Science Friday - Rising Seas Stories, Pseudo-Biology of Monsters, Howling Wolf Soundscape. Oct 29, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

The Science Behind Cryptid Sightings People around the world have long been fascinated by the idea that there are strange creatures out there, ones that may or may not exist. Tales circulate about cryptids–animals whose existence can’t be proved—like Bigfoot hiding out in American forests, or sea serpents lurking just below the water in coastal towns. Despite the best efforts of monster hunting T.V. shows and amateur sleuths, there may never be concrete proof that these creatures exist. But that doesn’t stop people from analyzing strange photographs or odd carcasses and saying maybe, just maybe, cryptids do exist. Darren Naish, a paleontologist and author based in Southampton, U.K., has a particular interest in looking at cryptozoology—from a skeptical perspective. His breakdowns of cryptid sightings from a scientific perspective have been published in Scientific American, his website, and in his book, Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Darren speaks to guest host Sophie Bushwick about faked evidence, his relationship with cryptozoology, and how cryptids may lead to other pseudoscience beliefs.   Stories From Those On The Frontlines Of Sea Level Rise Next week marks the start of the UN’s annual conference on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland. It’s a big moment for global consensus on climate change: Nations are supposed to make new, aggressive pledges to lower their emissions in the attempt to prevent the planet from hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Meanwhile, in the world we see and touch, seas are already rising. In some coastal areas, seas have risen between 0.5 to 1.5 feet in the last century. We’re also already seeing hurricanes with higher storm surge, and heavier rainfall. More change, of course, is projected. The SciFri Book Club has been talking about these risks, and reading about how these numbers have endangered wetlands, flooded homes, lost livelihoods, and sometimes scattered communities in Elizabeth Rush’s 2018 book Rising: Dispatches From The New American Shore. But while we’ve talked to wetland scientists and Elizabeth herself, the voices of community members most affected by climate change—a key part of Rising’s mission—were still missing. In a final conversation with guest host Sophie Bushwick, producer Christie Taylor shares some of the stories of people on the frontlines, including a real-estate agent who helped his neighbors relocate after Hurricane Sandy, and the leader of the Gullah Geechee people on the sea islands of the southeast coast. Plus, social scientist A.R. Siders’ insights into communities’ need to adapt to sea level rise, and how they can be most successful.   Listen To The Haunting Howls That Once Permeated Europe Last year, Melissa Pons, a field recordist and sound designer, set out to capture a sound that at one time would have been familiar to almost any European: the howl of an Iberian wolf. There was a time when the sounds of wolves filled the forests and mountains of Europe. But after centuries of persecution by humans, only some 12,000 wolves remain in all of Europe. Isolated pockets of wolves can be found in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Finland. A sixth of the entire remaining population lives in the mountains of Portugal. Pons headed to the remote, mountainous region of Picão—a settlement on the small island Príncipe off the west coast of Africa—where there is a rehabilitation center for the Iberian wolf. There are some 350 packs of wolves spread out over about 45 acres of the reserve. Pons first explored the region and observed the wolves. Then she set up her recording gear and gathered over 100 hours of tape. From those recordings, she composed an album where each track captures a distinct soundscape made by these wolves. The album is available online and half the proceeds go toward supporting the rehabilitation center in Portugal.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. Ira is away this week. Next week marks the start of the UN's annual conference on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a big year for global consensus on climate change. Nations are supposed to make new, aggressive pledges to lower their emissions in the attempt to prevent the planet from hitting 1.5 degrees of warming. Meanwhile, in the world we see and touch, where you live maybe, seas are rising. and with them climate change is bringing hurricanes with higher storm surge and heavier rainfall. Depending on where along the coast you are, seas have risen between half a foot to a foot and a half in the last century, and more, of course, is projected. The Cy Frey Book Club has been reading about how these numbers translate into endangered wetlands, flooded homes, lost livelihoods, and sometimes scattered communities in Elizabeth Rush's 2018 book,

Rising, Dispatches from the New American Shore. And here to talk more about some last reflections from this journey is SciFRI producer Christy Taylor. Hi, Christy. Hey, Sophie. So what are we talking about today? Well, Sophie, we have talked a lot about the loss and threat of rising seas already. But as Elizabeth herself has told us, Rising is a book is really about how communities are beginning to recognize what's at stake and working to protect what they feel is most important along the way. Here she is kind of unpacking that for us.

