnessed this monster or assert that it was instead his son Poul who was the witness. Oudemans, for example, credits this as “the Sea-Serpent, as seen by Hans Egede, drawn by Bing” (Great Sea-Serpent, fig. 19), presumably after Pontoppidan, who specifies, “Mr. Bing, one of the missionaries … took a drawing of it (Natural History of Norway). Ellis concurs: “Since Egede was known as a sober, reliable observer, this picture thus became one of the earliest illustrations of a sea monster based upon a reliable eyewitness account” (Monsters of the Sea, 44). Others, however, clarify the record: “Hans Egede (1686–1758) was not a witness and his account is second-hand based presumably on the recollection of his son Poul (1708–1789) which was published separately later (P. Egede, 1741)” (Charles G. M. Paxton, Erik Knatterud, and Sharon L. Hedley, “Cetaceans, Sex and Sea Serpents: An Analysis of the Egede Accounts of a “Most Dreadful Monster” Seen off the Coast of Greenland in 1734,” Archives of Natural History 32, no. 1 [2005]: 1–9). It is in Poul Egede’s book Continuation af den Grønlandski Mission: Forfattet i form af en Journal fra Anno 1734 til 1740 (1741) that a well-known early sketch of a sea serpent (drawn, according to Paxton and his colleagues, “by Egede senior,” on the basis that the map is signed “H. E.”) is found. The authorship of the map remains uncertain, though, according to Charles Paxton, e-mail to Daniel Loxton, April 22, 2012.

  230 Pontoppidan, Natural History of Norway, 199.

  231 A young gentleman of the Customs, in Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, August 24, 1786, 3.

  232 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, September 9, 1786, 3.

  233 Charles Gould, Mythical Monsters (London: Allen, 1886), 263.

  234 Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 572–573.

  235 Coleman and Huyghe, Field Guide to Lake Monsters, 73.

  236 Heuvelmans, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, 277.

  237 Ibid., 284.

  238 Charles Paxton, “The Monster Manual,” Fortean Times, no. 256, July 2010, www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/4003/the_monster_manual.html (accessed February 28, 2011).

  239 A meme is a small unit of “idea”—a piece of culture, like a catchy tune or the notion of teacup—that can be passed along from one host (a mind, a book, or any other place where an idea can survive and replicate) to another. Just as genes can be connected into successful organisms, so small ideas (memes) can be connected into successful collaborations. A classic example is the collaboration of the idea of “god” with the idea “tell people.” These two ideas mutually reinforce, spreading farther and more quickly together than apart. It is an idea that is most usefully considered as a metaphor. Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme in his book The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), although others had proposed similar ideas in the past.

  240 Owen, “Sea Serpent,” 8.

  241 Archie Wills, “Cynics,” Victoria Daily Times, October 11, 1933.

  242 Edward Cadogan, letter to the editor, Times, December 20, 1933, 8.

  243 Dennis Loxton to Daniel Loxton, April 8, 2005.

  6. MOKELE MBEMBE

  1 “The Last Dinosaur” [season 3, episode 52], MonsterQuest, History Channel, June 24, 2009, “MonsterQuest: The Last Dinosaur, Pt. 1,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CeHwgMtvXQ (accessed November 2, 2011).

  2 Martin G. Lockley, A Guide to Dinosaur Tracksites of the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest (Denver: University of Colorado, Department of Geology, 1986), and Tracking Dinosaurs: A New Look at an Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Martin G. Lockley and David G. Gillette, Dinosaur Tracks and Traces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Martin G. Lockley and Adrian P. Hunt, Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of the Western United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Martin G. Lockley, Barbara J. Fillmore, and Lori Marquardt, Dinosaur Lake: The Story of the Purgatoire Valley Dinosaur Tracksite Area (Denver: Colorado Geological Survey, 1997); Martin G. Lockley and Christian Meyer, Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  3 William J. Gibbons, Mokele-Mbembe: Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin (Landisville, Pa.: Coachwhip, 2010), 133.

