Saturday, February 11, 2012

Two monsters that ain't so

Two videos have been making the Internet rounds here.  One is of an Icelandic lake monster, or so it is purported: the other concerns a putative woolly mammoth crossing a river in Siberia.

Lake Creature
Mammoth

Hmm.  The Icelandic one was intriguing for the first few seconds - it made me recall that Jeremy Wade of River Monsters had reported a scary nighttime encounter with a big fast-moving shape in the fog on that same lake.  But then it starts to look like a bunch of solid objects tied together, either by a hoaxer or by natural action if it's caught one some sort of mini-tide or wake-crossing-line.
The other - well, Siberian mammoths have been reported alive before (Jack London wrote a short story about this) but I've heard of no interesting reports since WWI, and never gave the subject much thought.  This one looks like a long, shaky shot of a bear with a fish in its mouth wading a shallow river, with maybe some CGI help when the camera zooms in and something vaguely like elephant east appear.

So I think the score is Skeptics 2, Monsters 0 on this flap.   Which is too bad.  I'd love to learn the big woolly guy is still with us.

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