Category
Folk Mysteries & Cryptids
Loch Ness, Bigfoot, Mothman. The creatures we keep telling stories about.
2 articles
Bigfoot and the Ape That Biology Forbids
Somewhere in the dense, dripping forests of the Pacific Northwest, the story goes, walks a creature seven, eight, nine feet tall — heavy, hairy, ape-like, and upright, leaving enormous human-shaped footprints and a smell that witnesses never forget. It has a Native name anglicised as Sasquatch and a newspaper name, born in 1958, that conquered the world: Bigfoot. It has thousands of reported sightings, a famous home movie shot in 1967 that shows a striding figure turning to look back at the camera, a small library of plaster footprint casts, and a devoted community of researchers, hunters, and weekend believers who have spent their lives looking for it. What it does not have, after more than sixty years of that searching, is a single specimen. No body has ever been recovered, living or dead; no bone, no tooth, no fossil of any North American great ape has ever been found; and every hair and droppings sample submitted for genetic testing has come back as a bear, a deer, a human, a cow — never as an unknown primate. The name itself began as a hoax, the founding footprints carved from wood by a prankster whose family confessed it after his death. The most rigorous DNA study of alleged Bigfoot and Yeti samples, run by an Oxford geneticist, matched every one to a known species. And the biology is decisive: no ape has ever lived in the Americas, and a breeding population of giant primates could not hide from a continent now carpeted with trail cameras and smartphones. By the standards of evidence, Bigfoot does not exist. And yet it thrives — in the festivals, the statues, the television shows, and the sincere conviction of people who have seen something they cannot name. This article sets out where the legend came from, why its best evidence dissolves on inspection, what science has actually established, and why a creature that almost certainly is not there refuses to leave the woods.
The Loch Ness Monster and the Photograph That Was a Toy Submarine
Loch Ness is a long, deep, black ribbon of water in the Great Glen of the Scottish Highlands, holding more fresh water than every lake in England and Wales combined, its surface often mirror-still beneath brooding hills and its depths so stained with peat that a diver cannot see his own hand. In 1933, as a new road opened up its shore to motorists and reporters, it acquired a tenant: a large, unknown creature, glimpsed humping across the water and, in one celebrated case, lurching across the road itself, which a newspaper editor christened a 'monster.' Within a year the creature had its defining portrait — the 'Surgeon's Photograph,' a grainy image of a small head on a long, curving neck rising from the ripples, taken, it was said, by a respectable London doctor who wanted no part of the fuss. For sixty years that photograph was the single best piece of evidence that something extraordinary lived in Loch Ness. In 1994 it was revealed to be a hoax: a sculpted head mounted on a clockwork toy submarine, floated on the loch by a man bent on revenge against the very newspaper that printed it. That revelation is a fair emblem of the whole case. A sonar flotilla swept the loch in 1987 and found nothing it could call a monster; a 2018 survey that sequenced the DNA in the loch's water found eels in abundance and not a trace of any reptile or unknown giant. By the cold standards of evidence, the Loch Ness Monster has been looked for as hard as any creature on earth and has never been found. And yet it persists — in the sightings, in the searches, in the tens of millions of pounds it draws to the Highlands every year. This article sets out what is actually known: where the legend came from, how its greatest proof collapsed, what science has and has not ruled out, and why a monster that almost certainly does not exist refuses to die.
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