I think there's a series of really important lessons to be learned around how a single person becomes part of a collective that can advocate for real change. I think that we see climate change as producing really interesting solidities amongst frontline communities amongst neighbors who might not otherwise have a reason to like fight for something together. I think this makes me want to know more about what specifically these communities can do or what they're trying to do when they're building this solidarity. Yeah, absolutely. In a lot of places, what that looks like is leaving their homes, honestly. Ideally, in a planned out intentional process assisted by buyouts of flooded homes, this is called managed retreat. We've talked about managed retreat on the show before, but it's actually pretty dicey. You're more likely to get a good deal if you're not already poor, for example, and better off communities are more likely to be able to stay together after they move.

Also, not everyone wants to leave. And absolutely no one wants to be told to leave. But as Elizabeth writes in her book, too, there have been whole neighborhoods asking the government to buy their homes so they can have the money to move somewhere else. I think it's absolutely imperative that we start having a larger public conversation around not only what is managed or and where are people leaving behind, but where are they going to go? The place that we help people move to and thinking about the dynamics of that move is as important as thinking about the places that they're leaving behind. I will also say that in places that I've seen move, there's often still folks who go out

and visit on the weekends. It's not like the place that they leave behind disappears. I think the lines are a lot more blurry. That's such a good point. As much as I've heard the phrase managed retreat in the last few years, I don't know that there's much focus on what happens after people leave. Exactly. And one last thing, one very small, inconsequential thing, you know those bills that are stuck in Congress right now that are full of measures to actually do something about climate change? The infrastructure bill and then that big budget bill that's supposed to go with it. Right. The ones that maybe are not looking so great right now. So one of the things in the infrastructure bill is tons of money for what gets filed under this thing called resilience.

Money for the Army Corps of Engineers to build drainage projects. Money for moving flood prone highways and drinking water infrastructure. Money for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to focus specifically on vulnerable indigenous communities. But it also felt like one of the questions that the money in that bill begs for me is, what do people in the frontline communities themselves actually want or need, whether they're going or trying desperately to stay. So here's one really dramatic example of that. People on Staten Island whose homes were flooded out by Hurricane Sandy

after several other storms in years prior. These people teamed up to demand that the state of New York buy their homes from them and return them to Marshland so that they could relocate. This sounds like an epic kind of story. I mean, in some ways it was. I started by talking to someone from the Staten Island community who was directly part of this story. And his name was Joe Terone.

He's a real estate agent by profession, but he was also one of the big organizers of the buyout push on Oakwood Beach, this community in Staten Island. The city wasn't interested. And so Joe and his neighbors had to go to the governor for help. And even then, Joe calls it the miracle buyout. Here he is describing the meeting where they first started organizing. Well, electricity was itself still mostly out in Sandy's aftermath. And then I said, how many people here would be interested? There was about 200 people in the auditorium.

And everybody raised their hand, a sea of hands. It was like I was not prepared for that. Neither was anyone who was in the auditorium prepared for that. But I would say that Isaac was like the first punch. And then Irene knocked them all back on their heels. And then when Sandy came along, that was a knockout punch. They had had it. Now, Joe and his co-organizers did not actually know how to do a federal buyout innately.

They leaned on expertise from people who were already themselves expert, emergency managers in upstate New York and Nashville, Tennessee. And Joe's real estate knowledge was actually super helpful. He did a lot of pro bono work making sure neighbors were able to buy new houses with the guarantees that they were getting from the buyout program, actually finding new homes and moving. And by the way, most of these people who took buyouts ended up staying in Staten Island nearby. And the last factor that probably helped was that then-governor Andrew Cuomo, at least as far as Joe saw it, was ready to be a little competitive in trying to make that buyout much faster than the FEMA average of five years, which at 13 months, the Staten Island buyout was certainly very fast. Wow. That sounds, as Joe put it, like a miracle buyout in a lot of ways.

Yeah, it really sounded like a lot lined up in just the right way. I also asked Joe what his advice would be for other communities, you know, in the absence of his specialized expertise or the ear of. of a competitive politician. Communities have to identify people that do have trust within the community, long-time residents, preferably, that says this is really good for the community, and then go around exactly the way we did, we did by knocking on doors.

If you remain organized and you remain united and you build trust, there's nothing that you can't do. What about those less miraculous buyouts? So if people I talk to, only one other person really had a success story for getting bought out, at this point, and her name is Terry Straca. She's in a neighborhood called Rosewood in Socoste, South Carolina, which is right by Myrtle Beach, and it gets floodwaters,

both from the intercoastal waterway and a nearby river. Terry has been advocating for the neighborhood since they first started getting repeat floods about five or six years ago, and she and another resident basically used a Facebook group. Neither one of us were, you know, activists of any sort prior. We just knew right from wrong, and we knew what, The needs were, and they were being unmet. As we started digging and learning and educating ourselves, we were learning, well, hey, there's this program here, or there's that program there. Why are we not getting this?

