A MYSTERY sea creature spotted in the Mersey has experts baffled.
The “monster” was snapped off Seacombe Ferry at 9am yesterday by photographer Mark Harrison.
Paul Renolds, from the Blue Planet Aquarium, who studied the photos, said: “It is virtually impossible to actually identify, but this is the time of year when large numbers of basking sharks, the second largest shark species in the world after whale sharks, head towards waters off the Isle of Man.”
Mongolia, a land of mystery. Where the grave of great warrior king Genghis Khan, who created an empire stretching from the Baltic and Black to the Bering seas, remains undiscovered. Where the national dish has becomeMongolian barbecue, the stir-fry buffet variety invented in the United States.
And where giant, scarlet worms burrow in the barren expanse of one of the world’s largest, coldest deserts, spewing fiery acid and electrocuting unlucky camels from a distance.
Yes, a creature so fearsomely odd that its name — which also happens to be the title of a cheesy Syfy Channel/Lions Gate DVD release set for April 26 — deserves the honor of its own paragraph:
The Mongolian Death Worm.
He didn’t find it, but managed to add to MDW’s mythos by noting it can explode when angered, as if zapping helpless goat herders from a distance weren’t enough.
Syfy Channel’s own documentary show, “Destination Truth,” has been there, too, as have others, though according to this Mongolian site that offers death worm tours, the first digital age quest may have been by a 1994 Czech TV team.
Like everybody else, the Czechs came up empty-handed. That’s not a surprise, since the originator of the whole Mongolian Death Worm meme was the storied, tough bwana Roy Chapman Andrews, said to be an inspiration for Indiana Jones.
In his 1926 book “On the Trail of Ancient Man,” Andrews recounted with some skepticism a range of secondhand observations from native Mongolians of the so-called intestine worm — so named for its outward appearance, not its choice of alimentary dwelling.
Unfortunately, history leaves us little more than eyewitness testimony of worm sightings, detailed as they often are.
The MDW is dubious enough that cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, displays a vintage model of Japanese kaiju movie heroMothra in the larval stage, but labels it as the Mongolian Death Worm. Youngsters often ask what the label is doing on Mothra.
Mongo-D “is not a celebrity cryptid like the Loch Ness Monster or Yeti,” Coleman told AOL News. It’s more of a second-tier creature, he said, “not like a unicorn or a centaur, but it’s very much a shadowy folklore creature.”
So why is the worm enjoying a sudden cultural renaissance among couch explorers?
“You could go to Lake Champlain and look for Champ, or you could go look for Bigfoot, but that’s not so exotic,” Coleman said. “These documentary film companies are looking to sell concepts and sell advertising.”
The fact that Genghis Khan Beer is plentiful and costs about $1.15 a large can, or 1,412 Mongoliantogrog, probably doesn’t hurt either. Unlike, say, Burton and Speke’s nearly year-long Victorian-era expedition searching for the Nile’s source, reality docu-junkets last a couple of days — hardly time for serious scientific investigation.
Plus, Coleman said, “People are getting bored, and so they like different kinds of cryptids.”
The single review on Amazon of “Mongolian Death Worm” the movie, by a Tammy N. Zhang, which 0 of 9 people found helpful, appears to support that conclusion:
Its the best creature movie yet and a treasure guarded by killer man-eating worms only a genious could think of a movie like this. Nice level of gore like the one where blood and chunks of meat came flying out of the well, A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Good action like guns and explosions that are big and cool. How can it get better than this, then all of a sudden a giant one came out of a big crack in the wall and ate a couple of people but still awesome. [sic]
Awesome indeed, especially considering the movie stars Sean Patrick Flanery, who once played the young Indiana Jones.
The thing is, a creature such as this could almost exist if it didn’t have quite so many unique characteristics, said May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology — the study of insects — at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
For instance, among bugs, “spitting acid is not a unique and unprecedented accomplishment,” Berenbaum told AOL News. “There are plenty of arthropods that rely on acid.” For instance, she added, there’s the vinegaroon, or whipscorpion, which “sprays from a revolving turret on its abdomen, literally acetic acid,” the key component of vinegar.
Really big worms are not uncommon, either. In Australia, there are earthworms that can reach 5 feet long. But it’s the electrical jolt component, the notion that Mongo-D is some sort of “taser worm” that can kill from a distance, that’s most problematic, according to Berenbaum. Her name might be familiar to “X-Files” fans from the episode “War of the Coprophages,” about possible alien robotic cockroaches, in which the writers paid homage to her as Dr. “Bambi” Berenbaum.
“There are certainly intestinal worms that can establish residence internally and cause major stress, and heavy levels of parasites can bring down an animal, but from the inside, not the outside,” she said.
She stops short of ruling out the existence of the Mongolian Death Worm — it may be a misnamed snake or some other phylum-bender. “Certain aspects of its biology are not at all unfamiliar,” Berenbaum said. “But when you put them all together, I am not sanguine about the process of finding one soon.”
Source: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/24/mongolian-death-worm-legendary-creepy-crawley-desert-killer/
The following video was shot by Darrin Jackson, who was driving through a neighborhood in Goodyear, Arizona when he came upon this strange creature.
“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I seen it, and it looked real strange, then as I kinda drive by I say ‘That looks just like the chupacabra on the video I saw, the thing they found in Texas!’ ”
At that point Jackson turned his car around to get a better look. He managed to get a good minute or so of footage of the frightened creature in a Fry’s parking lot while he contemplated what to do next.
“I said, well if I call 911, they’re gonna think I’m crazy if I say I saw the chupacabra. So I just said I seen a crazy animal.”
