So I’m trolling Facebook this morning, and lurking in the right-hand column is an ad for the new del Toro-Hopkins movie “The Wolfman.” Part of the ad is a poll. “Do you believe in werewolves,” it queries.

Poll: Are you gullible?

Okay, I’m curious. I am fully aware that this is a non-scientific poll, being drawn not from a random sampling of the public, but rather from those who choose to respond to a poll in a movie ad on Facebook. But in order to see the poll results, one must vote.

It should come as no surprise that I elected to vote “No.”

I click my selection and await the results with a small degree of trepidation. This being teh Intarwebz, I mercifully haven’t long to wait.

Well. You can see the results. I suppose I should be heartened that a creature for which there is no evidence of existence is not believed to exist by a majority of poll respondents. But 29% say Yes?! And an additional 7% chose “I don’t know.”

Evidence, people. Evidence. Please require some.

Last night I got around to watching Sunday’s episode of American Paranormal, featuring Bigfoot. There was nothing groundbreaking, and it was obviously biased towards the Bigfoot being real. There were a couple of howlers, in particular when it came to the famous Patterson-Gimlin movie. Looking around the web though, I am finding a lot of comments about the TV show on the Bigfoot believers sites along the lines of, “Well, I guess that settles it, Bigfoot is real.”

The Patterson-Gimlin movie is the famous one of Bigfoot walking away from the cameraman, shot in 1968 by Roger Patterson, with Bob Gimlin nearby.  American Paranormal did a 3D scan of the Bluff Creek site, then tried to use what was known about the camera and the distance from the subject to determine how big the subject was. They came up with height for “Patty” (the cutsey name Bigfooters have given the subject in the film) of 4’8″. Oops. That’s not nearly large enough to qualify as Bigfoot. So the American Paranormal people assumed that Patterson was using a different lens (though not the lens known to be on the camera), and with that unsupported assumption in place the height of Patty was determined to be over 7 feet. What struck me about this whole part of the show was that there was another variable that American Paranormal never questioned, and that’s the distance from the camera to subject. Apparently Bob Gimlin estimated that Patterson was 100 feet from Patty when he was shooting, and I guess because Bigfooters are so invested in the honesty of Bob Gimlin they refuse to even acknowledge that he could be wrong about any aspect of the sighting. But if the 100 foot estimate is incorrect, either because of an honest mistake on Gimlin’s part or some deception, then the height of “Patty” could be almost anything. I’m also not sure why, if you believe in the truth of Patterson’s film, you’d need to do all this fussing with camera lenses and filming distances. Patterson made casts of the prints “Patty” allegedly made, and they’re 14.5 inches long. From that you should be able figure out how tall Patty is. While the calculation has been done in the past (estimating Patty to be 8 feet tall), I think that even most Bigfooters are a little leery of Patterson’s reputation for dishonesty. For example, we know so much about the camera he used because it was a rental and he never returned it, causing a criminal complaint. Therefore, the tracks Patterson cast are considered questionable.

One claim made about the Patterson film on American Paranormal seemed to be refuted by the very footage they showed. It was in the section of the show about Patty’s shambling gait. When a human walks, the heel strikes the ground first, but Bigfooters have claimed that Patty’s feet land flat on the ground. Yet in the stabilized footage from the Patterson film shown in the episode, it’s clearer than ever that, when you can see Patty’s feet, she walked with the heel striking first, perhaps even a little exaggeratedly so. It was only in the “reconstruction” of Patty’s movements after the point her feet stop being visible in the film that the flat-footed walking is supposed to be happening.

There’s another aspect of the Patterson film that isn’t directly related to the American Paranormal episode, but I think it should get highlighted more often. In 1957, when interest in Sasquatch was ramping up and just before the initial incidents that created Bigfoot (yes, initially Sasquatch and Bigfoot were different things), a man by the name of William Roe swore out an affidavit that he saw a Sasquatch “Indian” in 1955 on Mica Mountain in British Columbia. You can read his entire statement here. The most striking thing about his account is that the Sasquatch he saw was female, and had large hairy breasts. Roe also specifically mentions that the creature he saw walked heel first, something that he, I guess,  incorrectly thought was different from humans. Several other features of Roe’s sighting are similar to the Patterson film, including the way it ends: the Sasquatch walks away quickly, and even looks over its shoulder.