That's when we started going to the council meetings and getting more politically involved. But while the buyout was itself a successful result of her own activism, Terry's actually not sure she'll be getting enough money to buy a new place in the current market. So she's actually in the process of trying to get money to raise her home instead. And she's working on getting water gauges and an effective flood warning system for those who don't end up moving. Does everyone you talk to who lives in places with recurring floods want to leave? Definitely not. Many of them just want better water-diverting architecture. Some are working to get grant funding for things like bios whales.

And there's one group I talked to that absolutely 100% does not want to leave. and that's the Ghalagichi people on the southeast coast of the United States. They're on this narrow ribbon of coastal land and islands from North Carolina to Florida. And the Gullagichi people are the descendants of enslaved West Africans. They were taken to plantations on the coastal plain and sea islands, and they're still there, and they've retained both a distinct culture and language. Here's Queen Quet, who's been chieftest of the Gullagichi since 2001. We have been here since the 15 and the 1600s.

When you talk about something impacting in any way, it impacts our souls as a collective group, as Gulligichis. And so our community still lives from the water. We still live from the land. So, of course, it's important to us that we can continue to do that and thrive for hundreds and hundreds of more years. Queen Quet called me in the middle of a torrential rain to tell me how bigger king tides, storm damage, and those big, big rains are making. making it harder for people on sea islands like St. Helena, which is where she was, to grow the food they rely on, safely navigate their roads, and weather the wind damage from hurricanes. If they don't want to leave their land, what options do they see for staying? Mostly, money for adaptation, for fixing roads and raising houses, or even pro bono labor to raise those buildings, which Queen Quet points to, especially because there are so many resorts and vacation homes and upscale developments along the Gullagie.

She's historic home. If it is technical assistance you want to give us, then you have the companies that do that for the Uber-rich people. They can pay for that. We cannot pay for that. Buy out the resorts. Buy out the people who moved here last. And then invest in the communities that were here for the hundreds of years first.

Okay. Don't ask us to move because we didn't create the problem. I think another really important point is that people on the front lines need to support in choosing what's best for them. Not just scientific expertise, but also expertise that's just in service to their needs. I talked to June Farmer in Marin City, California. It's been a majority black community since World War II, and they're inland enough to not get flooding directly from the sea, but they do get flooding from intense rainfalls and rising groundwater levels are not helping. So water pools up very high in people's yards and also in the only road in

and out of Marin City. June also told me a story about one of those rains. and having to help a young boy find a safe way to get through the floodwaters, his options were basically to wade through really deep water or walk along the freeway entrance. And while June's work with the Marin City People's Plan has netted them grants for building green infrastructure, which is what they want for diverting rainfall so it's less dangerous. June says it's been a struggle to be heard by the very people with the money to make a difference. We have too many people on the outside. They come in and tell us exactly what we need.

A few years ago, they did an assessment of Marin City. Not one person in Marin City was interviewed. Not one person in Marin City was talked to. But they spent $350,000 on this assessment. We need money. We need people. We need supplies. We need people to listen.

That sounds so frustrating. Yeah, doesn't it? And June was one of several people to express this frustration at me, of knowing exactly what you need, of having a plan, and then just never being given the money to make that plan a reality. We're going to pause to take a short break, and when we come back, we're going to pull it all together with help from a sociologist. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick.

Our fall book club has been reading Rising Dispatches from the New American Shore with author Elizabeth Rush. And on top of conversations about marshes, sea level rise, and resilience, we also wanted to talk about communities, how they respond to the risk of flooding from sea level rise, and what they feel like their options are for staying or leaving flooding neighborhoods. I've been talking to producer Christy Taylor about her interviews with residents of frontline communities. And Christy, you also took some time with someone who studies these questions. Right. So we've been talking about what communities want and need when facing rising seas, whether that's helped staying or help leaving. And to help me pull all of this together, I reached out to Dr. A.R. Siders at the University of Delaware. She studies climate adaptation as a sociologist. She talks to people about the decision to stay or go and to people who are in charge of emergencies about how they're wrangling the challenges of climate change.

Spoiler alert. She's also someone who thinks that some amount of planned intentional retreat is going to be necessary as climate change. makes more of the coast into a floodplain. But she also thinks there's a way for people who don't want to leave to stay in some ways, as long as they're given the resources to make the choice that works best for them. That sounds a lot like what the other people we heard from were saying about being listened to and given money to make the changes they want. Exactly. What the community wants is a super important part of the story.

