On the borderland between superstition, occultism, and science are the many monsters, human or animal, reported from many parts of the world throughout human history. The word "monster," from the Latin monstrum, implies a warning or portent. The term is used derogatorily in reference to malformed or misshapen animals and humans, as well as creatures of great size. Because of the awe and horror excited by monstrous births, they were traditionally regarded as an omen or a sign of God's wrath with a wicked world. Many street ballads of the sixteenth century moralized about monstrous animals or malformed human beings. Today, persons born with bodies outside the social norms—giants, dwarfs, and Siamese twins—are studied under the scientific label of "teratology." Deformed and limbless children are now known to be caused by rare genetic factors or by the use of such drugs as thalidomide in pregnancy.
In modern times, much of the superstitious awe surrounding legendary monsters has passed into the world of fiction, and talented novelists have created images of scientific or technological doom like Godzilla and Frankenstein, the evil from the subconscious like the vampire Dracula, or the product of unrestrained animal-like urges, Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde. Such literary monsters have been powerfully represented in horror movies, which have presented increasingly terrifying creatures from the edge of civilization and human experience—swamps, ocean depths, and outer space. Such fictional monsters undoubtedly owe their power to the eternal fascination of the clash between good and evil in human affairs and the old theological themes of judgment and damnation.
Few stories achieved this metaphysical terror so powerfully as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the possibilities of evil inherent in all human beings are released from the kindly Dr. Jekyll in the shape of the demonic Mr. Hyde. Stevenson also varied this theme in his short story Markheim, where a debauched murderer is confronted by an angelic alter ego.
Mysterious creatures reported from isolated places, having an existence somewhere between myth and natural history, continue to fascinate and attract while playing on subconscious anxieties. The discovery by Western scientists of the gorilla and the colocynth have given substantive hope to the idea that some of the legends of monsters may refer to actual survivors of ancient species. This has generated a new field of research, cryptozoology.
Loch Ness Monster
A large, aquatic, dinosaur-like creature is said to inhabit the large area of Loch Ness in Scotland, a lake about 24 miles long and a mile wide with a depth of from 433 to 754 feet. Since a monster was reported in ancient Gaelic legends and in a biography of St. Columba circa 565 C.E. , it is supposed that there may be a colony of monsters.
Modern interest dates from the 1930s, when a number of witnesses reported sightings. The creature has been photographed repeatedly and even filmed, though some of the more frequently reproduced films have been shown to be frauds. It appears to be about 45 feet long, of which 10 feet is head and neck, 20 feet the body, and 15 feet the tail. The head is small and sometimes lifted out of the water on the neck, high above the body. The skin is rough and dark brown in color, and in movement the creature sometimes appears to contort its body into a series of humps. It can move at speeds of around 13 knots, and in general appearance resembles a prehistoric plesiosaurus.
On April 8, 1976, the monster made the front page of the New York Times, which featured records of an underwater camera using a sonar echo technique. Known in Britain affectionately as "Nessie," in the mid 1970s the creature was given the formal name of Nessiteras rhombopteryx by naturalist Sir Peter Scott in an attempt to secure official protection. A British Act of Parliament requires that any rare species of animal qualifying for conservation must have a scientific name.
The Loch Ness Monster is the most famous of a number of reported lake monsters, such as the similar creature reported at Lough Muck in Donegal. In other parts of England and Scotland, reported creatures include Morgawr in the area of Falmouth, Cornwall, and Mhorag (or Morag) in Loch Morar, West Inverness, Scotland. There are numerous reports of sightings, and some photographs. In 1910, a plesiosaurus-type creature was reported in Nahuel Huapi, Patagonia.
Interest in the Loch Ness monster was stimulated by reports of the decomposing body of a sea creature caught by the Japanese trawler "Zuiyo Maru" about 30 miles east of Christchurch, New Zealand, on April 25, 1977. The carcass was about 30 feet long, weighed two tons, and was raised from a depth of approximately 900 feet. For a time, it was suspended above the trawler deck by a crane, but the captain feared that the evil-smelling fluid dripping from the carcass would pollute his catch of whip-tail fish and ordered the creature to be dumped overboard. Before this was done, Michihiko Yano, an official of the Taiyo Fishery Company aboard the vessel, took four color photographs and made a sketch of the carcass, after taking measurements. He described the creature as like a snake with a turtle's body and with front and rear flippers and a tail six feet in length. This suggests a creature resembling the plesiosaurus, which flourished from 200 to 100 million years ago.