Even more interesting, in 1960, True magazine ran an article by Ivan T. Sanderson titled “A New Look at America’s Mystery Giant,” illustrated with an artist’s interpretation of the Roe sighting. I couldn’t find a good reproduction of the painting on the web, so I had to capture it from the Kindle version of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, an excellent book by Joshua Blu Buhs.

Compare that image to an iconic image from the Patterson film.

I find the resemblance striking. I suppose Bigfooters could say these are just two reports of the same creature, but that doesn’t quite wash. The elements that are most similar in the two images, like the bent-leg gait, the slumping posture, and swinging arms, are not included in Roe’s statement, so must be products of the illustrator’s imagination. Though we may never know exactly the circumstances of the Patterson film ‘s creation, I think it’s safe to say the hoaxers used the Roe sighting and the True illustration as a model for their encounter.

The new season of MonsterQuest, the History Channel’s cryptozoology-themed show, started airing last week. The first episode was titled “Monster Sharks,” though the subject of the episode were completely non-monster great whites in the oceans off the U.S. Increasingly I suspect the MonsterQuest people are running out of good subjects, judging from episodes like “Monster Sharks,” “Gigantic Killer Fish” (goliath groupers), and “The Real Cujo” (packs of dogs — really).

But last season MonsterQuest had a whole episode entitled “Sea Monsters,” focused mostly on something that could, at least in theory, be an unknown animal. Some guy in South Florida had a bunch of footage of an animal frolicking in an inlet. Though the footage appeared to show a manatee, much hay was made out of the fact that the animal’s tail appeared to be shaped roughly like a trident. The possibility that a manatee’s tail could be mutilated by a boat propeller to look like that was broached, but dismissed. Florida Fish and Wildlife keeps track of mutilated manatees, the show explained, and none  has a tail that looks like a trident. They also managed to find a scientist from a local university to look at the footage and exclaim that the head of the creature looked nothing like a manatee, even though it looked exactly like the head of a manatee.

Guess what? A manatee has been found with a tail that looks exactly like the one in the video tape. As reported by WPTV, Florida Fish and Wildlife biologists found the manatee huddling for warmth near a power plant. For the sake of comparison I’ve included pictures both from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission and the original videos seen on MonsterQuest.

There’s a new special about Bigfoot coming to the National Geographic TV. You can see a couple clips here.

I wonder how the Bigfoot community is going to take Dr. Jeff Meldrum being described as “the world’s leading expert on Bigfoot.”

Is the Normandy Nessie dead? I don’t mean in the literal corpse kind of way, because that any such creature lived has not yet been proven. I’m referring to the fact that after a flurry of local media interest three weeks ago, including stories in both major newspapers and on at least three TV stations, the Normandy Nessie story appears to be moribund. No new sightings, no more heated speculation about giant aquatic snakes.

But how will history see this incident? Will the Normandy Nessie live on as an example of an animal unknown to science, perhaps cited from time to time on the web as a genuine mystery? Or will the story die here? Let’s look at the factors that will go into deciding Normandy Nessie’s fate.

Reason Nessie Will Live On #1 – People Love a Mystery

No denying this one. The fact that one person saw something in the water he couldn’t identify became international news says a lot about how we hunger for the unknown.

Reason Nessie Will Live On #2 – The Video Footage

Unlike a lot of of other creatures that are reported, we don’t have to take the one witness’s word that there’s something in the water. He has footage that shows something in the water. That might not sound like much, but keep in mind that in the world of cryptozoology (the study of creatures that haven’t been recognized by science) the standards for evidence are very low. For example,  the chupacabra became famous despite existing only as a collection of highly improbable and often contradictory eyewitness reports for a full decade. It wasn’t until recently that bodies starting showing up, even if they are coyotes and other mangy dogs.