And here's my conversation with Siders. is the general categories we talk about when we think about adaptation, especially in a coastal or in a flood-prone area, but general categories are retreat, so relocating away from the hazardous area or avoidance, don't build there in the first place. But then we have resistance. So in the flood context, this is things like flood walls or sea walls or beach nourishment, building dunes, maybe putting living shorelines, anything that prevents the water from getting to you. And then there's accommodation. And this is things where you let the risk happen, but you reduce the harm it causes. So imagine elevating your homes, the water comes and the water goes. And yeah,

it still causes some health concerns and some, you know, maybe it hurts your car, but you yourself are safe and your house is safer. So it reduces the damage. Well, and that brings me to a question about people who do want to stay where they are. Are they going to get the adaptation help they need to stay in place? Is there a way to stay in place if you really value your community being in that place? Oh, I really want the answer to be yes. But most decisions about adaptation resources, and like other types of resources in the United States, are based on property value. So we build million-dollar flood walls in front of million-dollar homes. We don't build them in front of lower income housing, even though it might protect more people because it's not, because the property is not

worth as much. There's a great study by Eric Tate in Iowa looking at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the decision to build a flood wall on one side of the river that would protect denser, or they would protect more expensive properties and not to build a flood wall on the other side of town where there was less expensive property because it's not cost effective. And that's a real equity issue, right? And And I think this is a huge problem. Unfortunately in the United States, we are making our decisions based too much on property value and not enough on people. And we need to change the way we make these decisions to think about what's worth fighting for, what's worth preserving. And what's worth preserving isn't about who has the most expensive buildings.

It should be about things like who has the clearest connection to the land, who has the greatest need to remain where they are, who has experienced historical injustices. And that's not the way we're currently making decisions. I think there is a starting to be a recognition that we need to make decisions based on that and that people are trying to make these differently. Changing the way we make decisions is a slow process. And like everything else was climate change, the question is, can we change that quickly enough to help address the suffering that otherwise we will experience? Agency participation is incredibly important, right?

At the end of the day, all of these projects should be about trying to give people options and real meaningful options, as many as we can. Climate change, we've already taken a lot of options off the table by not taking action on climate change earlier, right? The effects of climate change are already happening that they've already limited the options available to some communities. But we should be doing as much as we can to give communities all the options that they could have

to try to deal with the effects of climate change in a way that helps them pursue what it is they care about the most. Let's talk about the next 10 years, regardless of political decisions at the top, what do you think we're going to see in terms of community needs at the very least? All around the United States, and globally too, but especially in the United States, I think we're seeing people start to have a reckoning with just how expensive adaptation is going to be, how expensive climate change is going to be dealing with the effects of climate change. We're starting to see billion dollar price tags come out of even small communities in terms of elevating roads or maintaining homes or elevating homes. We see, you know, tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billion dollars to put floodwalls around major cities.

We're seeing astronomical price tags when we start looking at drought and wildfire and heat issues. And so over the next 10 years, I think those price tags are going to become higher and we're going to become faced with some really tough choices. There's going to be really difficult choices in our future. And I think the thing that I hope is that we make those choices in a way that doesn't continue to give the most of the people who have the most and the least to the people who have the least. I hope that we make those decisions to the best we can to give people options. Thank you so much for joining me. Dr. A.R. Siders is a disaster researcher and assistant professor

of public policy at the University of Delaware. She researches community adaptation to climate change. I love what she had to say about asking communities to identify what they care most about in the process of adapting, whether that's beach access or each other. Yeah, me too. And while Sider's kind of apologized for not having better answers to some of the questions I asked her, my biggest takeaway from talking to her was, maybe no surprise. Communities need to have more conversations with each other about the future, with the understanding that change is inevitable,

and that the experts who can help communities adapt need to see themselves as in service to these communities. Sounds like a great place to leave it. Thanks, Christy. Thank you, Sophie. And while we ran out of time here, you can read more stories from our conversations with people on the front lines of rising seas on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash adapt. People around the world have long been fascinated by the idea that there are strange creatures out there, creatures that may or may not exist. I'm talking, of course, about cryptids, things like Bigfoot hiding out in American forests, or sea serpents lurking just below the water in coastal towns. Despite the best efforts of monster-hunting TV shows and amateur sleuths,

there may never be concrete proof that these creatures exist. But that doesn't stop anyone from analyzing strange photographs or odd carcasses and saying, maybe, just maybe, cryptids do exist. So can we explain these sightings with science? Joining me today is my guest, Dr. Darren Nash, paleontologist and author based in Southampton in the United Kingdom. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, hi, thanks for having me.

