Investigating the Unexplained

By Johnny Apocalypse
Bschin2188@aol.com

Living in a world of globalization worries, shady politicians, criminals everywhere you turn, and fears of World War Three, we’ve lost track of the really important questions; Does Bigfoot really exist?  How about the Loch Ness Monster?  And what about those darn pesky ghosts?

Just when you thought all worthwhile debate on these imperative topics had ended, along comes Johnny Apocalypse, investigative reporter from hell, to dive into the mysterious phenomena of the world.  Now I don’t have all of the answers.  In fact, I don’t really have any answers.  But I would like to look into these subjects, propose the benefits and detractions of the theories, and finally state my own opinion on the matters.  Bring your skepticism along and decide where you stand.

UFO’s and Aliens-

So there I was, about ten, maybe twelve years ago, sitting in the car.  My mom was driving to my grandparents’ house in the middle of the night.  My grandparents lived in the middle of nowhere, so the trek required a lot of driving through the rural countryside.

As I’m peering up at the cloud-covered sky, I see a light cross the clouds.  I see a light, like a beacon, zip across the clouds.  A moment later, a large white ball of light, about the size of a soccer ball, arced in front of the truck about twenty to thirty yards away.

A moment later my mom asks “Did you see that?”  I reply that I did and ask what it was.  My sister said it was a bird.  In one of my mothers’ top-ten jokes, she said it could have only been a bird if it had a firecracker up its ass.

Officially, I saw a UFO.  An object was flying and I failed to identify it.  Did I see an alien?  Only if they were the size of Legos.  Did I just see a soccer ball?  The way it was flying, gravity must have taken the day off.  Was it really a bird in the condition suggested by my mom?  Possibly, but what kind of kinky bird shoves a lit firecracker up its own ass?

Every year, a bunch of people claim to see alien spaceships cruising through the sky.  Still more people claim to have been kidnapped by the aliens for the sole purposes of an intergalactic colonoscopy (in less fancy words, an anal probe).  The sheer number of reports would lead one to believe that we’re under an invasion of space perverts who want to sodomize us for “scientific” purposes.  Does the idea of visitors from other worlds have any credence whatsoever?

The universe is sufficiently large enough that life on other planets is definitely possible, even probable.  So the aliens, in and of themselves, aren’t a big stretch of the imagination.  But could they hop in their space-hoopty and cruise down here for lunch?

According to modern physics, traveling at the speed of light is impossible.  The reason being that as something gains momentum, it gains weight: more weight requires more energy, and the jump to light speed would result in infinite weight, demanding infinite energy to keep moving.  Long story short, there’s no such thing as infinite energy.  Unless Discover magazine has changed their story in an issue that I missed, in which case disregard the previous.

So, can aliens travel a few light years to visit us?  Looking at our current use of space travel it seems unlikely to say the least.  The two possibilities left are that either the visiting species found a loophole through the laws of time and space (like a wormhole), or our physicists forgot to carry the two and we’re wrong.  Considering that UFO’s tend to move in which defy our known physics they could be incredibly advanced.

In the end, this comes down to credibility.  Did these witnesses see what they actually claimed to, or did they make it up?  If they saw something, was it a spaceship?  We probably won’t know for some time.

For my money, I say aliens exist somewhere in the universe.  It’s just too damn big for us to be alone.  Whether or not they have come to our side of the galaxy, I rather doubt but I won’t rule it out entirely.

Bigfoot-

If you’ve seen a hairy beast walking through the forests and mountains, I’m going to tell you right now that it was me.  Being more hair then skin, I have become regarded as a mythical creature instead of a guy who writes silly crap for Acid Logic and the occasional mystery.

In case you’re not convinced, I’ll discuss the theory anyway.  It is said that in forests around the world there lives a forgotten species of the great ape family, one that it far more adept at bipedal walking then gorillas and orangutans.  He’s covered in hair, stands over six feet tall and smells pretty bad.  Can such a beast exist without our knowing it, or are the photographs, videotapes and footprints all part of an elaborate government conspiracy to distract us from the alien invasion?