When Taiyo Fisheries executives heard about the unusual catch, they radioed their trawlers around New Zealand, ordering them to try to recover the carcass, but without success. Japanese journalists named the creature "The New Nessie" after Scotland's famous Loch Ness Monster, and a large Tokyo department store planned to market stuffed dolls of the creature. Fujior Yasuda of the faculty of fisheries at Tokyo University has examined Yano's photographs and concluded that the creature was definitely not a species of fish, and Toshio Shikama, a Yokohama University paleontologist, was convinced that the creature was not a fish or a mammoth seal. For reports of this incident see the London Daily Telegraph (July 21, 1977), London Times (July 21, 1977), and Fortean Times (no. 22, summer 1977).
Yeti (or Abominable Snowman)
The Yeti is a giant humanoid creature that has long been part of the folklore of the high Himalayan region in Asia. The popular name "Abominable Snowman" derives from the Tibetan term Metoh-Kangmi or "Wild Man of the Snows." Other names in the Himalayan regions of Kashmir and Nepal are Jungli-admi or Sogpa —"Wild Men of the Woods." There are many stories told by Sherpas of the giant Yeti that carried away human children or even adults. In 1951, such stories suddenly attracted scientific interest when a photograph of a large Yeti footprint taken by mountaineer Eric Shipton on an Everest Reconnaissance Expedition appeared.
The Abominable Snowman had been reported by westerners as early as 1832 in an article by B. H. Hodgson for the initial volume of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The first European to see Yeti footprints was Major L. A. Waddell, who found them in the snows of northeastern Sikkim at 17,000 feet in 1889, but believed them to be tracks of the great yellow snow bear (Ursus isabellinus). Additional reports filtered back to the west through the twentieth century.
In 1925, N. A. Tombazi, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, saw a large humanoid creature walking upright at a distance of 300 yards in Sikkim, and afterward examined footprints in the snow. In February 1942, Slavomir Rawicz escaped from a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp with six companions and crossed the Himalayas to India. In his book The Long Walk (1956), Rawicz claimed that he saw two Yeti-type creatures, eight feet tall, in an area between Bhutan and Sikkim.
In the 1950s, various expeditions to track down the Yeti failed to produce any tangible evidence of its existence, but in 1972 a Sherpa named Da Temba saw a 4'6" creature, possibly a small Yeti, in Nepal. The cumulative effect of the large number of reports of Yeti sightings from Sherpas reinforces the possibility that there is a large humanoid creature in the Himalayas, but the area is a vast one and the creature could be even more elusive than the Loch Ness monster.
Bigfoot
Other creatures of a Yeti type have been reported frequently from different areas of the world, notably isolated regions of the Pacific Northwest. The popular term "Bigfoot" seems to have been a newspaper invention for the creature named "Sasquatch" by the Salish Indians of southwest British Columbia. The Huppa tribe in the Klamath mountains of Northern California use the name Oh-mah-'ah, sometimes shortened to Omah, while the name Seeahtiks is used in Vancouver Island.
It is interesting to note that reports of Yeti-type creatures cover a fairly consistent trail through the remote mountainous regions of Asia across to similar regions in Alaska, Canada, and North America, suggesting a rare and elusive species distributed over similar isolated areas. In the Russian areas of Asia, such creatures have been named Almast, Alma or Shezhnyy Chelovek. Bigfoot has been frequently reported in Canadian and North American territories from the early nineteenth century on. In modern times, construction workers in Northern California claimed to have seen a large ape-like creature, eight to ten feet tall, in Bluff Creek in October 1958. It walked upright and left large footprints, which indicated a creature weighing 800 pounds. Investigations were stimulated after the widespread showing of a 16mm color film supposedly of the creature taken by Roger Patterson, a rancher in Bluff Creek, California, on October 7, 1967. This film shows what appears to be an erect ape-like figure at a distance of some 30 feet.
Such creatures were systematically investigated by Irish explorer and big-game hunter Peter Byrne, who organized a three-year search in 1971. He traveled many thousands of miles between Nepal, Canada, and the United States, interviewing hundreds of individuals and evaluating claimed sightings of Bigfoot. Byrne visited Patterson before his death in 1972 and found his story and the film convincing. Byrne, like fellow researchers, was repeatedly distracted by the likes of the 1968 prankster in Colville, Washington, who tied 16 inch foot-shaped plywood boards to his feet and made tracks in the woods. He sent a photograph to Peter Byrne, who dismissed it as an obvious fake. Meanwhile an ordinance in Skamania County, Washington, prohibits wanton slaying of ape-creatures, with substantial penalties.
Further interest in Bigfoot was generated in 1982 by the sighting reported by Paul Freeman, an employee of the U.S. Forest Service. He came face to face with the creature at a distance of no more than 200 feet. Both fled in fear of the other. Interest in Bigfoot continues and over the last generation several research centers such as the Bigfoot Information Center and the now defunct Sasquatch Investigations of Mid-America were established. While Forteans have kept interest in Bigfoot alive, the dearth of definitive encounters with the creature have caused many to doubt the authenticity of the legends.
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