Just a note. This segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. For more information on how to join a future event, go to sciencefriday.com slash live stream. You literally wrote the book on this subject, which came out in 2016. It's called Hunting Monsters, Cryptozoology, and the reality behind the myths. How would you describe your relationship with CryptoZoology? It's a very interesting question.

Cryptozoology, the study of cryptids, the study of monsters, unknown animals, animals known only from anecdote, should be regarded as a part of zoology. As part of my broad interest in zoology, living and extinct, living and extinct animals, yeah, for me it was like, wow, our creatures like the claimed sea serpents of the cryptosurological literature and Bigfoot and the Yeti and so are they actual real animals. That's why I got interested as a younger person. So that's kind of like an amateur interest. As a, you know, working scientist today, I do maintain an interest in that possibility that, you know, when people report sightings of these creatures. Are they really describing encounters with other animals? I remain, you know,

open to that idea to a degree and interested in it, certainly interested in any material evidence that people bring back, you know, whether you mean photographic evidence or, you know, things like hairs or DNA samples or whatever. But for me, it's kind of mostly moved into something that is actually kind of difficult to compartmentalize because basically, I think, our interest in mystery animals is a part of culture. So if you're studying accounts of mystery creatures, whether by accounts I mean, you know, like stories, legends, or whether I mean people's claims, you know, modern encounters, kind of modern folklore, urban folklore, whatever, you know, what subject is that? Is that kind of social anthropology? And those of us interested in this subject, discuss this

all the time. It's like, where are we going with this field? Are we sure that it's not part of zoology, Is it still connected to zoology or are we completely wrong in that assumption? And is it all to do with culture? So part of what I'm doing kind of feels like a kind of meta-science. It's like we're studying the studiers. We're studying the cryptosologists themselves and we're studying what they say. And we're also studying the body of evidence, the claimed accounts. But yes, for me, it's quite like a confusing and messy subject.

And would you describe yourself as a scaffold? Yeah, I mean, absolutely, totally a skeptic. And I think that unfortunately today, that's kind of a loaded term. I mean, never mind its role in, you know, the culture wars and what certain self-proclaimed skeptics, you know, the way they've used the term. It's related to all kinds of sometimes problematic areas. But in terms of my general approach, you know, to science, I mean, it's right to be skeptical. You shouldn't accept anything without weighing up the evidence for it. When people talk about, what does it mean to be skeptical of cryptosilological evidence. I know many people that are interested in mystery animals that are like, will be prepared to say, I am convinced that, for example, I am convinced that the Yeti is real,

because the eyewitness encounters are just so plausible sounding and the ecology of the animal makes sense. There are people that hold that position. And I would say, from a skeptical position, I can understand that point of view. I can understand that you say that, A lot of these accounts like sound really good.

But in order to sort of lean towards being, you know, convinced of the reality of the alleged creature, I'm going to need, you know, a lot more convincing evidence, not just accounts, not anecdotes, not even photographs, but you're going to have to have actual physical evidence the same as we have for the animal species that we have recognized as valid. So yeah, I'm definitely on the skeptical side of things. But that's not the same as being dismissive.

I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC studio. So let's get into one of the most famous cryptids, the Loch Ness Monster. There's a very famous photo from 1934 that looks like a long-necked dinosaur is poking out from Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. And people have come up with theories for what this creature could be for decades. So what do you think that this photo of the Loch Ness Monster really is? Yeah, you're talking about the most famous Nessie photo and probably the most famous so-called monster photo, the surgeon's photo taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson in April 1934. And whole books have been written just about this photograph alone.

And I always think an interesting thing worth saying about photos, claimed photos of monsters, is that unless you're really, really into the subject, you kind of pick up just to moses. Like, didn't someone show that was a hoax? Isn't there a story about it being a hoax? Yeah, I think so. That's the end of the story. Whereas if you really get into it, the stories are.

they're just, they're so complicated. So it's been claimed over the years that the object in that photo might be quite large, that might be as much as sort of like a meter tall above the surface of the water. Finding the actual original copies of the photo have always like been kind of Holy Grail because normally you see this like tightly cropped version where the monster is quite big. But you can see from the size of the ripples, you can infer, it doesn't have to be an expert on wave dynamics or anything, but you can work out that the object isn't very big.

The water doesn't look big. It doesn't look big, it's not big water. So I think that the object is tiny, like 30 centimetres tall or something. Seen within that context, you know, some people have said, could it be like the tail of a diving otter or the neck of a waterbird or something? And I've never been convinced by those. The object just doesn't look right for that. So in the 1990s, early 1990s, a man called Christian Spurling came forward and said,

and said that he, together with his stepbrother and stepfather, they'd deliberately hoaxed this, and they'd used a little model clockwork submarine with a model monster's head made of plastic wood, which was a thing in the 1930s. It did exist in 1934. They made this, and they set it up in the lock in a little kind of bay where they thought the ripples would make the object look quite large.