The biggest thing running against the legend is the fact that we haven’t found any sasquatch bodies.  We can find all sorts of other dead animals in the woods, but no bigfoot.  There is a picture from a few decades ago of a dead bigfoot propped up on a stick, but the corpse got lost in the mail.

One counter-theory is that perhaps the bigfoot race bury their dead.  Neandertal did, thousands of years ago (that’s the correct anthropological spelling of Neandertal, there’s no ‘h’).  It still seems likely that we’d find a buried body someday, what with all the logging and mining going on.  Hell, I don’t know, maybe they’re immortal.

There has also been some decent proof in favor of Bigfoot as well.  A footprint, far to large to be human, was found with enough detail intact to see sweat pores.  It would take a lot of time and dedication to fake a footprint with sweat pores, so I call it a quality piece of evidence.

Then there’s the infamous Patterson film.  That’s the grainy, crappy looking video you see every time someone on TV mentions sasquatch.  There have been a great number of attempts by credible experts in science and video technology to prove and disprove the film, and it ends up being a wash.  You can see muscles contracting under the furry skin, the creature’s breasts bounce as it walks (it’s supposedly a female Bigfoot), and anthropologists debate endlessly about whether or not a person could walk like the creature in question.

Lastly, I introduce exhibit C, photos of the Myakka Skunk Ape.  This is a variant of the Bigfoot species who does his thing in Florida, and these pictures are friggin’ great.  It looks a lot like a super-hairy orangutan, but it’s estimated to be over six feet tall due to the position of the plants; orangutan’s average four feet tall at best.  If it’s a hoax, then it’s a very good hoax.

So what do I think of the Bigfoot legend?  I believe he’s out there, but only because I feel like believing in it.  Seriously.  Think about it, how many things do you choose to believe in simply because you want to?

Loch Ness Monster-

Rumor has it that in a murky lake in Scotland , there lives a strange creature with a small head, a long neck and a massive, round body.  This doesn’t sound like anyone we knew in high school, so we call it a monster.

Aside from the eyewitness reports, the only evidence of Nessie is in the form of the blurriest photographs known to man.  We can get crystal-clear pictures of a gaseous nebula from across the universe, but we can’t get a decent image of a monster in a lake.

Oddly enough, a few of these photographs show what’s apparently a head atop a long neck sticking out of the water.  The skeptics say that it’s just a picture of a bird, but what bird looks like this?  Must have some damn silly-looking water fowl in Scotland .  I’m no expert, but it seems to me that these photos aren’t birds.  That doesn’t mean that it’s a monster.

One of these photos, known as the “surgeon’s picture”, has been discovered to be a hoax.  Sadly, it was also one of the better pictures we had.  The photographer whipped up a head and neck with some clay, attached it to the top of a kid’s toy submarine and set her afloat.  Once the camera was properly out of focus, the picture was taken and legend was made.  After this hoax was exposed, the question becomes “how many other pictures are hoaxes?” and “how many witnesses saw a clay head on a submarine instead of a monster?”

Personally, I think the Loch Ness Monster story is crap, and I have actually used something resembling reasoning to make the decision.  The most popular theory says that Nessie is a left-over plesiosaur from the Cretaceous period, some sixty million years ago.  This means one of three things: plesiosaurs are immortal, they have a sixty-million plus lifespan, or there are a group of them reproducing in the Loch right up to present day.

Going with the most likely speculation of reproduction, we quickly come to another problem.  Loch Ness is almost twenty-two square miles on the surface, and its deepest point is some 740 feet to the bottom (source: wikipedia).  Being locked off from the ocean, there must be a finite number of monsters in the loch.  Over a minimum of thirty million years and assuming a plesiosaur’s lifespan to be around thirty years (no research on the lifespan, just seemed like a good number), the monsters would have to reproduce at least a million times.  Even if the Loch was jam-packed with monsters at the end of the Cretaceous period, they would be inbreeding after the first ten, maybe twenty generations (that‘s just an estimate, I‘ll be damned if I‘m doing any math).  The end result is a monster that’s been incestuously reproduced for millions of years, likely resulting in its extinction long before we see sight of it.