  4 “Last Dinosaur, Pt. 1.”

  5 Gibbons, Mokele-Mbembe, 162.

  6 For example, Rory Nugent describes this conversation with the Boha village witch doctor (near Lake Tele, in the heart of alleged Mokele Mbembe habitat): “My talk of a living dinosaur doesn’t interest him. He believes Mokele-Mbembe is a powerful deity that constantly changes appearance, varying by divine whim and human perception. People have come to him with wildly differing descriptions of Mokele-Mbembe, and he believes them all, sure that no one would risk their own well-being by lying about the gods.” Nugent further quotes the man as saying, “Sometimes people say Mokele-Mbembe is small, like a goat, and sometimes they say he is bigger than the tallest tree” (Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993], 163–164).

  7 This idea seems to have originated from James Powell’s vis
it in 1976 to Cameroon, where local informants told him that hippos (not dinosaurs) used riverside caves “for dens and hibernated in them (but did not wall themselves up) during the great rains (not the dry season, as in current Mokele Mbembe mythology).” Hearing this, Powell arbitrarily decreed, “While nsok-nyen normally refers to the hippopotamus, it would probably also be applied to any large aquatic animal reminiscent of an elephant”—an inexcusable bit of cultural license, given that his “informants’ response to the picture of a long-necked dinosaur was that they were unfamiliar with the animal, had never seen anything like it, and were quite sure it did not occur in the area” (“On the Trail of the Mokele-Mbembe: A Zoological Mystery,” Explorer’s Journal, June 1981, 86–87).

  8 His Web site discusses how his planned “discoveries” of cryptids will undermine evolution. See William J. Gibbons, “Welcome to Creation Generation.Com … We Are Still Under Construction,” Creation Generation: Genesis 1:1,” http://www.creationgeneration.com (accessed November 2, 2011).

  9 Robert Mullin’s author biography at Crimson Moon Press (the home of his Christian allegorical science-fiction novel) describes him as a “seven-year editor with Creation Research Society” (Crimson Moon Press: Where Apologetic and Fiction Meet, http://crimsonmoonpress.com/Authors.html [accessed May 5, 2012]).

  10 Gibbons, Mokele-Mbembe.

  11 “Inside Story: Mullin on Mokele-Mbembe,” June 28, 2009, CryptoMundo, http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/mullin-mm/ (accessed May 5, 2012).

  12 Gibbons, Mokele-Mbembe, 205.

  13 Abbé Lievain Bonaventure Proyart, History of Loango, Kakongo, and Other Kingdoms in Africa (1776), in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, trans. and ed. John Pinkerton (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 16:557.

  14 For example, Roy Mackal cited “a strange animal” painted on a rock in Kirumi Isumbirira, Iramba, Tanzania, that previous scholars had identified as mythical or fabulous. Mackal offered this as “cave rock art that could represent an unknown, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged animal. This evidence should not be taken as more than suggestive because positive identification or conclusions certainly cannot be drawn. But the evidence cannot be dismissed” (A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe [Leiden: Brill, 1987], 9–10). Perhaps—but this Tanzanian rock art also cannot be linked in any way to the Mokele Mbembe of Lake Tele (1,200 miles away), except by wishful thinking. African rock-art specialist Fidelis Taliwawa Masao warns that the meaning and interpretation of Central Tanzanian rock painting—including that cited by Mackal, which Masao labeled “Semi naturalistic paintings of animals”—is extremely conjectural. While Mackal claimed that the figure “definitely is not a giraffe,” he had neither the training nor the grounds to assert this. Certainly, it looks more like a giraffe than a sauropod, and as Masao pointed out, “the giraffe is the most common single [animal] species represented” in rock art in this region (“Possible Meaning of the Rock Art of Central Tanzania,” Paideuma 36, Afrika-Studien II [1990]: 189–199).