And they said that in the original photo, they deliberately did it, So you could see that it was Lochnest. You could see the bank on the opposite shore and that they took these photos. They deliberately used the camera belonging to Dr. Wilson, R.K. Wilson, because as a London-based, I mean, he was called the surgeon. He was actually a medical practitioner of a different kind involved in. He was a gynecologist. But he was seen as like a very sort of reputable source, a good person to claim that he'd taken the photos.

And apparently he had a great sense of humor and he was more than happy to play along with this. There's a back story to the taking of the photograph, which is that Christian Spurling's stepfather, Marmaduke Weatherall, had also in 1934, he'd taken some photos of fake Nessy footprints on the shore of the lock made with a hippo foot. He worked at the time for the Daily Mail newspaper. He thought it was all a bit of a laugh and the Daily Mail would go along with it and, you know, front page of the Daily Mail. male, you know, Nessie's nesty footprints found, but they didn't. They kind of dropped him in it, and they said, this is an obvious hoax, this man is a shawl, and he wasn't very happy about that. So the story is that, together with his son and his stepson, he was involved in the hoaxing of this submarine photo. More recently, uncropped versions of the photo have been found,

and they do confirm that you can see the bank on the other side. They seem to confirm what Christian Spurling said. And in a high-resolution scan, of the photo, you can see wires attached to the front and back of the object. So, of course, if you're going to, like, release a model submarine into the lock and just let it, you know, pootle away into the water, you don't want it to just like disappear. Loughness is, like, more than a kilometre wide. You want to control it. So it makes sense that you have wires.

And there's even more to the story than that. There's, I'm not going to carry on with it, but I just say there is a compelling paper trail which demonstrates that Christian Sperling's story about it being hoaxed in 1934, about R.K. Wilson being a stooge who didn't really take the photo, but was happy to say that he did, there is back up for this idea. So the most famous Nessie photograph is not a photo of an animal. It is indeed a quite good hoax, or quite good, I mean, an un-okay hoax. We have to take a break. And when we come back, continuing our conversation with Dr. Darren Nash, on the science behind some of our favorite cryptid stories.

We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday, and I'm Sophie Bushwick. We're continuing our conversation with Dr. Darren Nash, paleontologist and author, talking about the science behind famous cryptid sightings. And we have a question about faked evidence from Lera in Santa Clara, California. Hi there. I'm wondering what's the best fake evidence?

for a crypto that you've heard of. Yeah, thanks. That's a great question because there's quite a few. So I'm going to tell you about my favorite photo, my favorite indisputable hoax, and it's the Robert Laceric-1964 Hook Island Sea Monster Photo. So you probably haven't heard of this one, but it's the best sea monster photo ever taken. I say photo, it's not a photo, it's actually a sequence of photos. So in 1964, a French man named Robert Lassaric went on vacation with his family and his friend, Peng Joong, to Hook Island, which is part of Queens in Australia.

And in Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, Lesserick said that they all discovered this gigantic tadpole-shaped monster resting in the lagoon. And if you use your favorite internet search engine and just do Hook Island Sea Monster, you'll see photographs of this immense, very dark tadpole-shaped monster, sat at the bottom of the lagoon with a person and a little boat behind it. And like I say, it's part of a sequence. They approach quite closely to this creature. They look down on its head from above. You can see it's got two little pale eyes.

They said that at the base of its tail, there was a big white scrape, and they reckoned it had suffered from a collision with a ship, and it was resting in the lagoon. Lesserich and Dijong supposedly dove, and it went up close to the creature underwater, and it opened its mouth and swam towards them, so they retreated. And the photos, they're just great. I mean, they really look like photos of a real sea monster.

There's a prominent person in the history of Cryptozoordi called Dr. Bernard Hooverman's. He was the guy who wrote the sort of pioneering volumes on the subject, mostly during the 1950s, died in 2001. And he was based in France. and for his 1968 book in the wake of the sea serpents, he found out as much as he could about Laceric because he was really interested in this Hukk Island Seamolster story. And now this is a case where how much circumstantial evidence

do you need to be convinced of something? Hooverman's found that Laceric was regarded by everyone that he was sort of involved with and knew as kind of an untrustworthy character. He left various unpaid debts. He was wanted by Interpol. So on the one hand, you could say, well, being a shady character doesn't stop you from encountering a real sea monster. But Lesserich told people before leaving France that he was going to go away and make money from a hoax involving a sea monster. And I think, I think that's slightly suspicious, a slightly suspicious.