While on the phone with animal control, the creature managed to slip through a gate and escaped into a sewer.
Here’s the video of Jackson recounting his sighting, watch it and let us know your thoughts. Mangy coyote, Mexican hairless dog, or blood-sucking cryptid? You decide.
Source: http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/2011/04/chupacabra-sighting-in-goodyear.html
Posted by Steve Busti
I had spoken with this gentleman on a previous occasion, and asked him if he could give me a detailed account of his eye-witness sighting of what he believes was a flock of gigantic birds, possibly the fabled Thunderbird of Native American lore. Here’s his story:
On Saturday July 5th 2008, I witnessed, along with others, what can only be described as an extraordinary event in the Rio Grande Valley. I was in South Texas, visiting from Missouri and staying with my brother in McAllen. It was around 6:15 PM and my brother and I had just finished watching the Yankees-Red Sox game and the post-game show to see if the Cardinals had played yet. We went out on the patio for a cold beverage and a smoke.
We had visited for a few minutes when I noticed two large indiscriminate black objects in the distance, and I asked out loud “What the hell are those?”. I pointed them out to my brother, who acknowledged he saw them… but he couldn’t identify what he was seeing. As I stood up and took a few steps on the patio towards the back yard, I was thinking to myself… UFOs?… hang gliders?… neither fit with what I was looking at.
Just then, a commercial airliner that was apparently coming in for a landing (or possibly a departure) at McAllen Int’l Airport had swung around in an arc behind the objects…and for a long moment I could see the two indiscriminate black objects superimposed upon the body of the airliner, and I immediately blurted out excitedly, “It’s those G** D*** Big Birds from the History Channel… Holy S***!” (and then a few other words… expletives)… I told my brother to get his wife so she could see what we were seeing.
As I walked all the way out into the yard from underneath the patio, I glanced back to the southeast in the direction the birds had come from. Much to my surprise, there was an entire line of giant birds that stretched a good half mile to three quarters of a mile in the sky- in a straight line. As the birds moved from the SE to the NW, you could clearly make out that there were thousands of smaller birds swarming around the big birds in the center of the convoy… cause that’s what it looked like… a military convoy.
There were the original 2 birds that we saw, then a considerable distance – as much as a quarter mile or better… between the first two and the next group, which was either 4 or 5 birds… I can’t remember for sure. But each of those 4 or 5 birds had a swarm of smaller birds around them… then there was a considerable distance that I would again judge to be a quarter mile or better – and then two solitary birds bringing up the rear. The birds flew “single file” through the sky. We were viewing the birds from the same side as their left wingtips.
My brother’s wife arrived in the backyard as the middle group of large birds passed with the swarms of smaller birds – thousands of them. She exclaimed “Oh my god… it’s their babies!” Also, it was easy to see with the naked eye that some of the Big Birds were bigger than others. Even my brother, who is blind as a bat, could see that the Big Birds were different sizes… I specifically asked him this as we watched this odd procession cross the sky.
I then recalled one specific detail from the History Channel documentary as the last two birds in the procession passed by. As the last two birds passed by our sight line, the final bird in the procession spread it’s wings out and it looked like a nearly perfect rectangle. I turned to my brother’s wife and asked her, “What shape is that?” She looked at me oddly and said “a rectangle”. This rectangular shaped wing, which I’ve never seen on a bird before, was one of the unique characteristics of the Big Bird as reported by eyewitnesses in Texas and other states on the History Channel program.
Of course, no one had a camera – I even went next door to see if the neighbors were home to see if they had one. Nobody home. Took me a good 5 minutes to find my car keys and get out the door and by that time the birds were out of visible sight. I drove in the general direction the birds were heading, but I never saw them again.
I called the McAllen Police Dept to file a report. They sent an officer out from animal control to take the information. He tried to tell me we probably saw migrating white cranes. I called the airport to see if there would be possibly radar tracts or returns that would show something, or if any pilots had reported seeing anything unusual. No luck. I called and spoke with the editor of The Monitor (McAllen’s major newspaper)… who my brother knew personally because the editor’s daughter was a friend of my niece. He was intrigued but showed no interest in following up on the story. I even emailed a cryptozoologist about the encounter, but I never heard back.
Just a few months ago I spoke with Dr. Patrick Redding from the University of Minnesota Raptor Center about the incident. He was one of the experts who appeared on the History Channel program. I shared all of the details about the sighting as well as my hypothesis on where the birds may have originated from and where they were heading that day.
Seventeen days after the sighting, Hurricane Dolly made landfall in the region. It is my belief that the Big Birds moved their flock/pod purposefully to avoid the obvious weather conditions coming ashore. In addition, if you backtrack the vector the birds were traveling in the sky, a couple of different possible points of origin make themselves evident… as well as a couple of possible destinations. I have my own theories about that specifically – but who wants to go down to Mexico these days?
I swear to God and on my grandmother’s grave that these are the facts as truthfully, honestly, and accurately as I remember them. If I was asked to take a lie detector test about the information that I have shared from this encounter, I would readily agree. I have nothing to hide nor gain from sharing this encounter with those that would be interested. I have no doubt these Thunderbirds exist. I saw them… just as many others have. As far as I know, my brother, his wife, and I are the only ones to ever report an encounter with a group of the creatures and their possible offspring or symbiotic companions.
Sincerely,
Christopher Scott Miesner
Anyone who would like to speak with Scott about his sighting is welcome to contact me at steve@museumoftheweird.com and I will forward him your info.
Painting by Mark Hallett © 1988