Reason Nessie Will Live On #3 – The Name Is Catchy

At first glance this may seem shallow, but I think it’s more important than most people realize. “Normandy Nessie” is nicely alliterative, and instantly evocative of a sea monster . It is a little odd that the one witness to the creature, Russ Sittloh, decided to name the creature after the street he lived on, especially as the creature lives in the water and has never been on the street, but I can’t fault him for choosing a memorable moniker. As one wag pointed out, a monster seen off Madeira Beach should logically be called Messie, which doesn’t really work. Incidentally, the only other major cryptid (i.e., creature cryptozoologists claim to study) that I can think of that’s named after a street is the Beast of Bray Road, a werewolf reported to live in Wisconsin.

Reason Nessie Is Dead #1 – Nothing New To Report

There was about a week where Mr. Sittloh was claiming periodic sightings and even other witnesses, but nothing much has happened since. From what follow up I was able to do the other witnesses didn’t claim to see anything more than something in the water, which doesn’t do much to convince me that there’s a giant aquatic snake in the area.

Reason Nessie Is Dead #2 – The Video Footage

The video footage shows one or more manatees moving through the canal. Though Mr. Sittloh claims that what he saw wasn’t a manatee, if what he saw was what is in the video footage then he saw a manatee. I should add that while the footage is clearly manatees, to people outside this area it may still appear suitably mysterious. The TV show MonsterQuest has structured entire episodes around manatee footage.

Reason Nessie Is Dead #3 – The Crank Factor

While the existence of Normandy Nessie should be judged based on the evidence, the quality of the evidence is going to be tied inextricably to the person presenting that evidence. It’s now become clear that Mr. Sittloh is not exactly the most rational person. He’s declared he’s going to sue the state wildlife commission, in a posting full of incorrect punctuation and misused legal terms. My personal correspondence with him has consisted of me asking, politely and respectfully, for more information, and him replying with insults like “I do not know what ails you but a shrink visit may well be in order,” and “I would almost bet that you are a far left liberal wacko, commonly referred to as “Dummycrat” but that is your right.”

With no new activity in weeks and the only person who saw the creature descending to threats of lawsuits, I think that Normandy Nessie is dead. I doubt even the hardcore cryptozoologists are going to want to touch this one, now that’s fallen off the news cycle.

Another day, another Normandy Nessie story. Today’s comes from the Tampa Tribune’s website, though it looks like it may be a transcript of a TV story. I’ll reprint it below, but first I want to talk a bit about what we’re seeing happen here.

Now that Russ Sittloh’s story of a monster is hitting the media it’s starting to develop into something more complicated. Initially he was saying that he had seen the monster twice in October, but now he’s saying he saw it as far back as April. Originally he specified that he didn’t see the creature’s head, now he’s saying he saw the creature’s head during the first sighting. Other people are now coming forward to say they’ve also seen the monster. From what I can tell, none of these other witnesses are saying they saw any specific animal, but rather that they saw something in the water they didn’t recognize. I’ll probably try to contact some of them, just to see what they have to say.

Meanwhile, Mr. Sittloh continues to produce videos from his backyard security camera, though the animal shown in them is almost certainly a manatee.

I expect that if the story of the monster continues to be disseminated we’ll have more people claiming to see the monster. Most of these will probably just be people seeing a manatee or a fish or even a shark for a second, and reporting it as an unknown animal because they didn’t recognize it. I’m sure that there will also be a few people, either hoaxers or fantasy-prone individuals, who will give ultra-detailed descriptions of giant aquatic snakes. And the physical evidence will remain elusive, other than more videos of manatees.

I suppose I should explain for the benefit of our out-of-state readers why everyone seems to be jumping to the conclusion that there might be giant snakes swimming around Pinellas County. During the slow news months of late summer this year, or “silly season,” the media in Florida became obsessed with snakes, based on reports about an exploding Burmese python population in the Everglades. (Florida Wildlife workers then went hunting for the snakes and came back with far fewer than they were expecting, so the whole thing was probably overblown.) Around the same time there was also a young girl who was tragically killed by her family’s pet snake, but in a lot of people’s minds the two stories got conflated and now there are people who are afraid giant Everglades pythons are sneaking into people’s homes and killing children. Hence the speculation about dangerous snakes in the following article.