Just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So on that basis, Hooverman's concluded that. It probably was a hoax. So did Poveman's mentor and friend Ivan T. Sanderson, who also wrote widely about mystery animals. And they both tried to come up with various explanations as to how it could have been hoaxed.

And what's most likely is that they used some kind of like giant plastic sheeting or giant bag-like structure that you could tow along and make it look kind of like tadpole-shaped. Let's move from the sea back onto land and talk about possibly the most famous cryptid here in the U.S. Bigfoot. So similar to the Loch Ness monster, one of the most famous pieces of quote-unquote evidence that exists is this old video of what looks like some sort of ape walking in the forest. And many skeptics think that this video was completely faked. What's your take on the Bigfoot tape? yeah you're going to have to like tell me when to stop talking because again there's whole books written about this so sophie is describing there the paterson film sometimes called the paterson gimlin film of the pgillian film it was supposedly taken on october 20th 1967 and so we just celebrated the 54th um anniversary of when they're supposed to have filmed it so this was at bluff creek in california roger patterson and bob giblin specifically went to bluff creek because because of like Bigfoot activity that was supposed to have happened, you know, there before.

So Northern California is meant to be one of the hotspots for Bigfoot. So their story is they were specifically looking for Bigfoot. They're on their horses. They walk into Bluff Creek alongside the creek of Bluff Creek. And squirting at the side, possibly drinking. They see an obviously female Bigfoot who stands up and strides like from left to right and just keeps walking. She just keeps going. Patterson, according to some accounts, his horse or pony was scared and his horse like,

you know, reared and Patterson fell off, but he managed to get the camera. We know exactly what kind of camera he used. A huge amount of research has been done on the camera and its frame rate, which is something that's very important to how the object in the film looks. And he recorded about a minute of footage of this creature affectionately known as Patty to people in the Bigfoot community. and I'm sure most of you know the footage. In particular, you probably know Frame 352,

which is the famous shot where she's striding with her legs, arms even, iconic bit of a Americana, really. So among those people that are quite committed to the existence of Bigfoot, the Patterson film is one of the best bits of evidence we have, and there are people that include qualified primatologists, anthropologists, people that are experts in movement and stuff, they have actually said that this doesn't have the proportions of a human. You know, its arms are like longer than those of humans. Its head to total height ratio is slightly different from that of humans. Aspects of its

musculature, the movement of its pelt and various other of its parts look absolutely accurate. A gate is not like that of a human. It's walking with a compliant gate, which means it's like bending its knees in a certain way and it's got a particular kind of stride that's different from our species. That's the kind of pro-bigfoot stance. Now on the other side of things, the skeptical side of things and the sort of way I've tended to lean in my more recent writings, because I've flipped and flopped on this footage. I've been very inconsistent on this. My current thinking is that a lot of the things that are said to be like compelling and anatomically interesting about it could actually be faked by a person.

in moving in a particular way. So things like walking with a compliant gate, like moving with bent limbs and swinging your arms a lot and stuff, you know, a person can do that. This claim about the proportions being utterly different from homo sapiens is, is not true. The proportions are not that different from us.

And we've got this massive amount of circumstantial data compiled by an author called Greg Long, who wrote a book called The Making of Bigfoot. I think it was published in 2004. Not a very fun reader. I didn't like the book at all. But he does a really good job of showing that this is an important thing for a lot of these cryptological stories. Roger Patterson is not just some guy with a camera.

He's not a guy who goes into the woods and all this Bigfoot gets on film. He's someone who's got like years and years of background of being obsessed with Bigfoot. And specifically of drawing Bigfoot, building life-size Bigfoot illustrations, and of basically using Bigfoot as a way of making money. In a book that he published in 1966, that's a year before he made this film. Patterson drew the William Row encounter from the late 50s. So William Row is this guy who in Canada claims that he observes an obviously female Bigfoot in a forest clearing. She's eating leaves.

And then she realizes she's being watched and stands up and strides across the clearing. and gave quite a good description of what he saw to his daughter, who drew a very distinctively proportioned Bigfoot. And Patterson drew his take on the rowing counter in 66. And it's basically almost like a kind of prototype storyboarded version of what Patterson filmed in 1967. So I can't shake this. I can't like lose the importance, the potential importance of this.

of this whole aspect of the story. If Patterson was just some guy who went into the woods and just recorded the best Bigfoot film ever, then maybe it would seem more powerful. But the fact that he's got this long background of looking for Bigfoot, of making films about Bigfoot, he's excellent artist designer and craftsman. You just can't shake that fact, I think.