I thought that this was an original theory, and I was feeling pretty darn clever until I actually did some research for this article.  Turns out, this has been bounced around long before I whipped it up.  Give the credit to someone else.

Chupacabra-

The term “chupacabra” is a Spanish idiom for “goat sucker”.  No, it’s not about performing perverted acts with farm animals, it refers to a curious monster which drains the blood from goats, chickens, and all variety of livestock.  While no photographs have been taken, the creature has been witnessed a few times.  The compiled descriptions don’t match up too well, but we get the idea that it’s a kangaroo-shaped lizard with some serious fangs.

So if we don’t have pictures, video, DNA or any of that other fancy evidence, what do we have?  Dead animals who seem to have misplaced their entire blood supply!  That’s right, dozens upon dozens of farm animals have been found completely drained, sometimes having two holes in the neck.  Nice touch, huh?

Of course, dead and bloodless goats alone do not a chupacabra make.  There could be other possibilities.  Perhaps a farmer wanted some media attention, so they used the vacuum to suck the blood out and blamed it on a monster.  Maybe a group of drunk teenagers dared a friend to drink the blood from an animal.  Could the Red Cross have run out of human blood for transfusions?  Has Dracula started a non-human diet in order to lower his cholesterol?

As to what I think about Mr. ‘Cabra, I haven’t decided yet.  All I know is that something drained the blood from those animals and it wasn’t me.  Maybe it was Forbis.

Ghosts-

While I can easily turn this into an article of it’s own, in the interest of brevity I’m only going to cover pictures of ghosts.

Plug the words “pictures of ghosts” into your handy internet search engine and you’ll find almost as many sites devoted to this as to pornography.  Everyone who has found something strange in a photograph is seemingly bound by international law to create a website and post the picture, so you have to be careful about what you accept as evidence.

For many years now, people have discredited these strange images as glinting lights, problems with film or cameras, and tampering with the picture.  These are all great explanations and hold solid credence, but new scientific experiments (conducted in my personal laboratory) has discovered another possibility.

Here’s what you think happened:

1. You took a random picture of your living room for no good reason.

2. Upon developing the film, you discover some bizarre anomaly like unexplained light or shadowy figures.

3. You draw the conclusion that it’s a ghost.

Now here’s what really happened:

1. You left your camera lying around and one of your friends took a picture of his ass with it.  It’s a well known fact that in every culture of the world, if you leave a camera unattended, some schmuck will take a picture of his ass.

2. Nobody really wants to believe that their friends are this immature, so the brain has to cover for them.  All memories of seeing your friend’s ass are wiped clean and replaced with you remembering taking a random picture of your living room for no good reason.

3. Since the “no good reason” thing doesn’t fly, your brain tosses in the phantom image so you don’t question your motives behind snapping the photo.

I recently proposed this theory at a scientific symposium, and had to endure grueling questions to try to counter my theory.  Here are some of the best, along with my answers.

“Oh yeah?  Then why can I see a picture of an ass when I’m looking at porn?”  Because that’s porn and not a silly prank.  Your friend probably didn‘t take the picture hoping to arouse you. 

“Really?  Then why is it that when I see someone else’s picture of a ghost I don’t see an ass?”  Since all brains belong to the same union, they all know the same scams.  When someone tells you that they have a photo of a ghost, your brain knows it’s really an ass and has to protect your friend’s illusion.  It’s a trick of the trade. 

“Is that so?  Well, my friend has taken a picture of his ass and guess what I saw?  An ass!”  Look buddy, the brain is also lazy and can’t be counted on twenty-four hours a day.  Chances are you were expecting a picture of your friend’s ass sooner or later and there was no reason to protect your sanity.

To properly separate these devious practical jokes from real pictures of unexplained phenomena, you have to convince your brain that it’s okay to see a friend’s ass once in a while in the name of science.  It also helps to take random pictures of your living room.

So there you have it, a brief but thorough discussion of the paranormal, the supernatural and the just plain weird.  We’ve got strange things in forests, lakes and skies.  We’ve got blood-sucking monsters in Mexico and shadowy figures in every living room on the planet.  With all of this unexplained phenomena, who has time to worry about politics, the crime rate and the global warming?  Not me.