There’s something strange and big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach along the Pinellas County coast. Those who have seen it say it’s no fish and think it could be a sea serpent.

Russ Sittlow, 78, has seen it. He calls the creature “Normandy Nessie” because he lives on Normandy Road.

The retired engineer said he first saw “Nessie” in April.

“His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge,” he said of that first sighting.

Sittlow said he has seen two of the creatures in the canal, one very large, and the other a bit smaller. He estimates the largest one is at least 30 feet long.

Sittlow set up a surveillance camera to record video if the creatures came back. He said his camera recorded “Nessie” three times since September, the latest Saturday.

He showed the video to a reporter. It shows a dark form swimming along the surface of the water. It appears to be about 30 feet long. Another clip shows the creature splashing in the water.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said.

When a reporter asked if he thought it was really a monster, he hedged.

“No, no, well, call a monster what you will, it’s something different, it’s something strange, it’s something I’ve never seen in salt water,” he stated.

Sittlow’s account of what he saw is backed up by neighbor Maria VanAiken, 47, who said she saw the “monster” this summer while on her back porch.

“I looked up and I saw this like huge-looking creature,” she said, adding that it wasn’t a manatee or dolphin.

“This huge thing just came out of the water,” she said.

Her husband saw the creature later.

When pressed, Sittlow backed off his sea monster theory, but not totally.

“This is a snake I guarantee you, or a serpent like thing that looks like a snake,” he explained. He thinks it could be an anaconda or a python or “a mutation there of.”

State wildlife officials who have seen Sittlow’s video believe the creature is a manatee.

Sittlow disagrees. Whatever is in the canal is dangerous, he said, and he doesn’t recommend swimming there until it’s positively identified.

The Normandy Nessie has hit the big time, or at least as big as being on the inside of the Neighborhood section of the largest newspaper in the 14th largest media market in the United States allows something to be. Today the St. Petersburg Times ran a little story on Russ Sittloh and his alleged monster, under the headline “‘Big beast’ reported in Madeira Beach canal.”

MADEIRA BEACH — If you believe retiree Russ Sittloh, the canals around Crystal Island have their own version of the infamous Loch Ness Monster.

After four sightings of the mysterious creature, he is so convinced that something’s out there that he has dubbed it Normandy Nessie.

Sittloh and his wife, Betty, say they’ve seen the creature from their Normandy Road waterfront home once in the spring, again in September and twice this month.

Nessie doesn’t have a regular routine, Sittloh says, but usually swims by in midafternoon.

The couple used to watch dolphins frolic in their canal, but since Nessie arrived the dolphins have been a no-show.

“At first, I was puzzled. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then in September I thought it might be a python or some big snake. But then this month, I saw a caudal fin. He looks like he is over 30 feet long and about 15 inches in diameter. We are talking about a big beast out there,” Sittloh said.

When he told friends and neighbors about the first two sightings, he was met with skepticism and even laughter.

So he decided to prove his discovery. He spent $370 on a surveillance camera to monitor the canal from his window. He kept watch and downloaded both video and still pictures to his computer and then posted them on the Internet.

He even sent a letter to a local newspaper.

“At the risk of having everyone think I have lost it, gone bonkers or whatever, I must share this visual sighting with everyone,” he wrote.

He worries that the creature “could pose a real danger to people and small animals,” and particularly to those who swim or kayak in the canal.

Sittloh says his most recent sighting was about a week ago. The creature was in the middle of a school of baitfish, did a double roll and came back toward Sittloh with a “mouthful of fish.”

Now Sittloh’s Nessie sightings have gone viral on the Web.

Depending on how you structure your search, Google returns between 449 and 8,000 Web pages that reference “Normandy Nessie.”

Chatter on Web sites and blogs speculate on what Nessie could be. Guesses range from a large manatee to a Cretaceous-era mosasaur, a serpentine marine reptile that could reach nearly 60 feet long. Fortunately, it is extinct.

As for Sittloh’s first guess — a large python or snake — pythons can swim and have been reported in the Everglades. Presumably they are former pets turned loose by their owners.