And even today there's people who believe in, Bigfoot, there's TV shows all about looking for Bigfoot. It's, as we've said, it's one of the most famous cryptids out there. So why do you think it's Bigfoot that's gotten this level of fame? What is it about this particular creature that's captured the imagination? Yeah, I would say interest in Bigfoot and possibly belief in Bigfoot is on the up. And not just in your country and Canada as well, but probably worldwide. Why is Bigfoot so fascinating? I think, first of all, because it's a gateway drug, if you like, to... A gateway cryptid.

A gateway cryptid. A gateway cryptid, even better, yeah. A gateway crypted to the whole subject of mystery animals. So I think most people are naturally quite interested in all these things that are claimed to exist by some people. And Bigfoot is, you know, at the front of the list. So it's like one of the first things that people, you know, they'll hear about that or read about that before they will alleged sauropod dinosaurs of the Congo or the Mongolian deathworm or the ropin of New Guinea. Then secondly, if the claims about Bigfoot are true, well, this would be, were it real,

Sasquatch, Bigfoot, it would have to be one of the most remarkable creatures on the planet. We're pretty amazing animals and we're really interested in things like, you know, bears, tigers and gorillas and stuff. Bigfoot is like all of those things combined into one. You're talking about a human-shaped creature that is able to live in environments where we know we can't survive due to the extremities of cold and elements and whatnot. And it's supposed to be incredibly vocal, able to use possibly infrasound, as well as long distance, these remarkable howls.

There's claims that it's like a tool user, a toolmaker, that it's very good throwing things, that it's basically kind of like a superhuman creature. But again, if you are living in a world where you imagine that Bigfoot is real, I think if you're really into it, you probably can't stop thinking about it. It's like every day you're pondering Bigfoot. It's like, wow, it's also super terrifying and probably predatory. It's not like in Harry and the Henderson, this like friendly, you know, berry eating vegan creature.

It's meant to be, yeah, truly like predatory and to probably, probably be responsible for loads of human disappearances. I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'd like to talk about the conspiracy side of cryptozoology. Many of us have grappled with how dangerous pseudoscience can be during this pandemic. And I don't think that looking for Bigfoot is as dangerous as people ignoring the scientific evidence on COVID-19. But I am wondering how you. you feel about this conspiracy side of cryptozoology and if it could be a gateway to other types of

more harmful pseudoscience. Yeah, that is something that has been considered quite a lot. And there's different opinions on it. So there is a book called Abominable Science, a skeptical approach to cryptosology, and the two authors in the final chapter, one of them says, Loxton says he thinks cryptosology is mostly harmless and that even if people going in search of Bigfoot aren't really doing anything particularly useful, they're not doing any harm and they are actually doing a greater good because they're making themselves happier. They're connecting with the wilderness. The more connection people have with wild places, the more likely they are to, you know, want to hopefully preserve it. Whereas Prothero says the opposite. He says that it has been shown, there are studies demonstrating

this, that say a belief in Bigfoot is connected to beliefs in other things that are often regarded as part of the supernatural or the paranormal, and the belief in those is connected with a broader sway of things that we kind of generally don't really want to persist in culture, like, you know, people that are big on like a belief in UFOs and therefore tend to have like an interest in conspiracy theories. And then it's only like a kind of like a couple. couple of steps, really, before you are into sort of problematic area. So basically, the argument there is something like interest in Bigfoot is thin end of the wedge. And that's not difficult to demonstrate. If you pick up a book, there's loads of books called The Unexplained. You know, you'll buy them

if you're interested in Bigfoot because they got sections on Bigfoot. But then, you know, also in the same work, they will, you know, have stuff on like, you know, government conspiracies. and are the Illuminati real and are we controlled by lizard people and like I say it's only a couple of steps from there before you get to something that's probably not good for society as a whole and I don't know either way

I would say it's kind of a mix of both things it's like a lot of cryptosologists are perfectly sensible even pro-science people even qualified scientists and then there are others who are the opposite of that so there isn't a simple answer That's about all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Darren Nash, paleontologist and author, based in Southampton in the United Kingdom.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It was great fun. Some of the lore around cryptids comes from people mistaking something that's pretty common for something that's pretty spooky. And over the next few minutes, I wouldn't blame you if you or your pets thought ghosts were coming out of your radio. Here is a special Halloween soundscape from producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett of The World According to Sound podcast. These are Iberian wolves,

recorded in Portugal by Melissa Pons. She's released an entire album of the soundscapes created by these wolves. That gave me goosebumps. These sounds are part of a communal listening series The World According to Sound is hosting this winter. For more information about the their 80-minute binoral events, visit the world according to sound.org. And that's all the time we have for today. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick.