In recent months we’ve been hearing a lot about snakes here in Florida, specifically the Burmese python population that’s threatening to burst out of the Everglades and consume all small children south of Gainesville. I’ve written about it a couple times, if indirectly.

At the beginning of February the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission called for a special six week hunt for the pythons supposed to be infesting the Everglades. So how many pythons did the hunters find?

Zero.

I don’t want to minimize the environmental danger of invasive species like Burmese pythons, they certainly can be a problem. But so much of what we’ve been hearing about these pythons in the local media, and even on national shows like MonsterQuest, has been irrational and not really based on the facts. There’s really no reasonable scenario where these snakes become dangerous to humans.

It reminds me of when I was a kid, I was so worried about killer bees. I saw shows and read in magazines that killer bees were coming, that they were going to be everywhere in the U.S. by 1990, that they’d be killing hundreds of people a year. It never happened. The threat of killer bees loomed large in my psyche for a long time, until I finally read something that explained why africanized honey bees aren’t that much of a problem, and that’s where we are today.

This week’s episode of MonsterQuest was the second they’ve done on the subject of werewolves in Wisconsin and the midwest. That may sound ludicrous, but stories about the “Beast of Bray Road” and various “Dogmen” have been part of the folklore up there for the last 80 years or so. The episode was split into two separate investigations. In the first, the show sent three people into a swamp in Michigan to look for evidence of the wolfman. The expedition party was made up of a tracker, a cryptozoologist, and a Native American expert on local werewolf legends. Long story short, the three didn’t find anything, but that’s hardly surprising. The cryptozoologist argued that belief in animal transformations could be a metaphor for moving between dimensions, and spent her time in the woods detecting “primal fear.” The Native American guy ended the expedition looking confused and even a little physically shaken that “Nature” didn’t accept his offering of a seashell wrapped in wool and show him a wolfman.

The other part of the episode had to do with the “Gable film,” an alleged home movie that showed up in 2007. It was given to local Michigan radio DJ Steve Cook, who was promoting a song about the “Michigan Dogman,” and it became quite well known on the internet among cryptozoology enthusiasts. Here’s the entire film. The good stuff doesn’t happen until the end, around the 3:05 mark.

There are of course several things about the film that scream “HOAX!” The lack of provenance. The oddly undetailed creature. The Blair Witch factor, with the cameraman filming his own death. As the movie started to catch on Steve Cook went on the record as saying that the film was an “unintended hoax.” By this he meant that while he still didn’t know where the footage came from exactly he suspected it had been filmed as part of a docudrama movie in the 1970s, but it was being taken as real today. The whole thing was so shady that even Loren Coleman of Crytomundo declared that the film was almost certainly a hoax. In case you’re not familiar with Mr. Coleman, he believes nearly everything. He once published pictures of a purple windsurfing rig someone said was Ogopogo. For him to declare something a hoax you know it has to be burying the needle of the hoax-o-meter. Any lingering credibility the Gable film might have had died when another clip showed up, supposedly showing the police investigating the death in the first film. It was an amateur clip too far.

By the end of this week’s MonsterQuest the full story of the Gable film hoax was told. The clip was created in 2007 by a man named Mike Agrusa, using vintage equipment. The “wolfman” was in fact Mike in a costume that was nothing more than an Army Surplus ghillie suit. A ghillie suit, in case you don’t play Modern Warfare 2, is a camouflage suit made up of strips of cloth or twine, typically used to either hide snipers or needlessly tackle pathetic potential sex offenders. Mike Agrusa didn’t have any particularly strong reason to perpetrate the hoax. It just happened that he had enough vintage vehicles sitting around his backyard to do it, so he did. Steve Cook knew the truth about the film from the beginning.

So we have an obvious hoax, accomplished with the simplest of materials. No suit built by John Chambers, no experts on animal locomotion. Surely this film clip couldn’t have fooled any of the cryptozoology enthusiasts who are so eager to declare the Patterson-Gimlin film genuine? Let’s see what some of the commentators at Cryptomundo had to say about the Gable film, and just for fun, let’s only look at posts after Coleman declared the film a hoax. (All comments are from this page, or this page.)

First there are people claiming that the “creature” in the film was doing things that were impossible for a person in a suit to do.

If it is a hoax, I still want to know how it was done. Amazing.

This thing runs on all fours and covers distance, FAST! Is there any human that can run on all fours like this, be that speedy and cover that amount of distance? Maybe, but to me it seems that a human would have to be a feral child brought up by wolves that had always been running around on 4 legs. So, a hairy feral human could be the beast in the Gable film.

This film continues to puzzle me. I don’t think it’s a human in a suit. At one point, it appears as if all four legs are off the ground, as if the subject is leaping during its charge. I don’t know if a human being could do that at that speed, especially while wearing a suit.

Fifth, the jump: This, in my opinion, could be the most significant part of the film.I challenge anyone in the world to run and jump, lifting all of your limbs completely off of the ground, land properly, and continue a charge.(On your hands and knees of course, as the above article suggests a hoaxer has done.)

And from what we’ve seen of hoaxes this one seems too elaborate (sort of like the PG film). Yes we can do it with CGI but it is expensive. If someone paid to create this footage artificially then I think such a sizeable project would’ve spilled the beans. People talk.

The genuineness of the creature therefore proven, commenters then went on to spin some remarkable scenarios to explain how the film could appear to be hoax, but still feature a real monster. Some of these comments follow from some of the ones above, as you’ll see from some of the peculiar obsessions.

I don’t believe this is a hoax, but a misinterpretation of a film taken at a drive-through wild animal park. While it does look like a gorilla, I think it’s more probable that it is a large baboon, and that the passenger of the vehicle jumped out to get a closer look. This would also explain why he was filming in a moving vehicle to begin with… to film animals in the park.

.

Perhaps the film was never turned in to the authorities because the film maker knew he wasn’t supposed to be outside of his car in the wild animal park. My guess is that alcohol was involved.

However, in every known case of feral children, they ALL want nothing to do with humans, and all of them run AWAY from anything human. If this was a feral beast, it seems that it would also run away instead of becoming aggressive. So, I have to rule out anything feral and anyone in a costume. It’s just too fast and too agile.

The scenery looks like a typical midwestern clearing in a woodland. It doesn’t look African, or tropical in any way. So, not being tropical means ruling out a gorilla, unless you want to make the standard statement that some Gorilla escaped from a zoo. Yeah, sure.

About the best guess as to anything known, would have to be a silverback. But if you take a close look at the video, and actually take a look at a real silverback running, they just do not look all that familiar. The Gable beast looks very squat, and it appears to have pointy ears, although this is a matter of interpretation of what there is.

So, my opinion is something unknown. It doesn’t fit into anything that is normal, or what we people perceive as normal, anyway. And couple that with the fact that it appears to attack the camera person, that is certainly abnormal behavior indeed! And so it goes.

I don’t mean to pick on the commenters at Cryptomunodo. Well, maybe a little bit. But I think that these comments are instructive in how it’s possible to see proof for your preconceived beliefs in a short, fuzzy clip of film. The fact is that as it was originally presented the Gable film wasn’t proof of anything. Without knowing where it came from or who shot it, it was useless as evidence. While most of the online cryptozoological community was at least cautious about endorsing the film as genuine, there was a lot of weaseling about, saying “the film’s interesting” and “we shouldn’t be too quick to disregard it as evidence.”

Now, compare the Gable film to the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The P-G film shows almost no detail on the alleged creature, no matter how much “enhancing” Bigfoot enthusiasts do to it. The P-G film is associated with a man (Patterson) who was a liar and con man, even according to his friends, and the provenance of P-G film is fuzzy. The original negative is supposedly lost, making some troubling contradictions about the timeline Patterson claimed in shooting and developing the film impossible to reconcile. In short, the Patterson film should be as suspect as the Gable film. The only difference I can see between the two is that the Gimlin of Patterson-Gimlin, Bob Gimlin, is still around, and his story of how Patterson shot the film has been endorsed as honest by Bigfooters. I would just point out that, as the case of the Gable film shows, people don’t have to have immediately obvious reasons to participate in a hoax.

For a strange sideshow to all this, check out Steve Cook’s blog on the truth about the film coming out. He seems upset that people are calling him a liar, just because he lied. It’s an odd stance to take. As near as I can figure, he thinks that his statement back in 2007 that the film was an “unintended hoax” should have stopped all interest in it, even though that explanation was just ambiguous (and untruthful) enough to keep the story going. Odd that a man so interested in wolfmen would be so unfamiliar with the story of the boy who cried wolf.

MonsterQuest, the cryptozoology-themed show that runs on the History Channel every Wednesday, started its fourth season last month. I thought I’d take a look at the episodes that have aired, especially since most of them had some connection to Florida.