A state-sanctioned hunting program reported capturing and killing 37 pythons this month. Officials estimate that 30,000 Burmese pythons live in the Everglades.

In July, an 8-foot pet Burmese python escaped from its terrarium and strangled a 2-year-old girl.

“I don’t know if we have a mutated species here or what,” Sittloh said. “Whatever he is, my God, is he big. He is some kind of big.”

Sittloh said he has warned his neighbors and called the city, but did not report the creature to the Sheriff’s Office.

“From the video, it appears most likely it is a manatee,” said Carli Segelson, media relations coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Marianne Pasha said no one else in Madeira Beach has reported seeing Nessie.

“It sounds like there is something out there, but we don’t know what it is,” she said.

I’d say these videos feature a manatee, or in the first video, possibly two. In the first video you can see the animal take a breath by poking its nose above the water, and in the second you see the animal move with the vertical undulation that typifies a mammal (reptiles undulate horizontally, so a snake is right out) and, though it’s far from the camera, even a hint of a manatee’s circular fluke. I replied to Mr. Sittloh, politely thanked him for taking the time to reply, and I laid out the case for why what’s in the video is probably a manatee. Mr. Sittloh responded with a long diatribe that was nothing but childish insults.  All things considered, I think we can assume that Normandy Nessie isn’t a giant snake or mosasaur, but rather a misidentified sea mammal.

Today’s pop quiz comes from this article about a Bigfoot convention in Felton, CA. At the end one of the attendees is quoted as saying:

“All the stories about Bigfoot are so similar,” said [Jay] Bietz. “And to simply believe that the tens of thousands of people who say they have seen it are complete liars is insane.”

To find out the answer, highlight the redacted text below.

This is an excellent example of a false dichotomy. Mr. Bietz’s statement assumes that there are only two possibilities; either there really is a hairy biped sharing North America with humanity, or everyone who claims to have seen that hairy biped is lying. In fact, there are other possibilities, including the one that best fits the evidence, that the Bigfoot phenomenon contains some hoaxes and outright lies, but the vast majority of people who claim to have seen (or heard) a Bigfoot are sincere but mistaken.

Yesterday the following video was posted on the Tampa Taxi Shots, by Tim Fasano. No, a Skunk Ape didn’t try to take the taxi, though that would have been cool.

I’m going to let this run without comment for right now, though I’ll be returning to the subject of Tim Fasano soon. For right now I’ll just point out the odd fact that as of this writing Mr. Fasano has posted this video on his personal site, but not on the Florida Bigfoot Hunter blog, which he also runs.

In the sky, apparently.

Argentina recently had a spate of reports of a flying cow (well, two people reported it – that’s a spate, right?). And if there’s anyone I trust to recognize a flying cow when they see one, it’s the Argentinians. I assume they were a pair of roving gauchos, wandering the pampas in their boleros and panchos, hunting the elusive llama with their bolas.

Tacos.

And this wasn’t just any flying cow – this was a flying cow being abducted by a UFO! I assume the cow was just gliding along, minding its own boustrophedonous business, maybe looking for his friends the flying pigs and monkeys, maybe just throwing himself at the ground and missing, when WHAM! No, not George Michael – aliens!

OK, you’re skeptical. I can tell.

Well, be skeptical no longer! UFOlogists have analyzed the photos, and have found incontrovertible proof of . . . hooves!

Yes, they jacked up the contrast and found areas of high contrast . . . er, I mean hooves. Among the purported proofs are:

• 3) In non-destructive super-resolution processes applied to the image, the animal turned out to be a bovine with its right side toward the camera, its head hanging to the left.

Wow – non-destructive, super-resolution processes?

• 6) The 3d analysis is self-evident.

Well, there you go, then.

But I’d be more worried about where they studied their anatomy – their claimed front right leg appears to be coming out of the critter’s right rib cage, and the head appears to be protruding from the wrong side of the left shoulder. The thing looks to me like a splayed right hand with middle finger pointed right at the camera – not a normal configuration for any quadruped that I’m aware of.

Finally, what were the witnesses doing at the time?

We went to have some mate with the kids . . .

Wow. I knew I didn’t trust those damn Argentinians.