The season opened with the double episode “Monster Sharks,” which was about great white sharks allegedly becoming more dangerous along America’s coasts. I’m not an expert on sharks so I have no idea if we should be more worried about sharks now than in the past, but I do question the use of the term “monster” in this context. While “monster” is a somewhat fuzzy term, I don’t think it should be applied to completely normal animals living in their known ranges. If an animal was unusually large or unusually aggressive I might call it “monster,” or if it’s something unknown to science I might call it “a monster,” but the whole episode dealt with great whites of regular size doing what great whites usually do where they usually do it. Beyond that, “Monster Sharks” struck me as a lot of scaremongering. It’s even possible this episode contributed to the speculation, ultimately unfounded, that a shark attack victim in Stuart earlier this month had been killed by great whites.

The second episode of the season was “Hillbilly Beast,” which was about Bigfoot sightings in Kentucky. A big part of the episode was devoted to the photo that appears to the right, taken by a Kentucky man using a surveillance camera in his back yard last September. While the photo made waves briefly, it was soon revealed to be a picture of a black bird in flight. This obvious explanation was not offered until the very end of the episode, and was downplayed. It’s a shame, because the whole, sad episode shows how wishful thinking can find things in photos that aren’t really there.

“Giant Pythons in America” was entirely about the Burmese python population in the Florida Everglades. The episode opened with a dramatization of the tragic death of  Shaiunna Hare, a toddler who was killed by a pet python last summer. The MonsterQuest team then went into the Everglades and found some pythons, and there was a lot more scaremongering even though there’s no evidence that wild pythons have hurt anybody. The snakes are certainly an ecological hazard, but to imply that they attack people, as the show did, simply isn’t true. The show also made the completely irresponsible suggestion that the pythons might hybridize with local poisonous snakes, even though incompatible genitalia make that impossible. I also have big issues with the language employed in “Giant Pythons in America.” “Giant” should describe an animal significantly larger than normal, but, as far as I know, none of the wild pythons are particularly large for pythons. The term “taking over” was also used, which is also not correct.

My language gripes reached a crescendo with the next episode, “Giant Killer Bees.” Even if I grant calling Africanized honey bees “killer bees,” where the hell does “giant” come from? In fact, Africanized honey bees are slightly smaller than regular honey bees! The episode also threw around terms like “murderous rampage” to describe the Africanized population’s spread through the southern United States, which is a funny way to talk about one or two deaths a year. Far more people are killed by wasps and regular honey bees, and I don’t think we’d say they were on a “murderous rampage.” The episode was yet more scaremongering, with MonsterQuest people looking around Las Vegas for places killer bees might possibly live (though none were found), and there was a pretty neat demonstration that if you repeatedly poke your hand into a wild hive the bees will be really, really mad. That Africanized honey bees are often domesticated was completely glossed over.

This week’s episode, “Mothman,” might be the most unexpected episode of MonsterQuest yet. Why? Because it was almost… skeptical. Sure, the episode trotted out the usual silliness about Mothman sightings presaging the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River even though there’s no connection between the two events that would make sense to anybody but delusional paranoiacs. The rest of the episode, though, gave a lot of play to Joe Nickell’s theory that many of the famous Mothman and Jersey Devil sightings may be people startled by barn owls. Nickell did a perception experiment that proved that people are bad observers of how large objects are in the dark, and another team demonstrated how striking eye-shine can be from even well-known animals. Someone who came into the episode with no knowledge of the Mothman would probably come away with the impression that the witnesses were seeing birds at night. As of this writing you can see the whole episode here.

Is this new skeptical angle an anomaly? Probably, but I have a little hope. I think MonsterQuest is running out of cryptozoological subjects to tackle (only two of the five episodes so far this season were cryptozoological at all), and the usual formula of looking for a creature for an hour and not finding anything is probably starting to get a little old, even to credulous audiences. Maybe bringing some of the searches to a conclusion, even if that conclusion is that the creature doesn’t exist, will be employed as a way to add drama to MonsterQuest going forward.

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.

My new favorite podcast, MonsterTalk, has posted a new episode where they talk to Dr. Dave Martill, an expert on pterosaurs. The cryptozoological angle comes from the fact that Dr. Martill was on an episode of MonsterQuest, looking for the fabled ropen of Papua New Guinea. As is often the case with MonsterTalk, the cryptid is dispensed with fairly quickly (ropen sightings tend to describe an animal that matches the old conception of pterosaurs, not what we think they looked like today), but Dr. Martill’s run down of where pterosaur science currently stands is terrific listening. Also, I love the part where he starts yelling “How would that undermine my science?!” over and over when Ben Radford brings up the idea, much beloved by some cryptozoologists, that real scientists ignore evidence for cryptids because it clashes with their worldview.